Tonight I had a get-together at a coffee shop in a part of town I had not been to yet, so I called a cab to get there. I gave the driver the address, but he wanted to know the intersection, not the address, but I hadn't written the cross-street down, which rather irritated him. Back in Kazan taxi companies always wanted the precise address, and the drivers were irked if you told them how to get there. I asked the driver about that. He told me that they generally do not know addresses and generally prefer to work with intersections.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that addresses in Russia actually increment by one according to the number of buildings on a block. In other words if you start counting from the address #1 on the first block of a particular street, and there are five buildings on the east side of the street, the their addresses are 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, respectively. If on the opposite side of the block there are ten smaller buildings, then they bear the even numbers from 2 to 20. Sometimes those differences add up to quite a bit. On Friday I was looking for 43 Sovetskaya street, and across the street from it was building 93. So the nice coordinate system that makes younger American cities relatively easy to navigate does not exist here.

The second reason has to do with modern databases. Here is a Google map of the area near my Kazan apartment:

Note how the buildings and their addresses are indicated. Now look at the Google map of the intersection where my apartment is in Bishkek at the same resolution:

Note that the vast majority of the buildings are not indicated, and addresses are only indicated if some institution is also noted. My conclusion: the publically available databases for Bishkek are not nearly as complete for Bishkek as they are for other cities. I'm not all that surprised. The other day I wanted to download an app called 2gis, which was really useful for navigating Kazan. They don't even have one yet for Bishkek, and the absence of publically accessible databases would explain that. Plus street view is available on Google Maps for Kazan, but it still is not for Bishkek.

So for now I must get in the habit of telling my taxi drivers the cross-roads while I'm in Bishkek.