Vancouver districts emerge as a patchwork of different street-naming conventions: all "streets" downtown, a "street"/"avenue" weave through most of the city, but with exceptional areas like the "street"/"drive" zone of Grandview, the "roads" and "malls" of the university, or the paths cut by Broadway and the Kingsway.

Also notice how the Vancouver street/avenue pattern is adopted by some suburbs (like Surrey in the southeast), reversed in North Vancouver or Burnaby (easy of the major north-south "road" in green), and rejected altogether by Richmond (the "road"-dominated area just south of the city). Street-naming conventions subtly create different areas of the city, a different background feel. And the developers of curving streets often opt for the bucolic associations of a "drive" or a "crescent."