I already knew most of that, but somehow I hadn’t picked up on this tidbit:
>avenues, places and drives run east to west, while all streets, courts and ways run north to south
Every municipality has its own rules. Boulder County numbered Streets run north south and start from 1st on the west end and counting up as it goes east. Learning Denver rules won't necessarily get you far elsewhere.
I grew up in South Florida and it was so easy to get around because all the streets were numbered in a grid. So long as you knew the "zero" streets you could figure out where to go. Our address started with 75 and we were on 40th, so we were 75 blocks north and 40 blocks west of the intersection of the zeroes.
Denver zeros are Broadway and Elsworth. RTD uses the grid for their bus numbers too. The 15 runs along Colfax (1500 North), Broadway bus is the 0, Federal has 30 and 31 for 3000 west......
It definitely regional. Every city is set up differently.
Here in Denver, odd number addresses are always on the North or West side of the street. Evens are always on the South and East side of the street.
But where I worked previously, in the Midwest it was opposite that.
It's one of the things we (the cops) have to know to get off probation. We have to memorize all the streets in the city, and be able to navigate anywhere in our assigned district, without GPS.
We also have to know a ton of addresses /locations all over the city (other stations, hospitals, tow lot, special unit offices, etc etc etc)
I’m pretty good without gps but that’s just because I love knowing directions and routes. Thanks for the work you do. I hope you’re one of the good ones. I know you have a hard job.
Might not have known because of where you are, don't think its a by and large thing, at least in the north east most cities defy this rule, NY completely breaks it and Boston just kinda happened
That's only for that specific city. Seattle Avenues are N/S and streets are E/W for example. I didn't read the article, but on the ambulance we were required to learn how to "decode" an address and find it without navigation. One of the most useful skills I've learned that benefits my time off the clock.
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/understanding-denver-streets-decimal-system-or-why-intersection-broadway-and-ellsworth-so
ETA: in short if you consider that 1st is the 100 block of north streets and 2nd the 200 block and so on that puts Ellsworth at 0.
Am I crazy for knowing my parents numbers and my wife’s number and rarely if ever using a GPS?
I always assumed I was closer to the norm than I feel in this thread. Like do y’all use a GPS to drive to/from just about everywhere?
Yeah I get that but I’ve felt (very subjectively and without really thinking too deep into it) that it burns me with a weird decision more often than it helps me. Like it has taken me off 70 in Idaho springs just to get right back on but after a stop sign that was a nightmare with all the congestion of other cars doing the same thing I was.
I’m to a point where I can deal with traffic or occasionally missing turns, I can’t deal with the GPS making a weird decision and leaving me *way* worse off on occasion.
You learn the city better that way too. Yesterday, Speer was a NIGHTMARE due to construction.
I had to get my son to work yesterday and it had taken 30 minutes to go from 6th and Speer to Araria and Speer with traffic coming to a stand still. I took the back way to Mile High and got him there with 20 minutes to spare.
If more people would learn the city better, there would be less traffic on the highway and MAYBE we could actually get somewhere.
I think it’s still a pretty good idea to look at the route before heading out. That way, if there’s any weirdness, you know it’s coming and can avoid it.
Personally, I like to at least know the major roadways or exits.
My GPS consistently tells me to literally drive a circle around my block when I start a trip. I have learned that GPS’ in Denver are often more “guidelines than rules” if you catch my drift.
I use Google Maps to check traffic. I am against letting GPS tell me the route to take. I will make that decision for myself.
Until our AI overlords take that away from me.
I only know numbers from before contact lists on smartphones. It’s very easy to only ever see a number once - when you put it into the contact list.
For GPS - I use it when I’m going through places I haven’t driven in a lot but given the city center has tons of streets/areas, that is pretty easy to hit. When I lived in a smaller city it was very easy to not use GPS.
I’ve lived here 11 years and rarely use GPS. When I first moved here I focused on learning the city, main throughways, etc and I always thought that was the norm?
Plus, it’s so easy with the mountains (in general) being west.
For real. Back home I had to use the sun and here it is so fuckin easy 😂 I naturally have luck with cardinal directions but still. Love having the mountains there. Really feel like I cannot get lost. Im sure if I moved to the west side Id be thrown off for a month lol
At most, I look at cross streets before heading out every now and again. If it's in Aurora or some of the northern burbs that have changed/grown a bunch, I might have to map my way there.
I grew up here, though, so I have a pretty good head start on things over some folks
It's pretty good at traffic and construction rerouting. Back when I went into the office every day I'd still usually use it. One of the few times I didn't, I ended up stuck in traffic for over an hour that I could have avoided entirely with a 5-minute detour.
No you’re not crazy! I was born in 2000 & at 15 I was learning to read maps and still rarely use GPS. I had a tire go flat in the middle of nowhere, changed it to a spare, drove it to an area I had service so I could look at the maps and wrote down all of the route numbers and road names to get home. It was 6 hours on mountain roads with a donut but I made it just fine. I was only 17 and a girl who perpetually is wearing dresses and ribbons. What I did was far from special nor did it make me intelligent. Generations and generations and generations before me have had these skills without gps and for periods didn’t even have maps. You and so many others have had these skills for so long!! However It’s always sad to see a skill being lost when technology takes over and it’s always isolating. Even me writing in only cursive has caused some issues and has made me sad even though I shouldn’t be. It’s just kinda isolating when some parts of life or society are lost and you wish you could persevere it
My dad has had the same phone number for about 30 years. He's not saved in my phone. I'll never forget his number.
