What is the total number of streets in the USA?  If you added up all
the individual streets - ie. roads which have houses on either side -
how many would there be?

Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by alienintelligence-ga on 03 Aug 2002 18:55 PDT

Hi will1234,

I believe to answer this
question we might have to
home in on your main question.

First lets exclude what you
don't want.

You said streets. Does this
mean you are not interested
in avenues, trails, ways, dirt
roads, highways, freeways,
etc?

You also mentioned roads
which have houses on either
side. I'm not sure how we
could possibly determine that
for sure. But, this does leave
out streets/roads that do exist
but not adjacent to housing.
This is what you are interested
in?

I believe the only place that
would have that type of info
would be our USPS United States
Postal Service, since you are
specifying settled areas.

The CIA World Factbook sets
length of highways at:

Highways: total:  6,370,031 km 
paved:  5,733,028 km (including 74,091 km of expressways) 
unpaved:  637,003 km (1997)  

Thanks g-guys, but that's not what
we needed.


I'd be happy to research some
more when you have made your
clarifications. I kinda want
to know now myself ;o)

-AI

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Clarification of Question by will1234-ga on 04 Aug 2002 08:28 PDT

AI,

I like the direction you are going in.  Frankly, the parameters you
use for 'number of streets' can be a little vague if it helps get some
kind of ballpark answer.  I think a useful rearticulation of the
question might be, 'How many roads / streets / avenues / blvds... does
 the United States Postal Service deliver to?'  This would then
exclude highways, dirt tracks or any other route which you couldn't
include in a postal address.  (E.g.  you are never going to find
someone with the address '54 Interstate-95, Apt 15A, NY...' or '65
Dirt-Track-that-runs-off-Route-9, NY...')

Hope that helps.  

Cheers,

Will

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Request for Question Clarification by alienintelligence-ga on 11 Aug 2002 04:10 PDT

Hi will1234

I have a reference from 1999 that has
all of the populated streets in the
United States in it. Would that suffice
for an answer? I'd have to count them
by hand so lessee... 1 per second, 6
million or so, 70 days if I count them
out. Hehe, kidding, I'll parse it in a
database, and take the record count. ;-)

-AI

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Clarification of Question by will1234-ga on 12 Aug 2002 08:18 PDT

AI,

Sounds good to me.  Please press go on the 1999 info (no of populated
streets), find the record count and collect your fee!

Cheers,

Will

This answer is hard to come by. One of the sites said "over six
million" but I wouldn't consider it a reliable source.

Good luck fellow researchers!!

It looks to me like the answer is out there somewhere in US census
data.  The file at the following site:

http://www.ci.tucson.az.us/planning/roadhist.pdf

lists the most common street names in the United States and the number
of occurences.  (Second Street is most common, with 10,866).  Wherever
that piece of info came from should be able to give the complete
answer.

The data to answer the question should exist. The Census Bureau has
something called TIGER/line files that list every address and every
street in the country. Theoretically, the bureau could figure out how
many streets there are and how many of them have at least one house on
them. Whether they have actually done that or could do that for you is
another story.

Hi will1234...

Even though I'm absolutely confident that I have the most
exact answer you're likely to get, I'll post it as a comment,
for reasons which will shortly become obvious:

There's really only ONE street in the entire USA!
It just has a lot of segments which, though they
form a continuous path, are at right-angles or 
other angles, to each other. We've named the 
right-angled segments 'streets', but to show that
it's obvious that we're really naming the angles,
and not the road itself, there are circular segments
which we call 'circles'.

Okay, I admit: it's been a long night, and I REALLY
wanted to get just one question answered correctly...

sublime1-ga