What is the difference betwen a road, a street and an avenue?

Question

Is there a specific reason why they all get appointed differently?
What other names are there? ..I can only remember crescent, circle& close.

Why? Because i noticed people taking offence if you say the name wrong. Like if a streets name is Jackson Avenue, you may never call it Jackson Road.

Im just curious , thanks

Answer 1

Today there is no practical distinction. What something is called nowadays has more to do how the words sound (calling a residential throughway "lane" as opposed to "street" might make it seem more pleasant and "homey.").

In the 19th century, however, the distinctions had legal ramifications. Back then, a "road" was a throughway capable of supporting carriage traffic in one way at a time. (Only one carriage could fit -- one lane).

a "street" could carry carriage traffic going in two lanes.
An "Avenue" could handle four lanes of traffic.

The reason this mattered was because mapmakers needed the information to create more accurate maps. And if they knew what the throughway was called (road, street, Avenue, etc), they knew which kinds of lines to draw on the map.

Answer 2

It's not just taking offense: many cities have both a Street and a Road with the same name. Soquel Avenue becomes Soquel Drive in Santa Cruz.

The traditional definitions have changed, but here's what they used to be:

Street: down town, in the town sort of place.

Avenue: a wide version of the same.

Road: out of town, or between two towns.

Drive: a dead end at some significant destination; e.g., Disc Drive in Scotts Valley goes to Building One of Seagate Technology, which makes hard disc drives.

Crescent: it does what it says: goes into a residential area, usually, and comes out on the same street it started from. So if you live on a crescent near one end, you had better use a landmark to describe which end, or a directional designation: the north end of Sunset Crescent, for example, or the end near Denny's.

Circle is literal; many cities put them right down town, to control traffic around a central building like City Hall.

I'm an American and do not know the definition of "close" in this context.

Answer 3

Very nice question, quite hard to answer, but I'll try my best.

Roads are the biggest of the three, excluding a highway. It's usually 2 lanes and bigger. When you turn off a road, you enter a street, and when you turn off a street, you enter an avenue. So I suppose it gets smaller and smaller.

Crescents are small roads which are shaped as a, you guessed it, crescent. Something like a "U" shape. They are found when you go off the main road and is usually where houses are. Circles are roads which form a loop, and could also be found in housing estates. As for a close, it's a dead end.