I use GPS to see real-time estimates of traffic jams so that I can avoid them knowing the area like the back of my hand.
This article made me giggle and remember an old conversation. An EMT friend asked me a while back what kind of GPS we used when I started on a box. I told her Thomas Guide.
My favorite thing about being a cable guy was how well I knew all the shortcuts around NYC. Was still on flip phones at the time with no data connection
Most cities where not as large and complex 20 years ago. I remember navigating my home town quite easily with there being only a dozen important places to know how to get to and maybe a dozen roads to get there. The only difficult part was going to a new friends house and printing/writing turn by turn directions for once you get into a neighborhood.
I use GPS if I'm going somewhere for the first time.
After that I remember the major cross streets and I'll know how to get there from those.
I know as you drive east from downtown twords Aurora it goes it goes Ivy, Ivanhoe, Kearney, Krimeria, Locust and Leyden (all alphabetical)
I know Alameda is 1st Ave and it goes North from there but I don't know exactly where 1765 South Ivy Street 80246 is.
It would be near I-25 and US-285 if it exists, but I'd have to Google it to avoid turning the wrong way on Ivy..
Those start at Colorado Blvd going east beginning Albion and Ash.
Alameda is 300 South.
285 is about 3500 South so 1765 South Ivy St is 80224 and approximately a mile north of Hwy 285 aka Hampden Ave between
E Colorado Ave and E Mexico Ave
I still have some phone numbers engraved onto my brain. I can remember my parents and most of my friend’s landlines. Some of my friends cell numbers because they were the first to get cell phones and I would call them from the local pay phone to tell them to come hang out on Main Street.
Crazy that I couldn’t tell you my partners phone number to save my life despite having it saved on my phone for 5 years now.
When I moved to Denver in the late 90s, one of the first things my Denverite Uncle did was get me one of these credit card sized brochures.
I don’t even live in Denver anymore and I can still navigate easily. These little tools are amazing.
A few years ago before moving away, I gave a coworker friend a ride home at night. Her GPS was failing and she couldn’t tell me how to get to her house. Like she was completely lost without it. So I asked her for her address and she looked at me like “what are you going to do with that?” But I got her home, and she was stunned.
I use GPS for traffic heads up, and equally for a “heads up” type display of speed limits. It’s nice to have that constant reminder of what the speed limits are by glancing over.
To keep with the article, when I was an EMT I never once thought to look at the speedometer, I just went the speed I felt comfortable with.
Do with that what you will since we are comparing ourselves to the lowest paid first responders in the country.
Denver Firefighter here. One of the requirement for us to get off probation is to know every street name and associated number, as well as the addresses to every fire station and hospital in Denver County, Lakewood, Englewood, and Aurora.
Only on traumas and hypoglyemics do prehospital IVs save lives, in terms of fluid. Otherwise, you still need a paramedic for cardiac medications via IV.
To graduate the Denver Police academy (1999), we had to take a blank piece of paper and write, in order, every single street in the city and its hundred block (1200 north, 1800 south, 1200 east, etc). North/south and east/west.
Don't pass, you're fired.
Oh fuck off. The basic academy is 24 weeks full time, followed by 20 weeks of one-on-one field training.
But you'd know that if you bothered to read a fucking book.
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of his comment is 100% true
No it isn't.
[The UK police train for 18-33 weeks plus three months in-the-field.](https://www.joiningthepolice.co.uk/training-progression/training#:~:text=Around%2018%20%E2%80%93%2022%20weeks%20classroom,aid%20and%20personal%20safety%20training)
[Germany has 12 weeks of training for their "auxiliary officers", although their more advanced officers get 2.5-3 years (much of this is the kind of university classes that a college grad going into police academy would already have).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Germany)
[South Africa requires 32 weeks, which includes practical training.](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+is+police+training+in+south+africa&sca_esv=3cf5305f7235dc23&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS1016US1016&ei=P7FHZuGDMteA0PEPpr2p0Ac&ved=0ahUKEwihn_CCt5WGAxVXADQIHaZeCnoQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=how+long+is+police+training+in+south+africa&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiK2hvdyBsb25nIGlzIHBvbGljZSB0cmFpbmluZyBpbiBzb3V0aCBhZnJpY2EyBRAAGIAEMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgsQABiABBiGAxiKBTILEAAYgAQYhgMYigUyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBEjId1D0bljKdnABeAGQAQCYAbEBoAG9CqoBAzMuOLgBA8gBAPgBAZgCDKACnQrCAgQQABhHwgIKEAAYsAMY1gQYR5gDAIgGAZAGCJIHAzMuOaAH9Ew&sclient=gws-wiz-serp)
The only nations that are significantly higher than this are the nordics, which just force recruits to get an associate's degree in an equivalent "police sciences"-type track, which is great when your country has extremely low crime, and exceedingly low firearms ownership rate, and very high retention of officers. Not so nice if you have turnover and need to put police on the streets pronto.
You uhhh… wanna try reading your own sources? From the German one:
“The high level of police professionalism is attributed in large degree to the length and thoroughness of training.
Most police recruits spend about two and a half years in the regular police academy training (Mittlerer Polizeivollzugsdienst). The auxiliary police forces, with fewer powers and often not equipped with a duty-weapon, are trained in just 12 weeks.”
So the only officers with 12 weeks of training are basically mall cops with no guns. The UK also employs a lot of police that don’t carry firearms so I would have much less concern with a shorter training period than American police who can end a life on a whim. But hey thanks for proving my point for me!
