Where Does It Come From?

No one would advocate designing a city or a subdivision along certain lines merely because it would be easy for the visitor or the delivery truck to locate persons and buildings. A well-planned community, with well-grouped major uses and service facilities, and with efficient means of intercommunication, is the primary concern of planners. However, once a street plan has been adopted by a community, with major and minor streets laid out, with feeder streets, and residential streets, and through highways and heavy traffic bearers, designed each according to its function, facilitating the use of these streets follows naturally. In part, the general attitude towards street naming and house numbering might be compared to that towards calendar reform; everybody is in favor of the reform, but such reform does not have top priority.

Correct as this attitude may be, it is unwarranted to dismiss street naming and house numbering systems as unimportant. Since planning in part is directed to providing rationality and order in community life, and in making communities more efficient and convenient, ease in locating places and facilities within a community should be encouraged.

This need has been recognized by citizen associations as well as official agencies. For example, Anambra Stte Signage and Advertising Agency was instrumental in dramatizing the importance of clarifying the city's muddled street system.

Project Objectives

General Arguments for Adopting a Street Naming and House Numbering System

Many arguments may be advanced to justify the need for special funds for a study of existing practices in a community, or to justify a street naming and house numbering reorganization ordinance:

• Unfavorable impression on visitors to the community if they have difficulty in finding places of interest and the businesses and persons they wish to see.
• Expense to delivery services in routing and rerouting packages.
• Difficulty in quick delivery of mail.
• Loss of letters and goods, wrongly addressed.
• Potential increase in traffic accidents by motorists intent on searching for correct address rather than on driving.
• Difficulty in training civic employees in knowledge of the city, and the resultant disappointment by residents and visitors in the caliber of these employees and the government in general.
• Subconscious feeling of estrangement toward community on the part of residents and visitors to the community.
• Difficulty in emergency fire, ambulance and doctor access to correct address.
• Difficulty in maintaining correct legal documents, such as those for licenses, vital statistics, deeds.