I'm guessing this is the spot for this, though General Science may apply.

Salt Lake City, Utah is laid out on a grid. The 0,0 point is the intersection of South Temple and Main Street. As you go further south the streets are numbred 100 south, 200 south 300 south, and so on. These are normally said 1st south, 2nd south, 3rd south... The other four directions work about the same way. It's common to have an address like 1439 west 1900 south. Since the bulk of the county is a city, this system has persisted throughout all of the other cities that are attatched to Salt Lake. Sandy is its own city, but doesn't start until around 80th south. There are also 6 blocks to a mile. 33rd to 39th south is one mile.

Ogden, Utah is also a grid, sort of. The east-west streets are all numbered, 25th street, 31st street, etc. The north-south streets are mostly named after US Presidents, though not in any order at all. So if you are on the corner of 40th and Washington, and you need to go to 31st and Lincoln, you can figure out you need to go north, but there are no clues for east or west.

I'm asking this because to me, the system used in Salt lake makes perfect sense. A cartesian grid with basically standardized units. Yet, working where I do, I often have to give directios to people from out of town. Many find the system here to be confusing and I can't figure out why.
Is it becasue the addresses are both numbers and it's too much like math?
Is it some cultural thing that says all addresses have to have a number and a name? I'd much rather look for 17350 south than Whippersnaper Way.
How are the streets laid out in other cities?
Do they make sense?

[rant]As long as I'm here. Why don't cities plan it so that all of the schools are on the same street? I realise they need to be spread out, but a High school on 5th street, an elementary school on 10th, a jr high on 15, and another elementary on 20th makes getting from one side of town to the other a miserable event. WHy not 2 on 10th and 2 on 20th, then let people decide whether they want to hit the school zones or not. It might also cut down on the number of kids hid becasue the people that won't slow down in the school zones will have a road where they don't need to. Yes, I had to run an errand the other day on the other side of town at about 8:30 AM.[/rant]

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An evil person would do the things I think up.

Here we have Canberra, a logically designed city. It's impossible for anyone with any sense to get lost and so we often do. Currently I am in great Southern City One which is another planned city, one built without convicts, which is strange because despite the lack of criminals the other day someone stole my concrete frog.

In Japan the streets have no names and you can maintain your privacy merely by giving bad directions to your place. Personally, I think the Japanese method is best. That way if you have no friends you can just pretend that no one visits you because they can't find your where you live.

Most cities, at least out here, have one spot that's where you go from one direction to the other--where North Whatever St. turns into South Whatever Street--and East Something Else Lane becomes West Something Else Lane. Oddly enough, in Olympia, this is Division St. (Tacoma, too.) Back home, it's the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado Blvd, which means the Rose Parade goes through the changeover point every year.

The thing I find a little confusing is that, in Olympia, it's not north, south, east, or west in the street name; it's SE, NE, SW, and NW. What's also fun is that a lot of the communities, especially as you get closer to Seattle, start overlapping. I'm not sure how they deal with numbered streets in that situation, though it seems they all have numbered streets.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

One thing about the numbering of streets is, how much does the terrain influence things? For example, I think in a city built in a desert, having straight streets is the logical thing to do, but if you live on an island there there is a single road that goes around the island, and then streets that go inland (but not all the way through, because there is a volcano), then doing it that way would be complicated, wouldn't it? Or what about a mountainous region where road sort of wind around to fit the terrain?

BTW, it's not entirely true that streets aren't named in Japan. The road that passes in front of my building has a name, but people don't use it in addresses. There are subdivisions, so your address is a town, followed by a neihborhood, followed by a block, followed by your place on the block. So addresses are things like Jimbocho 2-40-6 (my office's address). It does create problems, though, because Jimbocho 3 is not necessarily next to Jimbocho 2. Sometimes neighborhood 1 is west of neighborhood 2, but then neighborhood 3 is south of it, or something like that. In any case, big streets have names, but little ones don't necessarily. So we do say things like, "walk down Hakusan street and turn left when you get to the drugstore."

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As above, so below

DC has a "logical" plan with the Captiol being the center. However it has the same "quadrant" set up that Gillian described in Olympia. The streets going east-west are lettered (A, B, C, etc) and those north south are numbered (first and so on) with the diagonal avenues named after states (thank you Pierre). The quadrant designation is essential as addresses duplicate in each quadrant. Thus there is a corner of I and 8th in each. In SE that's the Marine barracks. It's just a corner in NW. Properly, the White House is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. I once read somewhere that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue SE is a garage in one of the not so nice areas of town. (edit, checking the map, its actually near Congrssional Cemetary just before the road goes over the Anacostia River).