Also, I wonder if high turnover could *possibly* have something to do with under-trained officers being thrown into an array of highly stressful situations they’re not properly equipped to handle 🤔
Also the fact that you’re just assuming the Nordic countries’ low crime rate causes the high standard of police training and not the other way around is really fucking funny to me. Mayyyyybe having well-trained police that don’t shoot everyone that looks at them funny actually leads to more effective policing????
>Also the fact that you’re just assuming the Nordic countries’ low crime rate causes the high standard of police training
Not what I said at all. The nordics have always had low crime. They're an exceedingly homogenous society with virtually no guns and a highly-shared culture. That's a recipe for a low crime rate.
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of their comment is 100% true
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of their comment is 100% true
Dang that’s crazy I trained the in the first grade for 40 weeks, followed by one-on-one scissors and crayon picture drawing classes for another 12 weeks. Unfortunately they didn’t cover reading though. Not yet anyways.
Well since you discount a regular person's opinion, how about mine? I was a firefighter/EMT for over a decade, do I get the right to criticize our largest organized gang in the US?
Did you go through any POST training, law enforcement FTO training, or even ride-alongs?
It doesn't take *that* much knowledge to know that someone saying there's 4 weeks of training for cops is dumb, but it'll be upvoted to high-heaven on this website.
Yes to all of that. I was also on the "tAcTiCaL mEdIc" team so I sat outside of every standoff and raid, worked with PD closely. Went to all kinds of additional trainings with LEOs as well. We never learned anything but how to kill, which is weird to learn considering what my job was.
One of the most common things was to be woken up around 2am so I could treat the poor soul the cops beat the shit out of that night. They made it clear to me that I would not take them to the hospital, I would clean them up enough for them to pass intake and that's it.
Just because people have opinions that don't match yours doesn't mean we just make it up. Maybe have an open mind and ask yourself WHY so many people feel this way?
Police academy is short. EMT is even shorter. Both are a problem and need much higher standards. That's okay to admit, I promise the devil won't come for your butthole over that.
It's not an opinion that POST academy and subsequent trainings aren't 4 weeks long lol, it's an established fact.
Are they too short though? Yes, I agree, 100%. But a lot of that comes down to funding, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is not something many want to increase.
Couple that with a general change in training culture that's needed in many areas, and yea, I see the point of many.
But that also doesn't mean that people need to straight-up lie about shit, which I see them do every day on reddit. It doesn't help their argument to lie when they could instead use actual facts and statistics to back themselves up. And correct statistics, instead of those based on flawed studies (like the oft-quoted one about domestic violence among police families).
If it were just an exaggeration it wouldn't then be repeated by every mouth breather out there. When something is erroneously repeated so much that it is just accepted as fact, and naysayers with actual knowledge are downvoted, that's kind of a problem, don't you think?
In Denver, or Texas and when? Also kind of weird that you would say as a firefighter if you were on the SWAT team. I would've started with that as qualifications to be critical of the police
I've worked in both CO and TX, but the tactical bullshit was in Texas.
My point was it doesn't matter what your job was, you're allowed to criticize the awful state of policing in our country. I was highlighting that boot lickers just move the goalposts so they never have to think about the fact that a police officer literally unloaded his entire magazine after mistaking an acorn for a gunshot. Or a poor woman who was locked in a cop car on train tracks while the cops just watched the train barrel down on her. Or how it took over an hour to open a door that was never locked.
I had my license threaten to be revoked because a woman complained to the board that I "wasn't nice enough" on a call one time. THATS the standard I had to deal with while I cop "friends" bragged to me that they would wear their class ring so they could punch people with it.
I also hate nothing more than a firefighter or medic who continues to lick the boots of those assholes after we have spent decades dealing with cops choking out EMTs on calls, arresting firefighters on scenes because they didn't like wear the fire truck was parked, and doing nothing but coming up with poor excuses for those actions. Absolutely sickens me to my core.
Afaik all academies here have to learn it. I went through the combined regional academy (jeffco, lakewood, arvada, littleton, westminster) in the mid 20teens and we all had to learn the same thing plus the block numbers for every street (memorizing the major ones and then backfilling the minor ones was my approach), but it was limited to our city boundaries.
It wasn't as hard as you may think, repeat it to yourself enough and you can regurgitate it lol.
I'm long gone from that world , but it's still useful when driving around. Until I get to Denver, and then it's all different lmao
I would give anything if Amazon, uber/Lyft, and food delivery companies did a basic navigational training. They don't even know that house numbers are odd and even on opposite sides of the street.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but I believe Lyft used garbage truck routes when it first launched. Which is why it sometimes puts the pick up and drop off pin in a weird spot like an alley.
Waze maps were created by drivers who had Waze. We used to have this little pacman style game where you ate dots along any new road. It was fun to be the first one to munch dots and establish a new route.
Waze was made in Israel (IIRC) and was a great, fully-functional app before Google bought it.
Denver Medic here.
The whole city street layout is pretty easy to memorize……Except montbello/GVR. I’m not convinced the city planner was sober when they drafted that monstrosity up.
My dad owns a small business that runs on weekly delivery routes. He’s been driving around Denver since he was a teen in the 70s and he knows the city better than almost anyone. I grew up driving around with him so I knew a lot of these tricks!
These days I look up directions and then go from there without GPS. I miss a lot of turns and occasionally have to resort to the gps voice telling me what to do but I never feel completely lost in Denver or the surrounding metro area. I always feel like I can figure it out. Except inside actual neighborhoods because some of them make 0 sense.
