Just a couple of observations about numbers used to identify things.

My sister was musing to me recently that she can never remember my wireline phone number, largely because the city in which we both live has some phone numbers which begin with 347 and other, older numbers that start with 374. For that matter, most Schenectady phone numbers begin with 37, so for mine to turn that pattern around causes confusion.

our local transit authority has recently begun re-numbering the bus routes, so that they are all getting three-digit numbers, and they do actually have this pretty well planned out. They started in Saratoga County, giving all of those routes numbers in the 400's, then they renumbered the rural routes with numbers in the 800's.

They have just started working on the shuttles (600's) and expresses (500's).

And then there is Rensselaer County (200's) . . .

There are two buses that run from Albany to Rensselaer. One is route 24, which I use; the other used to be called 14 . . . Until they renumbered it to 214.

Oh, I almost forgot -- these two routes overlap.

I ride the 24 to work and back every day. Ever since the day they changed 14 to 214, I've seen a lot of people I don't normally see on the 24 getting on at one stop, and getting off two stops later, when the bus makes a different turn than they were expecting :)

They could have fixed this very easily, just by renumbering both routes at the same time.

In other places, I can see that people get it. The two U.S. Highway systems are deliberately numbered to keep like-numbered highways apart. U.S. Highways are numbered low in the east and north; high in the south and west; Interstate highways are low in the west and south and high in the north and east. Both have odd numbers for north-south and even for east-west.

These really are freshman mistakes that could be avoided to limit confusion.