We got caught out by this on a beach vacation. Our infant son was running a fever and ultimately had a febrile seizure, scaring the crap out of us.
We were in the west half of a duplex on East 1st Street, so the address was 123W E First St. I called 911 and in the process sent the first responders to 123 W First St. (Everything turned out okay, but response was delayed by at least 10 minutes. I recommended they change the addresses to 123A and 123B instead of East and West. That was denied.)
I grew up in a 149 High Street. About 300m away was another 149 High Street. They both originally belonged to different villages but London's growth had filled in the gaps between the villages.
We knew who lived there as it wasn't too infrequent that their post arrived at ours or vice versa.
I lived at a 600 Carver St for a while. It was technically 600 West Carver. We would get mail for people in 600 East Carver (which was too far away to end up in a list of closest same addresses, and should have been a different address anyway) but the names of the people at the addresses and the presence or absence of east or west in the addresses never seemed to disambiguate the addresses reliably for the post office.
My house in Seattle has such a twin, two miles south. The only difference is the directional suffix: their street is South, while ours - unlike most Seattle streets - does not have a directional. Of course this has led to constant delivery mix-ups, when Google or some other service helpfully "corrects" our address to the other. My own sister once mistakenly followed her GPS to the wrong house!
I lived in a rental house in the Salford Council area about 10 years ago. I was shocked to find a letter from a collection agency on behalf of the council one day, and assumed it must be a previous tenant.
Closer inspection revealed the postcode was wrong -- the goons had hand delivered it to an address 5 miles away. Same number, same street, same council area, completely different postcode (M28 vs M5)
Where we live, you can get the same house number on, e.g. "North 8th St." and "North 8th Rd." (and possibly "North 8th Dr." and maybe "North 8th Pl.") a block or two apart. It's fairly common to have at least two of those.
And it's maddening. I'd be curious to know if this situation is similarly common.
> I spoke to a chap who lived on the other side of the road (who, quite rightly, wanted to know why I was taking photos of people’s houses). Apparently they’ve been trying for ages to get the two councils to put up signage to clarify the situation.
Can't they put up their own signs?
I got nerdsniped hard by this. If I can find the data, I might try to replicate the analysis for Germany.
I learned that in Japan, it's quite common for neighbors to have the exact same address, if the entrances fall in the same number zone.
As always, addressing is a story that shows us that all our nice simple abstractions don't suffice. An address is not always street+house number.
(Site isn't loading for me)
Got caught up with a "nonexistent twin" for my old address.
I had address "123 Some AVE." in the town. There was also a road named "Some PLACE" in the town but there was not a 123 for the house number anywhere on the "Some Pl." road. "123 Some Pl." does not exist in the town.
BUT, you can type in "123 Some Pl." in Google or Apple Maps along with the town name and the maps program will just throw you at the closest numbering house on "Some Pl." If you're not paying attention you just think it's the correct address.
Somehow my voter registration was set to the "123 Some Pl." (but my driver's license was correct) so I was in the wrong voting district (quick phone call cleared that up). Also sometimes packages would try to get delivered over there to "123 Some Pl.".
The last map seems to show several houses on that street with same numbers, because it looks like on the west side of that border the numbers go up to 443 from west to east, and on the east side of it, the numbers go up towards 443 from east to west.
Google Maps[1] seems to confirm it, there are two 441's several houses away from each other separated by the two 443's (actually just separated by 1 house because they're semi-detached houses), and then two 439's, two 437's, and it goes on..
Similarly confusing -- I lived for a while in an estate where the roads were named "The Avenue", "The Street", "The Court", "The Drive" and so on.
It was a PITA to explain to delivery people, especially because it was before there were Eircodes, so there was no postal code in common use to direct people there without the confusing names.
About 10 years ago when still I lived in California, I began receiving postal mail for another house with the same number that had recently been built on my street one mile to the north, but in another city. This went on for a while until I finally complained to the Postmaster.
My home town (Leopoldsburg) had 2 streets with the same name (Boskantstraat), that crossed each other. So on the crossing, all streets had the same name. There uses to be no houses or other things to help with orientation. Great fun on a foggy autumn night.
It's an interesting observation that a lot of these are in the North West. We're around there and live on a road with a twin about 500m away. It can occasionally be problematic, but postcodes certainly help.
Not as good as his find, but close pairs do exist in the US: https://goo.gl/maps/ZisYmkTEJsd6Rw1f8
People who assign confusing house numbers and confusing street names have a special place in hell. What if an ambulance won't reach you in time because of an address confusion?
As an American, I find this type of British minutiae to be extremely fascinating.
Addresses should be UUIDs stored on a blockchain.
(2017)
The key to the confusing house numbering is that when a long road crosses between multiple towns, the numbers start again from 1.
So, to achieve the proximity effect, you want to find two towns which are close together, but which have expanded to form a continuous conurbation.
You then need a road which either 'clips' one of these towns, and hence has numbers starting from 1 but then quickly moves to another town, where the numbers get reset, or, where the road starts just over the border into one town, and hence again, starts from 1 before quickly crossing into another town.
We live in the UK city of Brighton. Actually, Brighton had a neighbouring town, Hove, and the two councils merged in the 90s to form 'Brighton and Hove' but this is often abbreviated to Brighton, and this town became a city in 2000.
So, any road that crosses between Brighton and Hove will have this number reset problem. We happen to live 200 yards from the Brighton and Hove 'border' for want of a better name, and our road crosses, so we have another identically numbered house on the same road 400 yards away.
The road itself runs for a number of miles, so there is at least one other house with the same address that I know of (in Portslade, the next town along). We occasionally get confused delivery drivers and post from the postman where we try and work out from the address who the package is for. I've met the current owners of the other two similar addresses, so we can help point things in the right direction.