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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Hmm this is interesting. I could see the value in other developing countries like Nicaragua where there are no street signs anywhere. Directions are "100 meters from the chicken shop, take a left"

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I had the opposite problem while living in Toronto. I'm so used to navigate by landmarks that I couldn't find places I'd been to before because everything looked just about identical. Second street down from the 'pizza-pizza' on the west side of Yonge street. Right. I had not quite figured there would be multiple pizza-pizza franchises on Yonge street alone.

Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin.

And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it out.

Japan doesn't have street names (normally), they number the blocks and houses. Which is a bit confusing, since the numbers of the houses are not necessarily in order either, other than generally assigned clockwise as they're built. So finding an address with out a map or asking someone can be tricky.

There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers.

http://sivers.org/jaddr

It's amusing since it's sort of like a .9 release of city planning that had some scaling issues, where as everyone else started at 1.0 to 2.0 and named their streets, and laid them out on grids. ;-)

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