as a european, in canada and the US I was constantly confused by directions. america uses street names and cardinal directions (turn north on I-??? then west on ...). europeans think in terms of sequences of towns (to get to munich I must drive on the autobahn via Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg).
I once travelled from toronto to chicago by car and decided to write down my own directions from google maps because I felt the ones provided were useless. Boy, was I lost when I didnt see a roadsign for windsor/detroit.
Here's a thought: the reason for the difference is due to how New World cities were artificially made rectangular whereas the Old World cities have a concentric circles growing out feel to them.
Go on Google Maps and look at a city like Montreal and you'll see that the streets are very rectangular.
Look at a city like Paris and you'll see a spiderweb instead of rectangles.
In the UK Google Maps does road numbers wrong. So A4042 should be "ay four o four two" but Maps says the less efficient "ay four thousand and forty-two" (it's also wrong, it's a code not a number; like calling 0b20 "twenty").
I once travelled from toronto to chicago by car and decided to write down my own directions from google maps because I felt the ones provided were useless. Boy, was I lost when I didnt see a roadsign for windsor/detroit.