Very interesting project, thanks for posting!

May be more of a gesture towards the kinds of hodonymic insights that OSM can make possible than a trustworthy resource in its own right. There seem to be a lot of assumptions baked in that might seem plausible but break down on closer examination (e.g. in the US, is every Roosevelt Street being credited to FDR? Are that many streets named after Seneca-the-philosopher rather than Seneca-the-people? Etc.)
posted by Not A Thing at 8:16 PM on June 24 [8 favorites]

Trying to guess who will be in the top 10, country by country, is revealing my limitations in history and culture. Try to guess the number one in, for instance, Austria, or Ireland, or Brazil, or Germany, etc.
For many countries the top entries are obvious, but for others it’s a long scroll to a name I recognize
posted by librosegretti at 9:44 PM on June 24 [2 favorites]

This is a cool project, but I think to do properly relies on a level of local knowledge that would be very hard, probably impossible, for one person to accomplish for the globe.

Take Australia, where there a huge number of places named for 'Elizabeth'. Almost none for the 20thC Queen, though, or even Elizabeth [Bowes-Lyon] her mother. Mostly they were named long before the second Queen Elizabeth was born, and quite a few were named for Governor Macquarie's wife, Elizabeth Henrietta, or Governor Bourke's wife Elizabeth. Any King Street is probably for Philip Gidley King, NSW Governor, not for a monarch. If there's a John St it probably was John Macarthur, the squatter and nogoodnik, not the John the Apostle, and where there's a Macarthur Street in an Australian city it's certainly not for the American WWII general, who was based here, respected, but not well liked. Mitchell Streets probably weren't named for the politician but for the explorer (and perpetrator of massacre). The Australian entry also seems to be missing a lot of other common 19thC name-place-names that local knowledge would indicate: Macquarie, Adelaide, Phillip, Brisbane, Goulburn, Castlereagh, and so on.

As well as Batman, of course.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:51 PM on June 24 [16 favorites]

Yeah looking at New Zealand, I'd say given how many streets are named after local people/the first settler landowner/the property developer who subdivided land, and given the high proportion of people with roots in Ireland and the UK, streets called Nixon or Kennedy or Maxwell or Armstrong are very likely not named after the suggested famous people.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:57 PM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I've noticed that street names in Germany (at least the more modern ones) tend to get the whole name of the person being honoured. So you'll have Willy-Brandt-Platz or Bessie-Coleman-Straße rather than just Brandt-Platz or Coleman-Straße, which makes it a bit clearer who is being honoured. Sometimes there's even a little explanation under the street name as to who this person was like here for Bessie Coleman and Thea Rasa Rasche.
posted by scorbet at 12:41 AM on June 25 [7 favorites]

Fiasco da Gama: If there's a John St it probably was John Macarthur, the squatter and nogoodnik, not the John the Apostle

There is an argument to be made that the John name was made popular in Anglo culture by John the apostle, and that as a subsequent result John Macarthur was named after John the apostle, and thus also the street is named after John the apostle.
posted by Barry Boterman at 1:09 AM on June 25

I'd argue in contrast that "named after" isn't a transitive relationship.
posted by trig at 1:11 AM on June 25 [9 favorites]

I've always liked Portugal's street signs, many of them provide a date and a simplified explanation of who the person was, or what the battle was about. The downside, in big cities, is that they are often high up, and hard to spot.
posted by chavenet at 1:14 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]

One thing which has always tickled me is that almost every medium-sized or larger American city has a Euclid Street. I doubt the author of the Elements would crack most Americans' top-500 list of people to honor with a street name, but I guess city planners are more into geometry than other folks.
posted by jackbishop at 3:34 AM on June 25 [12 favorites]

Just the other day I realized that although I had lived three years on a street named after this guy, I had never bothered to find out who he was. Some surprises. Mary in the UK? Mostly connected to churches, no doubt. Mitterand a lot higher than I would have expected. Germany a leader in Dichter und Denker (as opposed to politicoes), which makes sense. (Cf the USA, alas.) And Gramsci? This latter made me want to see a breakdown of names by city- that would tell a number of stories. A breakdown by category (artist, politician, warrior, religious figure) would make for an interesting follow up.

Fun project.
posted by BWA at 5:12 AM on June 25

I thought it weird that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was 52nd in the USA, with 208? Behind Rutherford B. Hayes??
Wikipedia has an estimate of over 900. That would put him in 3rd.
posted by MtDewd at 9:48 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]

I'm curious if he limited himself to streets that bore the full name of the person, like Martin Luther King Way as opposed to King Road. If so, his count may be more or less accurate, if not then I would take exception to a number of his estimations for US street names. Easily challengeable would be Roosevelt always attributed to FDR (many schools and streets named for Theodore Roosevelt), and Hawthorne being Nathaniel Hawthorne as opposed to the Hawthorne tree (in a series of tree-named streets). My guess is that this is interesting for counting similarly named streets but would need a LOT of local knowledge to disambiguate actual naming convention unless he's limiting himself to fully named streets.
posted by drossdragon at 10:10 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]

drossdragon: "Hawthorne being Nathaniel Hawthorne as opposed to the Hawthorne tree (in a series of tree-named streets)"

Nathaniel's last name was "Hawthorne"; the tree's name is "hawthorn" (no e). That one's actually pretty easy to distinguish.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:26 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

I've always liked Portugal's street signs

In the Azores at the moment, the only woman I've seen memorialised is Saint Barbara who may be fictional.
posted by biffa at 4:41 PM on June 25

The hawthorn tree was also commonly spelled with an "e" until sometime in the 1600s or 1700s, though most US streets were surely named more recently than that.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:47 PM on June 25

This is a cool project, but I think to do properly relies on a level of local knowledge that would be very hard, probably impossible, for one person to accomplish for the globe.

On a more local level, Writes of Way, by Benjamin Lukoff, is a fascinating blog looking at the name and history of practically every street in Seattle.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:51 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

(Well, not "practically every street" but still an impressive number of them.)
posted by mbrubeck at 4:58 PM on June 25

There seem to be a lot of assumptions baked in that might seem plausible but break down on closer examination

Yeah I have a hard time believing that there are 41 streets in the U.S. named after Margaret Thatcher, rather than any number of American Thatchers. Still an interesting project!
posted by oneirodynia at 5:06 PM on June 25

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