This fact — or what I originally thought the fact was — came up in conversation earlier this week. I did some digging and there’s a lot more nuance than I thought, so this may run a big long for such a small fact! — Dan

Numbered streets are everywhere in American towns. Getting around is easy: walk a block past First Street and you’re on Second, one more and you’re on Third, and so on until the town runs out of streets or the planners run out of patience. It’s about as simple as a street grid gets, since everyone already knows how to count. You start at one.

Except, it turns out, you usually don’t.

In 1993, the U.S. Census Bureau published a list of the 76 most common street names in America, and a number took the top spot, just not the one you’d expect. As FiveThirtyEight’s Mona Chalabi reported, Second Street came in first, with 10,866 of them (counting both “Second” and “2nd”). Third Street was the runner-up with 10,131, according to one blogger’s transcription of the Census list. First Street came in third, with 9,898. For a generation that was the only list anyone had. And it raised an obvious question: how does a town end up with a Second Street and no First?

The easy guess is that the 1993 numbers were a fluke. They weren’t.

In 2015, the Washington Post’s Jeff Guo counted every road in America using the Census Bureau’s 2014 road data and a very different method. He came up with a different winner, but on this point he reached the same verdict: “both the Census and I agree that ‘2nd’ is a more popular road name than ‘1st.’” More than a decade later the pattern still holds. The site Street Name Search, which draws on the crowdsourced map project OpenStreetMap, ranks 2nd Street well ahead of 1st, 5,849 to 5,266. Third Street beats First there too, which drops First to fourth. Three counts, decades apart, using three different methods, and all three agree that First isn’t first.

The reason is that First Street often goes by a different name.

In a lot of American towns, the first street, the one the town grew up around, was never going to be called First. It was Main Street. Or, as the sign retailer RoadSigns.com notes, it was Front Street, or Center Street, or some other local name. Philadelphia, one of the first American cities laid out on a grid, has no First Street at all. According to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Front Street runs along the Delaware River as “the equivalent of First,” and the numbers pick up from there. Cincinnati did it twice: as Cincinnati Magazine’s Greg Hand explains, the city “has no First Street,” because “below Second Street were Water Street and Front Street.”

Multiply that by thousands of towns and the rankings start to make sense. “In cartography, unlike in most competitive sports, second doesn’t necessarily come after first,” Chalabi explained. “A Second Street can be the logical next street after a Main Street.” Guo put it the same way: in many towns, Main and First “split the honor, so to speak,” and both “tumble in the rankings” as a result. Add up every First, 1st, and Main Street on the 1993 list and you get 17,562, which would top the list by a long way.

Which street actually tops the list is harder to say. The Census gave the crown to Second. Guo’s count gave it to Park, with 9,640 roads to Second’s 8,232. Street Name Search puts Main Street first with 9,361, and that’s even though it counts N Main St and S Main St as separate names (together they add more than 6,000 more). Most of the disagreement comes down to what counts as one street. Is a Second Street interrupted by a park one road or two? What about a North Main that runs into a South Main? Guo spent a whole methodology section on those questions. The Census, for its part, couldn’t answer them for its own list. When Chalabi asked how the 1993 list was made, a spokesperson told her the researcher who made it couldn’t recall his methodology.

So no one can say for sure which street is the most common. But Second Street can take some comfort in this: it may not be the most common, but it’s always ahead of First.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Main Street isn’t a major thoroughfare everywhere — in fact, in San Francisco, it’s not even a main street, neither in reality or by name. Main Street, SF isn’t named for its prominence within the city — it’s named for Charles Main, a businessman from the area during the city’s founding.

From the Archives: The Roads to Citizenship: How some Minnesota roads also teach civics.

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And thanks! — Dan