Address and street name grids in the Philippines

Dan Jacobson1

Abstract

Common in the Americas but rare elsewhere, house numbering grids are indeed present in the Philippines, as an analysis of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data shows.

In places like Bonifacio Global City, house number grids, and even house numbers themselves, are simply absent. Instead we find non-overlapping street vs. avenue number grids. Pasay on the other hand has odd numbered streets perpendicular to even ones.

However in almost every example the author (me) just cannot resist pounding on and on about how the city fathers and mothers could have made a smarter grid (but now of course it's too late.)

Keywords: address grids, address planning, Philippines, OpenStreetMap, Overpass Turbo

  1. Introduction

    Examining house numbers in Metro Manila, we find they often get quite high, and often parallel roads' house numbers advance in lockstep with each other.

    (Alas we still haven't found any relation between street names and house numbers. E. g., the 600 block of some B Street does not begin at its corner of some 6th Avenue. Nor does the 200 block of 6th Avenue start at its corner with B Street.)

  2. House addressing grids

    1. Malate, Manila

      Parallel addressing seen in Malate, Manila
      Parallel house addressing seen in Malate, Manila.

      Before we talk about grids we will talk about bands. (In the above image we only analyze the house numbers lying on north-south streets, leaving the east-west streets for some other day.) Using OpenStreetMap addr:housenumber tag values, we constructed these "hundred block" band contours.

      So we see (this part of) Manila indeed does have parallel house numbering on parallel streets. The only slight outlier is 1928 Jorge Bocobo Street, forcing our 1900 contour line to lurch north.

      (I suppose I should just ring their doorbell and ask them for an explanation. Maybe I shouldn't. What if I end up in a cooking pot for dinner? But in case the door opens and out steps a GIS professional, I could just digress and mention some:

      Methodology

      It took a whole month, for me at least, to figure out how draw address contours, when given just addr:housenumber nodes (address points), and ways (building outlines (which we then proceeded to use the ST_Centroid() of.))

      You see one normally draws contours upon e.g., Digital Elevation Models, etc. -- rasters. Here all we started with was a handful of address nodes -- points. We got the contours by "pretending" the addresses were "elevations". Nice use of the Z axis I would say.

      But then we only spent just a minute or two to write a filter for this particular dataset (Malate addr:housenumbers).

      Q: How did you filter in only the north-south streets?

      A: Yes, in some parts of the country one could just check addr:street for an "Street" vs. "Avenue" suffix (yup, in the same tag, right along with the proper name, hmmm) but here in Malate it's a mixed bag. Anyways we noticed that the range we were looking for of addr:housenumbers here is 1500 to 3000. That nicely excludes the east-west house numbers in this particular study area.

      Q: 3000? Why not just specify "> 1500"?

      A: Because you'd never imagine what funny stuff those OpenStreetMap mappers put into that addr:housenumber field. To make things simple our first filter was "simple numerical addresses only, please" (regular expression /^\d+$/). Yes, that threw away "2124-2126", "1919-A", etc. which we still could have made some use of if we were desperate for data, but at least it also gets rid of "公寓位置2004" (apartment location 2004), even if we could have still plucked 2004 from it.

      Anyway the handful of addresses we started with was 238, and we whittled that down to 161 valid north-south ones. Sure, there would be 100 times more data to work with, clean[er] data too, if somebody on OSM had done an address import (assuming there actually is a government (E911?) database importable.)

      Yes it would be tantalizing to trace back north to see where the 100 block's (or 000 block's?) baseline is. But we'll leave that for another day. We'll address how high the numbers go on their southward march below. Yes we are glad that they cross municipal boundaries without bothersome resets to 0 (or 100), like other countries' towns' addresses do sometimes.

      Maybe one day if we stroll into a fire department there in Malate we will see hanging on the wall the master addressing plan finally revealed, like in Illinois, USA.

      Taiwan

      In contrast, in the Philippines' nearest neighbor to the north, Taiwan, every street starts with house number 1. Yes, parallel streets, but just like a horse race with different starting lines, even if each horse ran the same speed, any synchronization would be a coincidence.

      Furthermore, their left legs run at different rates than their right! (The house numbers on the two sides of a street often lose synchronization with each other.) Sad!

    2. Addressing along Dr. A. Santos Avenue, Parañaque

      Running this query we have enough points to indeed detect a (somewhat loose) pattern.

