I can't tell you how many times I've had someone ask me where X street is and the answer is "you're on it." There are still some pretty awful signage gaps (I think especially along Memorial Drive).
Related to below, it took 6 months to find out Main and Vassar are different and why I could never walk to and from work (when at MIT) using the same route 🤣🤣🤣
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I live in this general area but have lived in different parts over Cambridge over the past 30 years. I once told someone to imagine Cambridge not as a grid but a squashed bicycle tire and they said it was actually a helpful way to navigate.
I've long claimed that the only way to navigate the road network here is to have a holistic grasp of the whole thing. If you try to think systematically like "this road is parallel to that road" you're out of luck. For a while I was trying to figure out how to test empirically if people did this
I went with "the Atlantic Ocean is to the east, and the Charles runs west to east, and figure out the rest of the compass from there" as a strategy.
Granted, this strategy did once put me on I-93 on a bicycle, so I'm not saying it is perfect.
I find that the history of what got filled in when helps a lot with things like why the alphabetized streets in the back bay stop at some point or why the grid by the river in cambridge suddenly stops/changes direction but it is very Boston to be like "oh it's easy just remember the 1730 map"
That really is the right answer. There’s a moment where the shape of the whole situation just kinda clicks and suddenly the whole fucked-up spiderweb is not only in your head but *makes sense*. And there’s an, ehhh… fifty percent chance you’ll defend it as logical after that too.
There’s a *seventy* percent chance that you’ll start giving directions via landmarks with no attention paid to when that particular bar or gas station last existed, too.
I always think of the study that found that London cabbies — dealing with a similar kind of street network and tested rigorously on it for licensing — had notably enlarged hippocampuses
Most of SoCal is laid out on a fairly regular N-S/E-W grid, but there are a few areas where that system gets subverted. My friend used to live in one of those towns, and I repeatedly got lost going to his house (pre-GPS); we eventually decided the place is just non-Euclidean.
I think some people do this as a general approach and others don't. One reason I think I do is that sometimes my mental map is clear but wrong and there's an almost physical sensation that the world is the wrong way around.
(most often after moving between S and N hemispheres)
I think the HowToGaMIT (for lack of a better word) handbook in the 80s mentioned most of the major streets around Boston just have signs telling you what road you were crossing. Main thing to do for navigation was have a couple landmarks and think like a cow
I'm not sure if this specifically a Massachusetts thing, but a lot of towns will have a Street Name and then an Old Street Name (e.g. Burley St. and Old Burley St.) which I'm sure is extra confusing to tourists, especially when signage is inconsistent.
It’s amazing common. Useful Massachusetts road name convention: Town_Name Street is usually a road that leads to that other town. When the name changes, you have arrived.
Haha yup, we have a ton of these on the North Shore: Topsfield Rd., Ipswich Rd., Lawrence, Rd., Georgetown Rd.
It actually is one of the few things that is simple about navigating up here!
And sometimes they are reciprocal and sometimes they are not.
Like Waltham St changes to Lexington St when you cross the line into Waltham.
But Bedford St in Lexington changes to Great Road when you cross into Bedford.
Before phone maps… using paper maps and seeing every angle of the John Hancock building trying to leave because one way streets.. I’m good at using maps too. I’m now expert level driving in Boston map app or not. Just. That learning curve can be brutal.