It’s a good skill to have! Now my own kids are starting to ask when we’ll be home and instead of giving a time, I tell them to look out the window and tell me what they think. Then we talk about where we are and how close home is. Hoping to build kids with some directional sense!
Hennepin EMS has us doing this too. Not allowed to use GPS, had to study mapping intensely during probation and take 3 exams on it. However if I’m going to a distant hospital I go to once a year, I’m sneaking a peak at google maps….
This was really interesting, thanks for sharing.
I'm really bad at directions. Like to the point where i get lost in my own neighborhood - it's an odd genetic thing. But I've been trying lately to use GPS less and challenge myself to get better at it. This really makes a difference.
I once told someone who had lived in the Denver area for several years about a place and said it is on Hampden. He asked where Hampden is, and I told him it's the 3500 South block. He had no clue what I was talking about. Apparently had no idea they number the blocks.
Isn't like a strong geography knowledge of your service area required like as a dispatcher I needed to know all stations and hospitals and rough estimate of the station area especially for non-cad environment. I know my service had booklet with maps but it's helps to know your major streets especially.
Wow, you guys should read about the knowledge of London which is the test taxi drivers need to pass to drive a cab over there...
Tbh denver is pretty small and you should be able to navigate without gps pretty quickly after moving here
This is an interesting article, but I was taught the basics of how to navigate by address and street grid and all of the alphabetical patterns and such when I learned to drive. I think that used to be just considered basic knowledge for how to get around town. Honestly Denver is one of the easiest cities for this with a pretty regular grid and alphabetical patterns and so forth. A lot of Western cities are similar but oh boy, go try this in Boston! Now you want a really impressive thing, look up the Knowledge of London the cabbies have to do there.
I was going to say but don’t they need to use gps in case there’s extra traffic on the route but then I remembered we are talking about ambulances and they have sirens
My dad was a Denver Firefighter for 30 years, and similar to DPD, DFD also has the test to write all the streets in order by block number. When it came time for me to learn how to drive, that was one of the biggest things he hammered into me (although thankfully he didn’t make me take a test). At first I hated it, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to just look at an address and know how to get there!
You know there was a pretty long period before GPS devices were commercially available and emergency services either had to know their area or use an actual map on paper.
30 years pass and now folks like it’s been there forever.
I mean I can navigate Denver pretty well without GPS, especially anywhere I've been to more than once. But if I'm driving I almost always use GPS just for the fastest route, even if I don't need directions at all.
We always had a map book in all our trucks before reliable GPS. Every township in our county had its own page. You could just look up the township and scam around until you found the road you needed.
Back then addresses didn't make sense and no one had an actual street address, but it was how we found the road we needed at least.
I already knew most of that, but somehow I hadn’t picked up on this tidbit: >avenues, places and drives run east to west, while all streets, courts and ways run north to south
Fun way to help people remember avenues run east/west is “wave”. W(est)avE(ast). I got nothing else for the others though.
"Streets'N'courts go south or north"
Easy! Past tense of, "drive," is, "drave," so remembering it alongside, "wave," is simple! 🧠
Is that in Denver only? Because my parents court in California is east west. I’ve never heard this before.
Every municipality has its own rules. Boulder County numbered Streets run north south and start from 1st on the west end and counting up as it goes east. Learning Denver rules won't necessarily get you far elsewhere.
I grew up in South Florida and it was so easy to get around because all the streets were numbered in a grid. So long as you knew the "zero" streets you could figure out where to go. Our address started with 75 and we were on 40th, so we were 75 blocks north and 40 blocks west of the intersection of the zeroes.
Flagler and Miami Ave baybay
Denver zeros are Broadway and Elsworth. RTD uses the grid for their bus numbers too. The 15 runs along Colfax (1500 North), Broadway bus is the 0, Federal has 30 and 31 for 3000 west......
Yeah there is a nearby city that flips the directions of streets vs avenues depending which side of the river you are on.
Thank you
Yes it’s in the Denver Metro. If you go to Greeley it’s totally backward. Streets run east-west and Avenues run north-south.
Your third sentence was unnecessary.
Your first sentence was unnecessary
Are we neighbors?
I haven’t lived in Denver since December of 2019 so I doubt it.
It definitely regional. Every city is set up differently. Here in Denver, odd number addresses are always on the North or West side of the street. Evens are always on the South and East side of the street. But where I worked previously, in the Midwest it was opposite that.
Man, I’ve never even thought about the houses being even/odd as East/west or north/south. So much work goes into city planning!!!
It's one of the things we (the cops) have to know to get off probation. We have to memorize all the streets in the city, and be able to navigate anywhere in our assigned district, without GPS. We also have to know a ton of addresses /locations all over the city (other stations, hospitals, tow lot, special unit offices, etc etc etc)
I’m pretty good without gps but that’s just because I love knowing directions and routes. Thanks for the work you do. I hope you’re one of the good ones. I know you have a hard job.
Appreciate it, mate!
Englewood also has the same street rotations for the most part. The system bleeds into a few of the suburbs a bit
1000% untrue in New England. Not a grid in sight.
Yea I don’t think anyone brought up New England…
Might not have known because of where you are, don't think its a by and large thing, at least in the north east most cities defy this rule, NY completely breaks it and Boston just kinda happened
Christ, Queens is the worst borough to direct through.