      Addresses along Dr. A. Santos Ave., Parañaque
      Addresses along Dr. A. Santos Ave., Parañaque.

      1. Observations

        1. Strict odd addresses on the north sides, even on the south sides of roads.

        2. Our eyes pop out of our head. It seems they are using about 100 numbers per U.S. mile (50 on either side of the road.) For comparison Chicago uses 800 per mile.

          Could this be what started out as rural numbering system, now enclosed in a city? Are the lot sizes super big?

        3. Yes, there are outliers, like 8006.

      2. Suspicions

        1. Wait, remember Malate? Perhaps this is the same grid, now in the 8000s so far south. But why do the numbers on A. Santos Ave. advance so slowly? Could it be that A. Santos Ave. is at such a glancing angle that the numbers don't advance much as one goes along it?

          Possible slight angle address grid along Dr. A. Santos Ave.
          Possible addressing contour 8300 crosses A. Santos Ave. at a glancing angle.

          But why don't they use the perpendicular component of their grid? Ah, perhaps A. Santos curves more that 45° from its initial orientation. But as the name stays the same, so must the numbering scheme.

          In the northern part of Parañaque we also find

          addr:housenumber 4497
          addr:street Colonel E.L. De Leon Street

          And nearby we see 5056, but also 8324!.

          Let's see, Chicago uses 800 numbers per mile. So 8000 would be 10 miles. Is Parañaque about 10 miles south of Malate? Yes!

          One finds plenty of documentation about Chicago's grid. How about Manila's. Is it documented anywhere, yet? No!

      3. Freeze the investigation

        Don't you think this is a great homework assignment:

        • Are the house numbers along A. Santos Ave. part of some larger Manila grid?

        • If not, then what are they related to?

        Let's stop right here and leave it to the next generation of house addressing forensic archaeologists, to tell us if the grid observed in Malate grid does indeed extend so far south to Parañaque.

      Programs and KMZ.

    3. Sampaloc, Manila

      Address grids seen in Sampaloc, Manila
      House address grids observed in Sampaloc, Manila.

      Here there is a quite rigid house address grid. For example, no matter what street we take, when it crosses España Boulevard we enter its 900 block. After we go past P. Florentino Street, houses addresses on either side of the street are in the 1000 block, etc. Indeed we can start building a table,

      900 España Boulevard
      1000 P. Florentino Street
      1100 Piy Margal Street

      1. Ordinances

        All I could find was

        1. An Ordinance Providing for the Numbering of Houses and Other Buildings in Quezon City

        which is a simpler system, but for the city neighboring to the east.

      2. Baselines

        Extrapolating, the "0" line for one of the two axes would appear to lie in the Pasig River. The other axis we'll leave as an exercise.

      3. Methods

        1. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=addr reveals we want addr:housenumber. We use that tag's data over and over in this article.

        2. On Overpass Turbo we query for it.

          In the previous Malate "bands" example we used addr:housenumber directly, after only minimal filtering. In the current Sampaloc example, we merely consult those addr:housenumbers to get a firm idea of the hundred value of each street is, and then lay down a rectangular grid via ground control points (GCPs) which we establish at no less than three street intersections.

        3. See our source code and KMZ for all the steps.

    4. University of the Philippines Diliman

      Buildings at UP Diliman do not have numerical addresses. So, just as an exercise, let's give them a address grid!

      Theoretical UP Diliman address grid
      A theoretical address grid for UP Diliman, with origin at (easting, northing) = (2500,7500), so as to fully occupy four digits. Example address: Villamor Hall: 2600 Osmeña Avenue.
      Single folded axis
      Actually there are no eastings nor northings in fact. Just one single axis with a 90° fold in it, with value 5000 .

      1. Construction

        East-west grid contours

        We observe long straight parallel roads, and use them to define the east-west horizontal lines of our grid:

        Avenue Utah Our
        M. Roxas Avenue 100 S. 7400
        University Avenue 0 7500
        Osmeña Avenue 100 N. 7600

        As one might suspect, we are indeed reserving 5000 to 9999 for our horizontal grid lines (and 0 to 4999 for vertical.) With 7500 strategically running down the middle.

        In Utah, not only would Osmeña Avenue have value 100 North, it wouldn't even be called Osmeña Avenue, but instead simply "100 North", no "Avenue" even. (0 Avenue would be called "Main Avenue" or "Center Avenue" though.)

