Have you ever wondered how roads get their names? People will have noticed that there are roads that have been named in recognition of local features, historical or present, or in recognition of people who have been historically associated with the area being serviced by the road. But there are a few formalities that need to be addressed, if you’ll pardon the pun, before a name appears on a street sign.
This policy under which roads are named in NSW is managed by the NSW Geographic Names Board (GNB) under the Geographic Names Act 1966. Nonetheless, with the exception of State Roads, including National Routes and Highways, council is the Road Naming Authority for roads within its Local Government Area. As such, while the Board offers guidelines and advice for the selection of names, council has the formal responsibility for naming roads and enforcing the principles that support the practice of standardised addressing.
Under these guidelines, which were only formally articulated in 2014 so you may well see many, ‘historical’ and contradictory examples on existing street signs, a road is considered to be “an area that is open to and/or used by the public and is navigable by vehicle or foot and can be used for assigning addresses or allowing access between points or to a feature”.
When it comes to the selection of actual names, the guidelines largely relate to the applicable restrictions: no punctuation marks, although the good old apostrophe is permitted in names such as “O’Connor” (just nowhere near a trailing “s”!), no abbreviations, initials or acronyms, although an exception is made of “St”, which does not have to be spelled out as “Saint”, and no numerals unless spelled out in full (“Third Street”, not “3rd Street”).
Roads in new subdivisions are obviously a lot easier to name consistently, following some neat theme. Nonetheless, following a recommendation of Council some years back, made in consultation with Council’s Bungendore War Memorial Committee, new streets in Bungendore, for example, are currently being named after local residents who served in the Great War. Observers of the machinations of Council will also note a steady stream of naming proposals coming before Council as we go about ensuring that all residences in the LGA, particularly those in more remote rural areas, can be located easily in case of emergency. Each proposal will invariably include the naming options considered, with the reasons for nominating the respective options, and comments from residents impacted by or with an interest in the naming in question.
If you’re interested, the NSW Addressing User Manual (a riveting read!) is available on-line from the GNB website.
And just in case anyone was not aware of the fact, rural property numbering is based on the distance, in tens of metres, of the access point to a property from the ‘end’ (known as the ‘Datum Point’) of the road on which it is located. For example, the address of the Wamboin Community Hall is 112 Bingley Way, indicating that its access point is located 1.12km from the beginning (the Norton Road end) of Bingley Way, rounded to the nearest even number for addresses on the right hand side of the road, or odd number for addresses on the left.
Unfortunately, as logical as all this might sound, there are ways to stymie even the best of plans. The observant traveller may have noticed that road numbering along the Kings Highway suffers a minor hiatus between Bungendore and Braidwood, where the numbering that was started from the Bateman’s Bay end of the road smacks into the numbering that was started from the Queanbeyan end of the road—the identification of reasons why this might have occurred is left to the reader as an exercise. Numbers increase as you head out from Queanbeyan, as you might expect, then, about 50km out, numbers suddenly flick from 5000s to 8000s then decrease again as you head towards the coast. I kid you not…
So, next time you’re on your way to the coast with the kids, get them to look for where the change actually occurs (between Bungendore and Braidwood) and where the odd and even numbers flip sides of the road (between Bungendore and Queanbeyan). Note also that it is permissible to flip to conventional street addressing as you enter an urban area, then flip back again as you leave.