Re: Every road around here contains the word Ox
Date: April 21, 2013 10:31PM
triddin Wrote:
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> Why does it seem like most of the major roads in
> the area east of IAD have the word 'ox' in them?
> With such similar names it makes it confusing for
> someone who isn't familiar with the area. Does
> everyone just go by the numbers or does it get
> easier to remember the names?
I can think of West Ox Road, Ox Road, and Ox Trail...how many more are there?
In any case, folks I know don't use route numbers much: it's the Dulles Toll Road, not 267, and the Fairfax County Parkway, not 7100...er...286. I do hear both Route 7 and Leesburg Pike, and usually Route 50 or 237 (occasionally Little River Turnpike).
If you think this is bad, try Atlanta, where every other road is Peach-something, or Newark, where every highway is some flavor of Route 1/9!
Not to sound unsympathetic...sure, it's confusing. To me, a bigger problem is roads changing names every couple of miles. I really don't understand that--why the County doesn't tell developers, "No, you're extending a road, you're not going to name it something different". OTOH, given the naming/numbering scheme in Fairfax, maybe they often *can't* let them extend the road, because it would cause conflicts. Never thought of that until now. (In case you don't know what I mean, the scheme means that the first four letters of a street name+the number are unique: so if there's a 1234 West Ox Road, there won't be another 1234 West or a 1234 Westland or anything else starting with "West".)
And then there are the rebuilt intersections that cause roads to turn left or right at a crossroads, like where West Ox meets Lawyer's, or where Lawyer's meets Reston Parkway. In fact, until sometime in the last decade, three of the four roads at the intersection of Lawyer's and Reston Parkway were marked "Lawyer's Road" (I never verifieid whether this was a signage error or was really on the maps that way). At some point that got fixed, so the westernmost leg, going to Fox Mill shopping center, is now Mclearen Road. Of course, that doesn't meet up with the rest of Mclearen Road, and never will--the extension was blocked. If this was an actual renaming of the road, it was relatively easy, because there are no addresses on it.
At least discontiguous roads are relatively rare here. Palo Alto, for example, uses a grid with named streets, wihch often start and stop. So if you're at the 200 block of Cowper and trying to get to the 1600 block, you may have to make several jogs when the road stops and then restarts.
Worst of all, I suspect, is Japan, where addresses are baswed on the order in which buildings were built -- so number 1 may be next to 52 next to 37 next to 3 next to... Oy!
So it could be worse.