        In our ("single axis") system Osmeña Avenue would be called "Lane 7600". But to help "sell" our system, we'll keep the name "Osmeña Avenue", only insisting that it's grid value is 7600.

        North-south grid contours

        Alas, for the north-south vertical lines we don't find very consistently spaced roads to fit a grid to. Therefore we will just plunk 2500 down at the Oblation Statue.

        Yes, coordinate pair (2500,7500), the center of our grid, no coincidence, located right there at the statue.

        And we'll use the same 125 meters per 100 house numbers distance we just obtained between University Avenue and Osmeña Avenue, for our vertical contour lines also.

        Let's say city blocks were all 130 × 110 meters. Well we would declare our contours to also have such differential spacing. But here at Diliman we only find the aforementioned three east-west Avenues as a good anchor for a grid. For north-south Streets there is no strong pattern to bind to. So we'll just use the same meters per grid line spacing as we did for the east-west Avenues.

        (In fact that also lets us justify our "single axis" abstraction. Something that would be quite hard to justify if spacing changed abruptly from 130 to 110 as we went around the bend!)

      2. Software implementation

        In our Makefile the reader can see we have filled in some ground control points (GCPs) etc. parameters needed for us to be able to use OGR/GDAL to produce our grid, and Viking to display it. And as in all the other Makefiles in our article here that you are reading, we do it all on a GNU/Linux system, command line only, no (Q)GIS involved.

      3. Clipping boundary

        Most, but not all, of the campus' streets align with our grid, so in our Makefile we clip accordingly.

      4. Final thoughts

        Yes, if we were a purist, Osmeña Avenue would become "74th Avenue", or even just "Lane 7400".

        So how does what we came up with match that Quezon City ordinance above?.....

  3. Street name grids

    1. Pasay street name grid

      Street name grids seen in Pasay
      Street name grids observed in Pasay.

      1. Observations

        1. Odd numbered streets (running NW/SE) intersecting even numbered streets (running NE/SW), like some cities in Cuba.

        2. We modeled it with an algorithm. Alas, if the block sizes were constant the streets would match our grid lines.

        3. In this area there is no coordination between street names and house numbers. No "700 block starts when you cross 7th St."

      2. Recommendations

        Well, let's say we see how we might fill their lives with sunshine via a custom-fit addressing system! I am sure the names of the streets have more sentimental value than the individual house numbers, so for this exercise we'll keep the former and only change the latter.

        OK, I got it! Just add "00" to all the red numbers on the map above. Now we've got our address grid.

        Ready? Let's take a stroll up 9th Street, keeping our eyeballs glued to its left side. We start at 10th Street, and pass addresses 1000, 1010, 1020, 1030, 1040, 1050, 1060, 1070, 1080, 1090, 1200, 1220, and end at 12th Street.

        Sorry about 1100 to 1190, but that's the price one must pay to keep the relationship between house numbers and street names. Unless perhaps the reader has some better way?

    2. Caloocan street name grid

      Street name grids seen in Caloocan
      Street name grid observed in Grace Park, Caloocan.
      Street name grids seen in Caloocan, my revision
      My revision.

      1. Observations

        1. Avenues run east-west, and (most) Streets (not all numbers used) north-south.

        2. No coordination exists between street names and house numbers. No "700 block starts when you cross 7th St."

      2. Recommendations

        Unhappy with just looking at maps, we decided to "fix their wagon". In our revision we added 70 to all the north-south Streets names, and would number the houses according to our single axis system. So City Hall would be something like 7850 8½th Ave. Lane 850. I am sure they will be overjoyed when one day they wake up and find … whereas I will already have fled.

      Source code, KMZ.

    3. Bonifacio Global City (BGC)

      Road number grids seen in Bonifacio Global City
      Road number grids observed in Bonifacio Global City (BGC), Taguig.

      A "virtual 18th Boulevard" shall be our folded single axis. Source code, KMZ. (Indeed there are several possible "virtual main boulevards". We could have picked any, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, between the highest numbered Avenue and the lowest numbered Street.)

      1. Observations

        1. We see Avenues running north-south and Street running east-west. The center of the grid is approximately the corner of 10th Avenue and 30th Street. In other words the city appears to have approximately reserved the numbers 1 to 20 for Avenues, and 21 to 40 for Streets.

        2. We admit the Ave. vs. St. name difference helps the public with orientation, vs. both being called just Lanes in a pure "single folded axis" abstraction.

