This Street, That Street, Road To Nowhere: Canada's Oddly Named Roads Explained

Amid hostilities with the current US administration, a city council in Canada's Ottawa recently decided to rechristen a street named after Donald Trump to 'Taco Avenue'. In a unanimous vote, the council voted to rename Trump Avenue, a residential street in the Central Park neighbourhood of Ottawa that has carried the US president's name for roughly 25 years. While Ottawa City Council came up with a creative name, the community of Porters Lake, near Halifax, Nova Scotia, drew attention in 2018 for the opposite reason. Social media users shared that streets in one section were named This Street, That Street and The Other Street, while a street in Iqaluit, Nunavut, was called Road to Nowhere.

Haphazard naming appears to be a trend in Canada. According to a CBC report, an analysis of Vancouver's 651 streets found that as many as 62 streets were named without any link to a person, thing or event. One of the streets was simply named Adanac, which is Canada spelt backwards.

As many as 12 streets are named after the books and characters of novelist Sir Walter Scott, after a city engineer reportedly pushed for them in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, there is love for golf in the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada.

There are more streets in Vancouver named for golf courses (26) than there are for women (14) and people of colour (5) combined. The report highlighted that names were approved by councils, and initially by a railway company, without a formal process. However, the city now has a committee for naming streets.

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Why Such Names?

Dissecting the issue, American professor Brian Brenner blamed urban sprawl for creating the problem. Writing for the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2023, engineer Brenner said towns once had their own Main Street, but the rapid development merged urban areas, and every new road required a name.

Porters Lake is not alone. Culver, Oregon, has similarly plain names: This Way Lane and That Way Lane. Brenner highlighted that without a common convention, many subdivision streets honour the developer's children. Brenner himself lives on Cheryl Drive, though he says he is not sure who Cheryl is.

"There was a street in the suburbs near where I grew up which is named after my sister and me. My brother didn't make the cut because he had not been born yet. Currently, I live on Cheryl Drive. I am not sure who “Cheryl” is," he said.

With Trump signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario, the Canadian town planners may hopefully start taking naming conventions seriously and come up with creative alternatives.