A little while back I was getting a ride home from someone and she just asked my address and drove there. She'd never been there before, but didn't use GPS.

When I asked her how she did it she explained that the house number tells you where something is. Unfortunately, I can't remember what the pattern actually was.

It was something like 5 digit numbers run east to west, and 4 digit numbers run north to south.

So to get from anywhere to anywhere, you first figure out if your destination is parallel or perpendicular to you, and head in the appropriate direction until you intersect with the destination street.

Then you follow the numbers until you get where you need to go.

My issue is that this must have exceptions and caveats. Like, does this hold in residential neighborhoods? Do I need to know from memory what direction a street is in? And then there's really weird things, like Foothill Blvd runs all the way up California, but is it really an unbroken line the whole way? Is every street with the same name actually the same street?

Roads have always confused me because we have so many of them and the mountains make it even harder. How/where can I learn these systems to make sense of the environment we all live in?