The Street Names of Vancouver

Golf courses are more likely to have roads named after them in Vancouver than women. In Vancouver more streets have been given the name of famous golf courses from around the world than have been named for famous or notable women. There are 26 streets bearing the name of a famous golf course and only 16 streets in the whole city which have been named for women. Of Vancouver's 651 streets 276 have been named for men.

CBC News has been investigating how streets have been named in the city of Vancouver. If you discount numbered streets and duplicate names Vancouver has 651 unique street names. These 651 streets are named for people (mostly men), golf courses, geographical features (e.g. 'beach') and lots of dead Europeans (again mostly men).

You can view an interactive map of Vancouver's streets organized into categories of different types of name on the City of Vancouver Open Data Portal. On the map roads are colored and organized by categories such as UK places, people from the UK, the works of Walter Scott, geography etc. You can read CBC News' analysis of the map in The origins of all 651 street names in Vancouver.

Of course Vancouver isn't the only city which has mostly ignored women when naming its city streets. Geochicas in Las Calles de las Mujeres has mapped out streets named for men and women in a number of Latin American and Spanish cities. In Germany Zeit Online has also mapped out streets named for men and women. In Streetscapes: Mozart, Marx and a Dictator Zeit Online  looks at the trends of naming streets for people and historical events.

An analysis of the Street Names in Vienna reveals that 4,269 streets have been named for men. Only 356 have been named for women. Mapbox has also created an interactive map showing the distribution of male and female street names in major cities across the world. According to Mapping Female versus Male Street Names streets in Bengaluru, Chennai, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, and San Francisco are all much more likely to be named for men than women.