Then there's Phoenix where all of the N-S streets are numbered in increasing sequence from Central Avenue. The kicker is that west of Central they are "Avenues" and east of Central they are "Streets" so you need to be specific when giving directions. It's not so bad if someone goes to 3rd St when they wanted 3rd Ave, but the distance between 75th St and 75th Ave is somewhat greater.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Some years ago when I was working downtown, I arranged to have lunch with a friend of mine at 7th and G Streets but neglected to mention the "NW" part. Because she was coming from the direction of Baltimore, she hit the "NE" section first, found the intersection, and thought, "Kevin works in the 'hood!" Fortunately she realized what was going on fairly quickly.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Bristol road layout resembles a dropped plate of spagetti.
With a river plus a floating harbour imeadiately to the south of the CBD, bridges being few across both bodies of water. Its fun.

Boston's streets developed from cow paths, and have all the logical regularity thereof.

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"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

VT has a lot of winding roads that follow rivers and terrain. Burlington is fairly regular, but since it is perched on and around a hill, city planners had to get crafty with streets going downhill. There is a N to S distinction when you hit Pearl Street. South Willard becomes North Willard and such. Sometimes the N and S streets aren't exactly parallel with each other, either. In the older towns you have a lot of very windy streets that looped around buildings. I'm quite fond of VT's hilly and curvy roads, very fun to drive down.

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"4th Law of Modern Thermodynamics: Where Mihoshi is, Chaos Reigns." ~W. Hakubi
"Gun control is hitting your target; Recycling is reloading your brass." ~ Lex of Dirty Work.

We've got hills and curves and things here, too--heck, down the hill from my house, we've got a big saltwater lake.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Having driven through SLC a few times from the airport, I deem it to be the most perfectly laid out street system in the known universe. SLC residents know better than to believe those silly signs - like one way. Only tourists fall for that nonsense. Boston is much more sensibly laid out. Even taxi drivers have rosaries hanging from their rear view mirrors.

Wonder if grid patterns allow the wind to
disperse traffic fumes more easily? Never
heard of air quality tests on this.

The center of Cleveland is somewhat logical, with east and west numbered streets (East 9th, West 25th), but the streets that go from East to West are named and of no logic. There are also a lot of streets, particularly away from the city, named for the towns they connected, such as Kirtland-Chardon Road and SOM Center Road (Solon-Orange-Mayfield Center). One problem is that the shoreline of Lake Erie doesn't go east-west, but more like Northeast-Southwest, so it complicates things. Some east-west roads follow the shoreline, some go truely east-west. So there are places where two east-west roads intersect each other at almost right angles.

The strangest is New Orleans. People talk about the East Bank and the West Bank of the Mississippi River. But at New Orleans the river is going more East-west and the East Bank is actually north and the West is south. With the twists of the river, there are actually places where the "East" Bank is west of the "West" Bank.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Hey, what? You mean there are cities that were designed?

Most older cities in Europe started to grow up before land transport was a sensible option: London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Bristol, York, Liverpool (not to mention Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Pisa, Florence, Prague etc.) all focus on rivers. The "streets" developed from lanes and alleyways between buildings.

If the city has a focal point (such as the mediaeval cathedral in York), you tend to get a radial arrangement, but only to a limited extent. Planning never really entered into it.

How strange it must be to live or work in a city where all the streets look the same (oh, wait, that's Milton Keynes!). Maybe that's why people get lost so easily?

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

The layout of DC's streets is logical...

from a satellite photo.

Lets see someone in a car try to navigate it and arrive with their sanity intact. I'll send flowers to your padded cell.

After the Alfred Murrah building was hit, they rerouted traffic to close down part of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, changing traffic flows, reversing some one way streets, along with some other nonsense, and that about gummed the works but good.

I've been to DC a few times since then, but I usually ask for a pistol and a single bullet in exchange for any required road trips downtown. Pity me that no one's taken me up on the offer...

Hm. Can't think of a planned Canadian city... can think of a five-way intersection (not a roundabout) in Halifax.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

It's almost impossible to get lost in Las Vegas, as the city is a grid with a huge tower stuck right in the middle of it. So long as you have a compass, you always know where you are in relation to the tower.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. A human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't resulted in hundreds of misdirected emergency responses each year, followed by a hue and cry to change the system. In many towns, simply having two streets with similar names was enough to cause confusion on 911 calls.

I Wonder If Grid Patterns Allow The Wind To
Diserse Traffic Fumes More Easily?...

Well, it's not as bad as it sounds in DC. For instance, the SW quadrant barely exists. It's sort of like Chicago. The joke there is that the East side of Chicago is Lake Michigan since the baseline (State St. I believe) is only a few blocks from there. For the locals, giving the quadrant in DC starts to come naturally. Also, for some areas it's obvious. If you agree to meet someone in Georgetown, you both know it's NW. As for driving there, I have to agree with Doodler. I avoid driving in the District whenever I can. Too many one-way streets, no left turns, and traffic circles for my taste.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli