From AmericanCulturalAssumption:16 American City Blocks would make one CountryMile. If they were in the country [meaning "countryside" or "rural areas"]. -- PhlIp -- How did you come to this conclusion?(Most?) American cities are laid out with 1/16 mile by 1/8 mile grids. (Metric equivalents: 100 meters by 200 meters.) Major streets are usually at 1/4, 1/2, or 1 mile intervals. (Metric equivalents: 400 meters, 800 meters, or km)Some exceptions: Midtown Manhattan (in New York City) has a rough 1/20 mile by 1/10 mile grid, with some avenues being twice that length at 1/5 neighborhoods (often called "suburbs") usually have grids of major streets, but the minor streets are often mazes instead of in Salt Lake City are 7 to the mile, in both dimensions. An oddball number, but the consistency (plus the use of numbers for all addresses) makes calculating distances city block is the distance between consecutive streets, running east-west, or avenues, running north-south. The Manhattan grid has about 20 streets per mile but only a few avenues per mile making it convenient to describe "short blocks" or "long blocks" (for blocks facing avenues or streets respectively). Portland, Oregon was laid out with most streets and avenues in a 200 foot grid, making more corner lots so that developers received more profit as corner lots command a higher exactly do you come to the conclusion that E-W is a 'street' and N-S is an 'avenue'? Last time I checked, 'street' is a road built up on either or both sides, and 'avenue' is a tree-lined road. [That's just the way numbered roads are laid out in Manhattan and some other places. It would surely be less confusing to use sets of numbers that don't conflict, particularly for visitors from places without that convention who don't suspect the vital significance in the "avenue" or "street" after the number, but that's how they named 'em.]There is no definition of how big it is. Each city block is just as big as it is. They aren't even all the same city block would typically be 1/16 to 1/8 of a mile, a football field is 300 feet, Labor Day is the first Monday after the first Sunday of September and is viewed as the end of summer many large eastern cities, a CityBlock is a standard 1/20 of a mile. That is, there is that much space between the centerlines of the streets in grid-platted parts of the in the SouthWest?, though, we have grids of "major" streets spaced about a mile apart, sometimes more, with minor streets running through them. Measurement in blocks is meaningless to me..In Idaho, as in many parts of the West, roads in farming country (at least the flat spaces) are often spaced a mile apart, and run directly N-S or E-W. The big exception is when roads follow geography like a mountain or river. A good rule of thumb for city blocks is 1/8 mile. The street address numbers almost always increment 1000 for every mile and 100 for every block. (If you're adding these up, remember, I said 1/8 is a rule of thumb!) The numbers increase from the center of the city, going assumptions, again. Outside the USA, and in many parts of the USA, a city block is not necessarily rectangular, or even close. Or even anything anyone would consider as denoting a given was under the distinct impression that the actual size didn't matter. It was merely a tool for giving informal directions ('Walk three blocks that way, then take a left and walk for three more blocks' means 'Walk by three main streets then go left and walk by three more main streets') or a general impression of size -something big. It is all very informal and I suppose every can see that from the discussion so far.