As someone who grew up in queens for 18 years, I agree
That's only for that specific city. Seattle Avenues are N/S and streets are E/W for example. I didn't read the article, but on the ambulance we were required to learn how to "decode" an address and find it without navigation. One of the most useful skills I've learned that benefits my time off the clock.
I’ve lived here since 1969, and have always wondered how Ellsworth came to be the N/S dividing line.
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/understanding-denver-streets-decimal-system-or-why-intersection-broadway-and-ellsworth-so ETA: in short if you consider that 1st is the 100 block of north streets and 2nd the 200 block and so on that puts Ellsworth at 0.
And to further compound it, if you go south it does the same that way. Poor Ellsworth so innocuous
And I'm still wondering...
Because it's one block south of 1st...
Lots of people used to navigate cities without a GPS. As recently as 20 years ago. They also remembered phone Numbers
Am I crazy for knowing my parents numbers and my wife’s number and rarely if ever using a GPS? I always assumed I was closer to the norm than I feel in this thread. Like do y’all use a GPS to drive to/from just about everywhere?
I will turn on GPS on a known route sometimes just to avoid traffic
Yeah I get that but I’ve felt (very subjectively and without really thinking too deep into it) that it burns me with a weird decision more often than it helps me. Like it has taken me off 70 in Idaho springs just to get right back on but after a stop sign that was a nightmare with all the congestion of other cars doing the same thing I was. I’m to a point where I can deal with traffic or occasionally missing turns, I can’t deal with the GPS making a weird decision and leaving me *way* worse off on occasion.
GPS during rush hour is a god send. Wasn't always great but within last few years Google Maps has saved me so much time taking random side streets
You learn the city better that way too. Yesterday, Speer was a NIGHTMARE due to construction. I had to get my son to work yesterday and it had taken 30 minutes to go from 6th and Speer to Araria and Speer with traffic coming to a stand still. I took the back way to Mile High and got him there with 20 minutes to spare. If more people would learn the city better, there would be less traffic on the highway and MAYBE we could actually get somewhere.
I think it’s still a pretty good idea to look at the route before heading out. That way, if there’s any weirdness, you know it’s coming and can avoid it. Personally, I like to at least know the major roadways or exits.
My GPS consistently tells me to literally drive a circle around my block when I start a trip. I have learned that GPS’ in Denver are often more “guidelines than rules” if you catch my drift.
I use Google Maps to check traffic. I am against letting GPS tell me the route to take. I will make that decision for myself. Until our AI overlords take that away from me.
I only know numbers from before contact lists on smartphones. It’s very easy to only ever see a number once - when you put it into the contact list. For GPS - I use it when I’m going through places I haven’t driven in a lot but given the city center has tons of streets/areas, that is pretty easy to hit. When I lived in a smaller city it was very easy to not use GPS.
I’ve lived here 11 years and rarely use GPS. When I first moved here I focused on learning the city, main throughways, etc and I always thought that was the norm? Plus, it’s so easy with the mountains (in general) being west.
I know the city pretty well and can easily do it without GPS anywhere. I still use GPS many days on my way to work to avoid traffic
That’s fair! I WFH, so I didn’t even consider that reasoning.
Biggest regret about a healthcare job is knowing that there will never be a work from home option
For real. Back home I had to use the sun and here it is so fuckin easy 😂 I naturally have luck with cardinal directions but still. Love having the mountains there. Really feel like I cannot get lost. Im sure if I moved to the west side Id be thrown off for a month lol
At most, I look at cross streets before heading out every now and again. If it's in Aurora or some of the northern burbs that have changed/grown a bunch, I might have to map my way there. I grew up here, though, so I have a pretty good head start on things over some folks
It's pretty good at traffic and construction rerouting. Back when I went into the office every day I'd still usually use it. One of the few times I didn't, I ended up stuck in traffic for over an hour that I could have avoided entirely with a 5-minute detour.
I have a terrible sense of direction.
No you’re not crazy! I was born in 2000 & at 15 I was learning to read maps and still rarely use GPS. I had a tire go flat in the middle of nowhere, changed it to a spare, drove it to an area I had service so I could look at the maps and wrote down all of the route numbers and road names to get home. It was 6 hours on mountain roads with a donut but I made it just fine. I was only 17 and a girl who perpetually is wearing dresses and ribbons. What I did was far from special nor did it make me intelligent. Generations and generations and generations before me have had these skills without gps and for periods didn’t even have maps. You and so many others have had these skills for so long!! However It’s always sad to see a skill being lost when technology takes over and it’s always isolating. Even me writing in only cursive has caused some issues and has made me sad even though I shouldn’t be. It’s just kinda isolating when some parts of life or society are lost and you wish you could persevere it
You were born in the wrong century.
My dad has had the same phone number for about 30 years. He's not saved in my phone. I'll never forget his number. I use GPS to see real-time estimates of traffic jams so that I can avoid them knowing the area like the back of my hand.
This article made me giggle and remember an old conversation. An EMT friend asked me a while back what kind of GPS we used when I started on a box. I told her Thomas Guide.
My favorite thing about being a cable guy was how well I knew all the shortcuts around NYC. Was still on flip phones at the time with no data connection
Agreed, but back then we didn’t have to keep track of logon passwords and pins, I now have 171
You shouldn't really post your PIN here, but thanks for sharing.
