JEDDAH, 30 September 2007 — In an effort to organize the city’s address system, the Jeddah Municipality announced yesterday a comprehensive plan to restructure the city’s street-naming system into a more organized numerical system that would work with the Kingdom’s new postal system.
Husain Al-Hijari, head of the Naming and Numbering Department for the municipality, said that the system would ease the process of identifying blocks and addresses.
Jeddah’s streets currently have names, districts are numbered and buildings have numbers (though not always displayed). The current system is confusing, and since most people get mail delivered at office addresses or at post offices, there has historically been little need for a clearly defined address system.
But now the Kingdom’s entire postal delivery system is being modernized. Mailboxes are popping up through Jeddah even while many people would be hard pressed to be able to recite their actual postal address.
Under the new system, main thoroughfares (routes that run across the entire city) are called “roads” and smaller routes will be “streets”. Some major streets have been renamed. For example, Prince Muhammad ibn Abdul Aziz Street (more commonly known as Tahliah Street) is now Prince Muhammad ibn Abdul Aziz Road. The same change was made to all major routes, such as Prince Majed Road, Sari Road and Palestine Road.
“According to the plan, we have changed 16 ‘streets’ around the city into ‘roads’,” he said.
Those new roads are also being numbered and tagged with different signs. Each sign, which is decorated in traditional Hijazi (western Saudi Arabian) motifs, will have a number that will indicate which section of a particular stretch of road is located in what part of the city. Each road will get its own distinct logo that will also be on the sign to help drivers know the street and the part of the city they are in. Numbers with two digits will grace roads running parallel the coastline (roughly north-south) while numbers with single digits will be used on roads running perpendicular to the coastline (east-west).
“This would make it easy for everyone to locate the geographical path that they are driving on,” he said.
The city will be divided into four quarters that will meet at the Al-Bai’ah roundabout in downtown Jeddah. Each quarter will be divided into four sub-sections.
Residences will get a more formal numbering system that will ascend out from the city center. This will make it easier for residents — especially in apartment buildings — to know their residential mailing address once the new Saudi postal system goes into full effect and people gradually shift away from post boxes and work addresses to receiving their mail directly to their homes.
Al-Hijari assured that after implying the new address system, people would find it much easier to identify their path and reach to their destination through the clear and organized signs and structure numbers.
He said that the numerical address system started more than 29 years ago, but it stopped because people did not understand the system.
“There should have been a comprehensive awareness campaign to teach people how to use the system instead of identifying locations through landmarks or structures,” he said.
Now that the project has started again, there would be more education in schools and to the public in how to use signs and numbers to identify locations around the city, he said.
Streets (rather than roads) will also be renamed and more clearly delineated. Al-Hijari added that certain streets and alleys (especially in the city’s historic center) would also get signs explaining their historical significances.
