What is the difference between..?

Question

Ave - Rd- Blvd - Dr

Avenue -Road-Boluvard-Drive??

Answer 1

Street type designations
Streets can be divided into various types, each with their own general style of construction and purpose. However, the difference between streets, roads, avenues and the like is often blurred and is not a good indicator of the size, design or content of the area. For example, London's Abbey Road serves all the vital functions of a street, despite its name, and locals are more apt to refer to the "street" outside than the "road". A desolate road in rural Montana, on the other hand, may bear a sign proclaiming it "Davidson Street", but this does not make it a "street".

In the United Kingdom many towns will refer to their main thoroughfare as the High Street, and many of the ways leading off it will be named "Road" despite the urban setting. Thus the town's so-called "Roads" will actually be more streetlike than a road.

In some other English-speaking countries, such as New Zealand and Australia, cities are often divided by a main "Road", with "Streets" leading from this "Road", or are divided by thoroughfares known as "Streets" or "Roads" with no apparent differentiation between the two. In Auckland, for example, the main shopping precinct is around Queen Street and Karangahape Road, and the main urban thoroughfare connecting the south of the city to the city centre is Dominion Road.

In Manhattan and Seattle, east-west streets are "Streets" whereas North-South streets are "Avenues". Yet in St. Petersburg, Florida, all of the east-west streets are "Avenues" and the North-South streets are "Streets".

In Ontario, numbered concession roads are east-west whereas "lines" are North-South routes.

In Montreal, "Avenue" (used for major streets in other cities) generally indicates a small, tree-lined, low-traffic residential street. Exceptions exist, such as Park Avenue and Pine Avenue. Both are major thoroughfares in the city. In older cities, names such as "Vale" which would normally be associated with smaller roads may become attached to major thoroughfares as roads are upgraded (e.g. Roehampton Vale).

In the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s[6] there was a trend to not use the street type suffix at all, resulting in street names like (translated) "North Sea" and "Tuba".

Answer 2

Without meaning to trivialise your question, the difference is pretty much only the way you spell it. By and large, avenues and roads will be larger throughfares, tending more to the commercial/industrial sectors of a city. Boulevards and drives will be smaller, house-lined streets of the sort found in subdivisions. (As an aside, there is a major throughfare in Toronto Ont. called Avenue Road - no kidding!! - 10pts. for superior imagination, eh?)

Answer 3

The most famous sorta-system is Manhattan's grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets. Here's another from the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission of Lansing, Michigan (my assistant Jane lives there, that's why):

* Cul-de-sacs should be named circle, court, way, or place
* Meandering streets--drive, lane, path, trail
* North-south streets--avenue, highway
* Streets with planted medians--boulevard, parkway.

Guilford County, North Carolina, prefers:

* North-south streets--street; east-west--avenue (take that, Manhattan)
* Diagonal--road
* Dead-end streets--terrace, point, cove, dale, way
* Cul-de-sacs--court
* Short curved roads with ingress and egress from the same thoroughfare--circle.

Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, is even more precise:

* North-south cul-de-sac--circle.
* East-west cul-de-sac--court.
* Northwest-southeast street--drive
* Northeast-southwest street--lane (doesn't the Kenai planning department have anything better to do?)
* Begins and ends at same thoroughfare--loop
* Meandering--road.

You get the picture. Lacking a detailed national standard (where are the French when we need them?), we're left with a muddle. One may hazard the generalization that long streets typically are called avenue, street, highway, road, etc., while short ones get terrace, court, place, and the like. But there are many exceptions even to this simple rule.

Don't despair. The U.S. Postal Service, exhibiting rare common sense, has decided suffixes aren't worth worrying about. It merely requests that street names be unique without regard to suffix, lest mail carriers be confused if the suffix is left off. (A notorious violator of this principle is Chicago, which has numerous instances of streets with names like 21st Place running parallel to 21st Street.) The agency adds a few other reasonable guidelines, e.g., street names should sound dissimilar to one another to avert mix-ups. These rules appear to have been widely adopted by local officials. In short we have a collective bureaucratic judgment that the power of the state ought to be exercised economically, a conclusion that might be applied to many aspects of public life.

Answer 4

Avenues and Boulevards are wide. Roads may be wide too, but generally not. Drives often have a curving shape but are not much wider than roads. Of course, these are just generalizations. Oxford and Regent Streets (another one!) are wider than many avenues I have seen