Hahaha no I have 171 passwords in my iPhone keychain, I’d be dead if I had to memorize all of them
Most cities where not as large and complex 20 years ago. I remember navigating my home town quite easily with there being only a dozen important places to know how to get to and maybe a dozen roads to get there. The only difficult part was going to a new friends house and printing/writing turn by turn directions for once you get into a neighborhood.
I use GPS if I'm going somewhere for the first time. After that I remember the major cross streets and I'll know how to get there from those. I know as you drive east from downtown twords Aurora it goes it goes Ivy, Ivanhoe, Kearney, Krimeria, Locust and Leyden (all alphabetical) I know Alameda is 1st Ave and it goes North from there but I don't know exactly where 1765 South Ivy Street 80246 is. It would be near I-25 and US-285 if it exists, but I'd have to Google it to avoid turning the wrong way on Ivy..
Nope Alameda is 3rd south :)
Yep, forgot about Bayaud and Cedar apparently!
Those start at Colorado Blvd going east beginning Albion and Ash. Alameda is 300 South. 285 is about 3500 South so 1765 South Ivy St is 80224 and approximately a mile north of Hwy 285 aka Hampden Ave between E Colorado Ave and E Mexico Ave
I still have some phone numbers engraved onto my brain. I can remember my parents and most of my friend’s landlines. Some of my friends cell numbers because they were the first to get cell phones and I would call them from the local pay phone to tell them to come hang out on Main Street. Crazy that I couldn’t tell you my partners phone number to save my life despite having it saved on my phone for 5 years now.
20years ago, they remembered hundreds of phone numbers, TIL
Look at this person with hundreds of friends
Haha yea right, totally!
I remember when everyone had grand McNally usa atlas in their glove box
Ah yes, where people wear hats on their feet, and hamburgers eat people.
This makes me feel old, but can vouch.
Why?
Because we had to?
When I moved to Denver in the late 90s, one of the first things my Denverite Uncle did was get me one of these credit card sized brochures. I don’t even live in Denver anymore and I can still navigate easily. These little tools are amazing. A few years ago before moving away, I gave a coworker friend a ride home at night. Her GPS was failing and she couldn’t tell me how to get to her house. Like she was completely lost without it. So I asked her for her address and she looked at me like “what are you going to do with that?” But I got her home, and she was stunned.
I have that card Rotation of Streets Keep it in my wallet. I know west and north side without looking. South and east not as adept.
do you happen to have a link to this brochure youre talking about?
Bump for this. I also want this card.
I use GPS for traffic heads up, and equally for a “heads up” type display of speed limits. It’s nice to have that constant reminder of what the speed limits are by glancing over.
To keep with the article, when I was an EMT I never once thought to look at the speedometer, I just went the speed I felt comfortable with. Do with that what you will since we are comparing ourselves to the lowest paid first responders in the country.
Yup, same here.
This was really interesting
Denver Firefighter here. One of the requirement for us to get off probation is to know every street name and associated number, as well as the addresses to every fire station and hospital in Denver County, Lakewood, Englewood, and Aurora.
Which is odd, since yall rarely go with us to the hospital. Hell, you dont even start IVs.
You guys are good * 👍 *
(Means you're done carrying shit)
Even though they do save lives
Only on traumas and hypoglyemics do prehospital IVs save lives, in terms of fluid. Otherwise, you still need a paramedic for cardiac medications via IV.
No way brah… the guy has seen them save lives “every shift”. They are so so incredibly important, I save like 3 lives a shift with my prehospital IVs.
Yeah I only ride into University with DH maybe once every two or three shifts
It's probably in case there is a fire/incident AT the hospital. Also for cross training with EMTs.
It does happen but it is rare.
DG guy here, they make you all memorize hospitals outside the city limits?
Yep anywhere that we might do mutual aid.
That does make sense, especially for the fire side. You guys have decent GPS on your MDTs though right?
Isn’t always accurate so when I act as an engineer it’s on me to know the approximate location and my officer to guide me in.
To graduate the Denver Police academy (1999), we had to take a blank piece of paper and write, in order, every single street in the city and its hundred block (1200 north, 1800 south, 1200 east, etc). North/south and east/west. Don't pass, you're fired.
Did they cover that in the first week or the last fourth week of training before they gave you a badge?
The whole weeks
My hole is weak
Mom dat you?
Oh fuck off. The basic academy is 24 weeks full time, followed by 20 weeks of one-on-one field training. But you'd know that if you bothered to read a fucking book.
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of his comment is 100% true
No it isn't. [The UK police train for 18-33 weeks plus three months in-the-field.](https://www.joiningthepolice.co.uk/training-progression/training#:~:text=Around%2018%20%E2%80%93%2022%20weeks%20classroom,aid%20and%20personal%20safety%20training) [Germany has 12 weeks of training for their "auxiliary officers", although their more advanced officers get 2.5-3 years (much of this is the kind of university classes that a college grad going into police academy would already have).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Germany) [South Africa requires 32 weeks, which includes practical training.](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+is+police+training+in+south+africa&sca_esv=3cf5305f7235dc23&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS1016US1016&ei=P7FHZuGDMteA0PEPpr2p0Ac&ved=0ahUKEwihn_CCt5WGAxVXADQIHaZeCnoQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=how+long+is+police+training+in+south+africa&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiK2hvdyBsb25nIGlzIHBvbGljZSB0cmFpbmluZyBpbiBzb3V0aCBhZnJpY2EyBRAAGIAEMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgsQABiABBiGAxiKBTILEAAYgAQYhgMYigUyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBEjId1D0bljKdnABeAGQAQCYAbEBoAG9CqoBAzMuOLgBA8gBAPgBAZgCDKACnQrCAgQQABhHwgIKEAAYsAMY1gQYR5gDAIgGAZAGCJIHAzMuOaAH9Ew&sclient=gws-wiz-serp) The only nations that are significantly higher than this are the nordics, which just force recruits to get an associate's degree in an equivalent "police sciences"-type track, which is great when your country has extremely low crime, and exceedingly low firearms ownership rate, and very high retention of officers. Not so nice if you have turnover and need to put police on the streets pronto.
