May 2, 2026
Road rage, but make it cartography
San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names
SF’s street-name mess sparks eye-rolls, world comparisons, and total map panic
TLDR: San Francisco has a long-running problem with streets whose names are almost identical, making everyday directions weirdly confusing. Commenters turned it into a global roast, with people from London, Sweden, the Bay Area, and Atlanta all arguing their city’s naming chaos is even worse.
San Francisco’s latest street-name roundup reads like a prank pulled by city planners with a grudge. The article lays out a greatest-hits list of urban confusion: Divisadero vs. Division, Francis vs. Francisco, Folsom vs. Fulton, and the deeply cursed trio of Lincoln Blvd., Lincoln Ct., and Lincoln Way, which are scattered around the city like a scavenger hunt. Even locals apparently get tripped up by Geary Street magically becoming Geary Boulevard midway through town. Add in duplicate Mason streets and the weird "State Dr./States St." situation, and commenters basically responded with a collective: oh, you think that’s bad?
That’s where the real fun starts. One commenter practically laughed San Francisco off the stage: "For goodness sake no-one tell the author about London", where endless High Streets and Church Streets make this look tame. Another chimed in from Sweden to say, in effect, amateurs, describing a landscape packed with hundreds of places named the local version of “New Farm.” The Bay Area piled on too: Mountain View residents pointed out that Mountain View Ave sits next to Miramonte Ave, which basically means the same thing in Spanish. And then Atlanta entered the chat, because of course someone had to invoke the legendary Peachtree street chaos. The vibe? Half civic therapy session, half international name-confusion Olympics, with locals joking that surviving these addresses is basically a personality test.
Key Points
- •The article attributes San Francisco’s confusing street names to the city’s complex history and the many linguistic, cultural, political, and personal sources of its place names.
- •It states that duplicate or very similar street names have been a feature of San Francisco for more than a century.
- •Examples of confusing pairs or groups include Divisadero/Division, Francis/Francisco, Folsom/Fulton, and State/States.
- •Geary Street and Geary Boulevard are described as two named sections of the same continuous road, which still causes confusion.
- •Several unrelated roads share common names, including Lincoln-, Mason-, and Presidio-related streets in different parts of the city.