Prevent GPS navigation mixups: rename every street to something unique!

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Background:

Every so often, a ridiculous story comes out about someone driving 400 miles to the wrong location because they went to the “right” address (“123 Snake Street”) in the wrong city.

In the ancient “paper map” days, this type of mistake would be nearly impossible, but modern GPS systems make it possible for a driver to input an address and then pick the wrong city.

(A similar phenomenon also occasionally afflicts inattentive airline-ticket-bookers, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=sydney+plane+booked+to+wrong+city). 

The Issue:

The fundamental issue here is that street names are not unique (Figure 1)! Let’s fix that.

Fig. 1: Most cities will have a “main” street in some prominent location. Oddly, San Francisco has a relatively small and obscure “main” street, because it was named after a guy named “Charles Main.”

Proposal:

It would be simplest to do this renaming at a country-by-country level. Let’s start with the United States. English has a lot of words to choose from, so let’s start by just renaming all the common street names to something plausibly word-like (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Top left: sometimes we might be able to keep the general sound of the street intact by just changing a letter or two. Top right: maybe anagrams can help, too. Bottom: If we’re going to be renaming streets (and avenues, and boulevards, etc…), we might as well also try to have some theming. For example, in this example, all coves are renamed to have a piratical theme.

Evidently there are around 5 million named streets in the USA. This is a lot larger than the number of easily-recognizable English words. We can solve this by just using multiple words: if we use two-word phrases made from 10,000 easily recognizable English words, then we’ll have 100 million (10,000 * 10,000) street name options to choose from!

PROS: No more navigational mixups!

CONS: Someone could still set their GPS to “Maine” street instead of “Main” street, especially if they used voice navigation. Maybe homophones also need to be excluded.