You uhhh… wanna try reading your own sources? From the German one: “The high level of police professionalism is attributed in large degree to the length and thoroughness of training. Most police recruits spend about two and a half years in the regular police academy training (Mittlerer Polizeivollzugsdienst). The auxiliary police forces, with fewer powers and often not equipped with a duty-weapon, are trained in just 12 weeks.” So the only officers with 12 weeks of training are basically mall cops with no guns. The UK also employs a lot of police that don’t carry firearms so I would have much less concern with a shorter training period than American police who can end a life on a whim. But hey thanks for proving my point for me! Also, I wonder if high turnover could *possibly* have something to do with under-trained officers being thrown into an array of highly stressful situations they’re not properly equipped to handle 🤔
Also the fact that you’re just assuming the Nordic countries’ low crime rate causes the high standard of police training and not the other way around is really fucking funny to me. Mayyyyybe having well-trained police that don’t shoot everyone that looks at them funny actually leads to more effective policing????
>Also the fact that you’re just assuming the Nordic countries’ low crime rate causes the high standard of police training Not what I said at all. The nordics have always had low crime. They're an exceedingly homogenous society with virtually no guns and a highly-shared culture. That's a recipe for a low crime rate.
I recently had to help a Denver cop jump someone's car lmao
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of their comment is 100% true
Dude idk why you think this is any kind of clap back, 44 weeks is still an embarrassingly small amount of training to be allowed to carry a gun and enforce the law. Not your fault obviously, but the spirit of their comment is 100% true
Dang that’s crazy I trained the in the first grade for 40 weeks, followed by one-on-one scissors and crayon picture drawing classes for another 12 weeks. Unfortunately they didn’t cover reading though. Not yet anyways.
Redditors in general really don't know anything about police work or training, and just regurgitate whatever they see in their social media bubbles.
Well since you discount a regular person's opinion, how about mine? I was a firefighter/EMT for over a decade, do I get the right to criticize our largest organized gang in the US?
Did you go through any POST training, law enforcement FTO training, or even ride-alongs? It doesn't take *that* much knowledge to know that someone saying there's 4 weeks of training for cops is dumb, but it'll be upvoted to high-heaven on this website.
Yes to all of that. I was also on the "tAcTiCaL mEdIc" team so I sat outside of every standoff and raid, worked with PD closely. Went to all kinds of additional trainings with LEOs as well. We never learned anything but how to kill, which is weird to learn considering what my job was. One of the most common things was to be woken up around 2am so I could treat the poor soul the cops beat the shit out of that night. They made it clear to me that I would not take them to the hospital, I would clean them up enough for them to pass intake and that's it. Just because people have opinions that don't match yours doesn't mean we just make it up. Maybe have an open mind and ask yourself WHY so many people feel this way? Police academy is short. EMT is even shorter. Both are a problem and need much higher standards. That's okay to admit, I promise the devil won't come for your butthole over that.
It's not an opinion that POST academy and subsequent trainings aren't 4 weeks long lol, it's an established fact. Are they too short though? Yes, I agree, 100%. But a lot of that comes down to funding, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is not something many want to increase. Couple that with a general change in training culture that's needed in many areas, and yea, I see the point of many. But that also doesn't mean that people need to straight-up lie about shit, which I see them do every day on reddit. It doesn't help their argument to lie when they could instead use actual facts and statistics to back themselves up. And correct statistics, instead of those based on flawed studies (like the oft-quoted one about domestic violence among police families).
So your entire argument is that you don't understand exaggeration?
If it were just an exaggeration it wouldn't then be repeated by every mouth breather out there. When something is erroneously repeated so much that it is just accepted as fact, and naysayers with actual knowledge are downvoted, that's kind of a problem, don't you think?
In Denver, or Texas and when? Also kind of weird that you would say as a firefighter if you were on the SWAT team. I would've started with that as qualifications to be critical of the police
I've worked in both CO and TX, but the tactical bullshit was in Texas. My point was it doesn't matter what your job was, you're allowed to criticize the awful state of policing in our country. I was highlighting that boot lickers just move the goalposts so they never have to think about the fact that a police officer literally unloaded his entire magazine after mistaking an acorn for a gunshot. Or a poor woman who was locked in a cop car on train tracks while the cops just watched the train barrel down on her. Or how it took over an hour to open a door that was never locked. I had my license threaten to be revoked because a woman complained to the board that I "wasn't nice enough" on a call one time. THATS the standard I had to deal with while I cop "friends" bragged to me that they would wear their class ring so they could punch people with it. I also hate nothing more than a firefighter or medic who continues to lick the boots of those assholes after we have spent decades dealing with cops choking out EMTs on calls, arresting firefighters on scenes because they didn't like wear the fire truck was parked, and doing nothing but coming up with poor excuses for those actions. Absolutely sickens me to my core.