        3. Looking closely at our map, the reader will notice that beyond (north of) 35th Street, all the Streets are numbered one less than they should have been. E.g., 36th Street should have been called 37th Street. Sad. (Perhaps they wanted all the "big Streets" to be even numbers, even though their system still permits odd numbers for east-west Streets.) This even forces us, when making our grid overlay, to have the curious "35½" contour line, to deal with the "transition zone".

          Also what should have been called 1st Avenue is called 2nd Avenue. Perhaps to avoid dealing with a "0th Avenue" where what is currently named 1st Avenue lies.

          They were doing very good at a well-fitting grid until this accident, or was it a careless choice, occurred.

          Plan ahead

          That teaches them a lesson for getting too close to the edge. Always plan ahead. I always use 1 to 50, not 1 to 20, with the meridian along 25, not 10. Hey Mom, plenty of room to grow! Still not enough room? Well then use 1 to 500, with meridian along 250. (Yes, 501 to 999 for the other axis. Center on 750.)

          By the way, is it 0 to 499, or 1 to 500? I always forget. The point is to have enough room to grow so you are guaranteed never to get even near the two edges, so you don't need to remember.

          Don't do like they did in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Started out smart at the corner of 100th Street and 100th Avenue, but still overgrew it and had to haul in a quadrant system to ameliorate it. Got to deal with growth below zero one way or another.

        4. McKinley Parkway conveniently continues where what might have been called (unlucky?) 13th Street is.

        5. We see they use the early part of the alphabet for interstitial Streets, and the latter part for interstitial Avenues, both of which are called Lanes. Hence Lane C is where "9⅔rd Avenue" would have been. But the ordering jumps gaps:

          Lane (Avenue)
          A 5⅔
          B 6⅓
          C 9⅔
          D 10⅓

        6. 28th Street bends south; 30th Street bends north.

        7. Roads are smartly allowed discontinuous segments with the same name. E.g., Lane C, 31st Street, 42th Avenue. After a break all reappear a few blocks later along their same alignment.

        8. (If one wants to get picky, one could complain that the letter comes after the word Lane, but the number comes before the words Street and Avenue. (But they are surely just trying to conform to majority English usage.))

        9. Any roads at an angle to the grid are thankfully called Drives: 21st Drive. I will have to check if there is indeed an ordinance...

          But "Drive" is not used for simple curved road continuation: 5th Avenue.

        10. To the northeast there is an area with thirty unrelated numbered avenues.

        11. "Corner" addresses

          Well how do the building addresses coordinate with the Street and Avenue numbers? We'll it turns out all their addresses are like

          BGC Arts Center
          26th Street corner 9th Avenue
          Bonifacio Global City
          Taguig City, Philippines 1634

          The OpenStreetMap addr: address tags are simply

          addr:street 26th Street
          addr:street:corner 9th Avenue

          and that's it. In other words buildings simply do not have address numbers.

        12. Meters per house number

          All along in our stories so far we barely ever mention how many meters per house number we were talking about. That's because it doesn't matter. 2 to 5 meters per house number are common.

          Examining the map of BGC we note:

          • A big Avenue or Street exactly every 200 meters.

          • The big Avenues have odd numbers; the big Streets have even numbers.

          • Let's add "00" to 26th Street and 28th Street. In North America that would be how we arrive at 200 house numbers between those two streets.

          • So we would have 200 house numbers per 200 meters, 100 on each side of a road. I.e., 100 ÷ 200 = one house number per two meters. 2 is between 2 and 5 and therefore reasonable. We'll use that below.

      2. Recommendations

        1. Call grid center 25/75, not 10/30

          Too late now, but (afterthought) if I was in charge I would have planned ahead and labeled that same center point as the corner of 25th Avenue and 75th Street, and grow in all four directions from there. For the same two digits, one maximizes the future growth possibilities in all four directions. (But why stop there? That's where four digit lanes come in.)

        2. Just add "00"

          When the day comes to finally number buildings in BGC (and in fact many other parts of the Philippines) the authorities can simply use our road number grid map above, adding "00" to all the numbers (number × 100). Thus the above Art Center address would become "851 26th Street". (Why 851 and not 850? Well we have to of course choose one side of the road to be even vs. odd. And how we did in fact choose is based on of our single axis theory, where the inner sides of the "fold" are even, and outer odd. Below we will see that the outer sides are the south and east sides of streets.)

