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Rural Addressing Naming Conventions

The major decisions about the re-addressing were driven by standards that are approved by the Rural Addressing and Mapping Committee. Tuesday, April 20th, the Rural Addressing Committee, with recommendations from Pro-West and Associates, approved the following conventions for re-addressing the county.

• The decision was unanimously made to start the addressing in the SW corner of the county according to addressing standards
• The county will use the standard of 1000 addresses per mile for simplicity = 100 addresses per 1/10th mile. 100 addresses per square mile would not work because then you would only have 10 addresses per 1/10 mile and that is not a sufficient number in some areas.
• All public roads will be named or numbered.
• All addresses will fit the grid for house numbers, if the road fits the grid it will be a Street or Avenue unless it is a Class I road. All Streets and Avenues will be numbered.
• Even numbered addresses will be on the South and East side of roads.

Class I Roads

• All Federal, State, and County State Aid Highways (CSAH) will be Class I roads. As well as a few trunk county roads.
• All roads that are Federal, State, County State Aid Highways, or have been designated by the Engineer and committee to be main Trunk routes, well know in the county and are already a county road are Class I roads.

Class II Roads

• Class II roads are the Streets and Avenues that fit the grid and are not Class I roads.
• A Class II road is any road that is not a Class I road and follows the county numbering grid from start to finish. They will be designated with a Street or Avenue suffix depending on whether they run West and East or South and North respectively.

Class III Roads

• A Class III road is any road that is not Class I or Class II.
• Class III roads will be named with a Name and carry a suffix like Drive, Road, Trail, Lane, Loop , Circle, etc.
• Road Names will be kept as short as possible.
• Roads that need to be named with a Name instead of a number will be named according to convention. The convention is that roads in the east or that start in the eastern side of the county will get names that start with an A and moving Westward every two miles the letter will change.

Road Naming (for Class III roads)

• A road that branches off of a Class I or II road and comes out on another road will be called Road (RD).
• A road that branches off a Class I or II road and dead ends will be called Drive (DR).
• There will be no duplicate road names in the County. Naming roads that sound alike will be avoided as much as possible. Example: Bike and Pike are two names that sound too much alike, and only one of those two names can be used. This is important for emergency services where this can cause confusion while talking over the radio.
• Creating duplicate names on Roads, Trails, Streets and Avenues, and Drives will not be allowed. For example: Walnut Drive and Walnut Lane would not be allowed. There will never be a Walnut Ave as all Avenues will be numbered.
• Boundary Roads will keep their names if they already have one. For example: State line road, roads that are the boundary between a city and a township – if the city or neighboring county has already named it a name then it will not be renamed.

Road suffix naming conventions for Class III roads:

Road:

• Attaches two Class I or II roads and does not dead end.

Drive:

• A road that comes off a Class I or II road and does not connect back to another Class I or II road.

Trail:

• Comes off a Class III road and is addressed South to North.

Lane:

• Comes off a Class III road and is addressed West to East.

Loop :

• Comes off a Class I, II, or III road and comes back to the same road it left.

Circle:

• Comes off a Class I, II, or III road and comes back onto itself.

Road names and numbers will be assigned according to the following map:

For more information about obtaining GIS data from Fillmore County, please contact the GIS Coordinator at 507.765.2806.