What is the street in Michigan with the longest name?

February 15, 2013 11:22 AM

What is the street in Michigan with the longest name? Or, how would you find this out? Assume I'm too cheap to spend any money on a commercial map database or the like.
posted by kc8nod to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

At least some MI counties have their street directories online. Here's Kalamazoo County.

That document also lays out their street naming policy, which it turns out includes a length limit: no street names longer than 11 characters. But it looks like some longer names have been grandfathered in.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 11:29 AM on February 15, 2013

Find a Michigan street atlas at the local library and peruse the index? I had thought that the Delorme Gazetteers had street lists, but I checked the one I have for TN and it does not.
posted by jquinby at 11:33 AM on February 15, 2013

The US Census lists every road in the US in their TIGER data. Here's all the data for 2010, but as you can see it's not exactly easy to browse through. A friend of mine has done some work with this data; I'll see if he can come up with something.
posted by zsazsa at 11:42 AM on February 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: So, I downloaded all the data after figuring out that files named tl_2010_26xxx_roads.zip corresponded to Michigan, unzipped every file, dumped the .dbf files to text format, extracted, uniquified the names, and sorted by length. Here are the results. As you can see, this is some messy data! The longest road name in there that isn't junk is Bald Mountain State Recreation Area Entrance Drive.
posted by zsazsa at 1:01 PM on February 15, 2013 [14 favorites]

zsazsa you magnificent bastard.
posted by jquinby at 12:27 PM on February 16, 2013 [1 favorite]