Thoughts on Street Numbering

So the weekdays are more or less like the weekends. Today I did lots of data entry, after concluding that canvassing on a Tuesday morning wasn't going to be that effective.

While canvassing, it has occurred to me to wonder how street numbers are chosen. Where I live, we have a whole bunch of houses on the same driveway, and because they're on the same side of the street, they increase by 2. But lots of places I've canvassed, they increase by 4, 6, or 10. Now, I can see why one might want to leave some room in there, in case somebody decides to subdivide their lot, but there's simply no way you're going to fit 5 houses onto one of these tract homes. Some of it could be an attempt to have numbers increase by roughly 100 each block, but that hasn't been totally consistent either. And, once you've decided to increase by an amount greater than 2, (and especially 10) what number do you choose to start on? I've seen streets where it's 6 on the even side and 9 on the odd side, for example. Really, who thought of that?

Another phenomenon I've seen is that lots of streets in the same area have similar numbers. I've seen parallel culs-de-sac where they all have the same hundreds and thousands digits. Actually, all the streets in a neighborhood often seem to.

Basically, I'd like to sit in on whatever meeting goes on where they build a new development and decide what the street numbers are going to be. I'm sure it would get boring after a while, but I'd still be curious to see what the decision making process is like.