        3. Benefits of upgrading away from a "corner" addressing system

          Let's think about all the benefits to "upgrading" such "corner" addressing system addresses, using instead the more North American hundred-numbers-per-block system. The single phrase "26th Street corner 9th Avenue" actually corresponds to four different sides of 26th Street at that intersection,

          Side 26th Street
          NW 850 - 898
          SW 851 - 899
          NE 900 - 948
          SE 901 - 949

          each containing 25 addresses for a total of 100 addresses. In other words the North American system allows 100 times more precision, or at least capacity. No need for a map to explain this as this is just standard USA addressing.

          We also cross our fingers and trust that "26th Street corner 9th Avenue" does not also mean the same thing as "9th Avenue corner 26th Street". But just in case it does, well then we are talking about not 100, but 200 times more precision.

          And let's say all there is at that corner are four giant properties. Well, "26th Street corner 9th Avenue" could refer to any one of them. Bad for ambulance dispatch. Whereas,

          Side 26th Street
          NW 876
          SW 875
          NE 926
          SE 925

          would nail down which one we are talking about. (Yes, 900 looks better than 926 on a corporate letterhead, so that is probably the number one would encounter.)

        4. Number addresses always better than corner addresses?
          Q: So the Philippines should hurry up and adopt house numbers, lock stock and barrel. Perhaps consulting their nearby neighbor, Taiwan, on how to do it?

          A: No way! Again, Taiwan absolutely blew it. They can barely keep both sides of the street coordinated. We're talking about getting off the bus at house number 301 thinking 302 might be across the street, but it's not 302 or 304, but 666! Should have stayed on the bus, until it reached the end and started coming back!

          And don't even dream of "parallel streets, parallel numbers". If you want the lockstep numbering needed to make the exercise worthwhile, you had better hire North Americans. But not New Yorkers or San Franciscans. You would think crossing 32nd St. would mean we entered the 3200 block. But unfortunately that's not how it is in those two cities.

          So now you know why in e.g., Taiwan, besides saying "1313 Nerdsome Lane" one must also mention what corner it is near, if you want the person in the street to find it.

          Q: But can't AI find it for us?

          Yes, as a matter of fact we can start recycling all those old fashioned address plates. But just in case it sometimes can't, then read on.

    4. More street name sequences observed at

      1. North of Gilmore Station

      2. 14.627856/121.039714

      3. 14.616032/121.057653

      Yes, plenty more. Just the tip of the iceberg here.

  4. Etc.

    1. Twenty+ streets named "Jade" in Quezon City

      Using this query, and pushing "Run", will show you the streets.

  5. Interviews

    1. Accu Map 2025/02/12 told me:

      There is no central, country-wide planning for house numbers. Also no public database of house numbers. Even within cities or municipalities: except in the city of Manila, that was already built by then. The growth in the past 50 years has been mostly through private communities called Villages or Subdivisions, most of the time gated, the rest being high-rises or squatter areas.

      In these private communities, the numbering follows whatever rules the developer chooses, generally blocks and lots, half of the time without street names.

      In other, public areas:

      1. Every time there is a new municipal election and new Barangay (the lowest elected administrative area) captains, they may choose to re-number houses sequentially, either per-Street or for the whole Barangay.

      2. Owners of houses in public areas may not like the new number, or get tired of having the number change; so for a small "fee", they will keep an old number. So there are layers of numberings that are present. Also, with Chinese and Catholic communities, they may skip both "4" and "13".

      3. To note: Street names are not unique in a City: there are over 20 "Jade Street"s in Quezon City; this breaks most search functions, including Google Maps, Here, Bing Maps and Apple. The exception is OpenStreetMap which does it correctly (just lacking a few entries).

      4. There is no provision for numbering when there is a currently empty lot. So numbering will skip it, never mind what happens when the lot gets built eventually…

      In summary, there are pockets of logic, but mostly numbers have to be collected one by one.

  6. Conclusions

    1. Philippines

      We only looked at Metro Manila, but we hope that before doing any E911 addressing, well thought out addressing is first put in place.

    2. OpenStreetMap

      Wouldn't it be great if address grids were part of OSM, just like they are on paper city maps.

You are looking at a draft submission to the OpenStreetMap 2025 State of the Map conference.

1https://www.jidanni.org/

Last modified: 2025-04-26 12:11:32 UTC