The Amerindians have always said the White Man is stupid. I mean, Hell, we call them Indians even though they clearly aren't from India. But at least that name can remain a testament to the White Man's stupidity. They also may be smarter than us in city design. A colleague of mine and I were working on a case today and we found a tiny little town in the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. It's called Roosevelt, UT. Most of the built up area of the city is designed on a grid of geometrically regular rectangles. And the grammar of the street layout is interesting. They don't use the usual syntax. The naming conventions for streets are like "abbreviated_cardinal_direction three_digit_number abbreviated_cardinal_direction". For instance, "N 200 W" is syntactically correct in this grammar (a well formed formula ^_^). The first cardinal direction tells you the direction of travel, with N for north to south and E for east to west. The digits are for a simple numbering scheme. Finally, the terminal cardinal direction character tells you the side of town. So, the middle of town is "0 E" a slight departure because there isn't an initial character, but you could infer the direction of travel from the terminal "E". The road "0 E" divides "N 100 W" and "N 100 E". You can infer your direction, side of town, and even connected roads from the data point of the street name alone, once you've had a bit of familiarity with using the system. It's actually more than data, it's information. And it's a brilliant design for such a small town. Not all streets are named that way though. Commercially significant areas with clusters of important activity such as the university or shopping areas have regular names, for example "Main Street". That's probably so there is not any confusion about the mailing address of institutions that do outside business for those not accustomed to the naming conventions. This is a well-designed system. See below if you want to explore for yourself: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Roosevelt,+UT/40.2891829,-109.987435/@40.2981682,-109.9920484,16z/data=!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x874fbb889e67efa5:0x7513e25fa9985d1c!2m2!1d-109.9887605!2d40.299403!1m0!3e1
