i should do a thread about DC streets

So, lots of cities have gridded streets or streets with logical naming (First street, Second street, etc)

DC has a couple of pretty interesting street organization features though. First up: Quadrants! DC has 4 quadrants, Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest

the dividing line for the quadrants is a "crosshair" placed directly over the capitol building

every street in DC has a suffix indicating the quadrant. Instead of "1st St", there's "1st St NW"

DC's street naming scheme is *mostly* regular, but there are exceptions. Generally, all 4 quadrant's streets radiate from the quadrant division lines, with North/South streets being named after numbers and East/West streets named after letters.

So if you drove north from the capitol, you'd be crossing (mostly) lettered streets on your way up.
First, A St (NW on your left, NE on your right), then B St

Also! The streets radiate in both directions from the quadrant dividing streets (the dividing streets are named North Capitol, East Capitol, and South Capitol. There's no West Capitol because of the national mall directly west of the capitol building)

So, heading north, you hit A street, then B street, etc

Heading south, you hit A, then, B, then so on in that direction

Same with numbers going east/west.

So that's the basis of our streets. It gets weird in some spots, especially because of landmarks that obstruct the typical pattern and the hilliness of the city.

Another fun thing about DC's streets is there's (at least one) street named after each state. Most of them are diagonal and cut through the many traffic circles in the city, but not all of them