75½ Bedford Street

Re:75½ Bedford Street by gumby on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @12:27PM (#22425103)

In a country where addresses have to be ordered, if not enough numerical space has been left between existing structures you have to do something, either renumbering (painful and rare) or increasing resolution.

Sherlock Holmes' "222B Baker Street" is a famous example.

In France if you put a building between existing addresses 11 and 13 you might do "11 bis" (or if that's taken even "11 ter"). "bis" might be translated as "again", though it's linguistically related to 2, as can be seen by "ter" which clearly looks like 3.

IIRC (it's been many years) you see this notation in the tree structure of 4G/LTE wireless deployment; the secondary (subsidiary) transmission nodes are referred to as "bis" nodes (I only vaguely remember this because an American engineer giving an otherwise excellent lecture on 4G topology mocked this French terminology).

Bizarre story: In 1984/85 I lived at 11 bis Rue XXX in Paris. Literally the week before last -- 35 years later -- I met an American woman at a dinner in Palo Alto who turns out to have lived at number 13. What a small world!

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Re:75½ Bedford Street by throwaway3563 on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @10:54PM (#22430285)

Seems like it would much more common where the numbering system alternates monotonically for the length of the street. In eg. USA where the numbers go up by 100 per block, there are gaps to make use of.

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Re:75½ Bedford Street by gumby on Thursday February 27, 2020 @05:37PM (#22438717)

In a big, old city like Paris or even New York there’s been enough infill over the years that any gals have been consumed.

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