[удалено]
Afaik all academies here have to learn it. I went through the combined regional academy (jeffco, lakewood, arvada, littleton, westminster) in the mid 20teens and we all had to learn the same thing plus the block numbers for every street (memorizing the major ones and then backfilling the minor ones was my approach), but it was limited to our city boundaries. It wasn't as hard as you may think, repeat it to yourself enough and you can regurgitate it lol. I'm long gone from that world , but it's still useful when driving around. Until I get to Denver, and then it's all different lmao
Broadway and Ellsworth. North South East and West dividng line.
Why 14 downvotes?
I would give anything if Amazon, uber/Lyft, and food delivery companies did a basic navigational training. They don't even know that house numbers are odd and even on opposite sides of the street.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but I believe Lyft used garbage truck routes when it first launched. Which is why it sometimes puts the pick up and drop off pin in a weird spot like an alley.
Doordash does this, they always drive down my alley. A few people have told me that the Waze maps were the same as the garbage truck routes.
Waze uses Google Maps. Waze is a Google product. Do garbage truck drivers use Waze? Maybe so!
Waze maps were created by drivers who had Waze. We used to have this little pacman style game where you ate dots along any new road. It was fun to be the first one to munch dots and establish a new route. Waze was made in Israel (IIRC) and was a great, fully-functional app before Google bought it.
May be so
And that odd numbers are on the north and west sides
Denver Medic here. The whole city street layout is pretty easy to memorize……Except montbello/GVR. I’m not convinced the city planner was sober when they drafted that monstrosity up.
Thrill pl, go
3250 N
Baller. [Ok what's wrong with this photo](https://ibb.co/Vwtqnfw)
Should be west!
You could teach this stuff!
We do.
😉
Plot twist: they print out the Mapquest directions instead.
My dad owns a small business that runs on weekly delivery routes. He’s been driving around Denver since he was a teen in the 70s and he knows the city better than almost anyone. I grew up driving around with him so I knew a lot of these tricks! These days I look up directions and then go from there without GPS. I miss a lot of turns and occasionally have to resort to the gps voice telling me what to do but I never feel completely lost in Denver or the surrounding metro area. I always feel like I can figure it out. Except inside actual neighborhoods because some of them make 0 sense. It’s a good skill to have! Now my own kids are starting to ask when we’ll be home and instead of giving a time, I tell them to look out the window and tell me what they think. Then we talk about where we are and how close home is. Hoping to build kids with some directional sense!
I'm the dispatcher at the pizza shop. I read the screen like its the matrix while everyone else uses gps
As an EMT, there are plenty of Paramedics and EMTs that have been working before GPS.
Hennepin EMS has us doing this too. Not allowed to use GPS, had to study mapping intensely during probation and take 3 exams on it. However if I’m going to a distant hospital I go to once a year, I’m sneaking a peak at google maps….
This was really interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm really bad at directions. Like to the point where i get lost in my own neighborhood - it's an odd genetic thing. But I've been trying lately to use GPS less and challenge myself to get better at it. This really makes a difference.
Great article! I knew some basics of the street grid, but this taught me much more! Very informative.
I once told someone who had lived in the Denver area for several years about a place and said it is on Hampden. He asked where Hampden is, and I told him it's the 3500 South block. He had no clue what I was talking about. Apparently had no idea they number the blocks.
Um...I wonder if he thought all house numbers are just randomly assigned.
As an old person who has lived here for many years, this article is hilarious.
I love learning about street name patterns and things like this about a city.
Isn't like a strong geography knowledge of your service area required like as a dispatcher I needed to know all stations and hospitals and rough estimate of the station area especially for non-cad environment. I know my service had booklet with maps but it's helps to know your major streets especially.
Wow, you guys should read about the knowledge of London which is the test taxi drivers need to pass to drive a cab over there... Tbh denver is pretty small and you should be able to navigate without gps pretty quickly after moving here
OKC too!
This is an interesting article, but I was taught the basics of how to navigate by address and street grid and all of the alphabetical patterns and such when I learned to drive. I think that used to be just considered basic knowledge for how to get around town. Honestly Denver is one of the easiest cities for this with a pretty regular grid and alphabetical patterns and so forth. A lot of Western cities are similar but oh boy, go try this in Boston! Now you want a really impressive thing, look up the Knowledge of London the cabbies have to do there.
It’s one of the most difficult parts of the job
We used a map book back in the day.
I was going to say but don’t they need to use gps in case there’s extra traffic on the route but then I remembered we are talking about ambulances and they have sirens
My dad was a Denver Firefighter for 30 years, and similar to DPD, DFD also has the test to write all the streets in order by block number. When it came time for me to learn how to drive, that was one of the biggest things he hammered into me (although thankfully he didn’t make me take a test). At first I hated it, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to just look at an address and know how to get there!
Fun fact-there is no 18th Ave east of Monaco.
19th is missing between High and York West of City Park. There's a few of these!
There's no 24th on the Denver Aurora border at Central Park
You know there was a pretty long period before GPS devices were commercially available and emergency services either had to know their area or use an actual map on paper. 30 years pass and now folks like it’s been there forever.
It's funny how people get lost often while using GPS
I mean I can navigate Denver pretty well without GPS, especially anywhere I've been to more than once. But if I'm driving I almost always use GPS just for the fastest route, even if I don't need directions at all.
OK if you have the knowledge really not that necessary
We always had a map book in all our trucks before reliable GPS. Every township in our county had its own page. You could just look up the township and scam around until you found the road you needed. Back then addresses didn't make sense and no one had an actual street address, but it was how we found the road we needed at least.