Moscow, ID: Street Review

Now that I’ve got a job as a Pizza Delivery Guy here in Moscow, I’ve had the chance to really get around the city, to explore its design and structure, something that I really never had the chance to do last year, what with me living out of town and all. Anyway, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to do a review of the entire city. See, I’m not stuck just reviewing media, no. I also review anything that may chance to come to my attention as needing reviewing. (I seem to recall saying something of this nature back when I started this blog.)
Anyway, on with the review.

Over in Russia during the Soviet days, there was a story (probably apocryphal) of a railway line being built across a rather large part of the Russian plains. It ran perfectly straight across the frozen tundra, except for a fifty-mile section about halfway through the line. There, the railway abruptly diverged to the south in an odd pattern and then shot back up north, where it resumed being a straight line again. One particularly observant tourist noticed this and asked one of the Russian crewmembers why it was like that. The Russian replied that when Stalin had drawn the line across Russia where the railway was to be built, the ruler he used had a chip in it at that point. This is a rather long-winded way of saying that I think something similar must have happened when Moscow, ID was being built. Instead of a chip, however, the architect in charge of Moscow’s blueprints was working with a pen that was running out and an unsteady hand on the ruler. This is, perhaps, one of the more plausible reasons that I can imagine for Moscow’s street layout. Most of the streets are fine, especially the main ones that got all the attention. Third and Sixth, for example. And then, off of the center of town where no one was paying attention, and for no apparent reason, a street will be split up into two or three sections, separated by a block full of nothing. In addition, streets will sometimes just not line up as they wend their way through town, jogging over half a block or more between intersections. The end result is rather confusing, especially considering streets were named by someone with a somewhat tenuous grasp of organizational structure to begin with. Half the east-west streets are numbers, and then there’s a bunch of letter names, but after the letter “F” the street names go back to random. There seems to be a running theme of Presidential names for North-South streets, but it’s haphazardly implemented. There’ll be a streak of two or three, and then a street with a really random name, just to throw people off. It’s great fun trying to navigate this poorly organized morass at night, when house numbers are nearly invisible due to the dual devilry of far too few streetlights and people who leave their porch lights off. In addition, due to poor city management, many of the street signs themselves are either completely absent, or covered with overhanging tree branches in such a way as to make them invisible until it’s too late to make the turn. And don't even get me started on apartment buildings that are either numbered with tiny print or not numbered at all. All in all, unless you've lived here all your life, Moscow is a very confusing place to try to find something. In fact, of all the towns I have lived in, Moscow is probably the worst designed.