BEACH LAKE, PA — A routine petition among a stack of building permits and land-use applications had supervisor Cathy Hunt doing a double-take at the May 21 Berlin Township Board of Supervisors meeting. It was a request to name a road, but Hunt quickly realized that the road was a private driveway. “Wait a minute. This must be a mistake. Why would anyone want to name a driveway?” asked Hunt.

Emergency management coordinator Rich Miller asked her if the driveway was more than 150 feet in length. “Yes,” said Hunt. “Then Wayne County Planning Commission law says it must be named,” said Miller.

Asked by someone in the gallery why that is the case, Miller said it has to with subdivision planning. “If the property is later subdivided, there is already a named access road that can be referenced during the planning process,” said Miller. But he pointed out that it has another, more immediate purpose as well. It can be useful to emergency services personnel trying to pinpoint a house set far back from the road, provided that a well-placed sign defines it and that the 911 operator has it as a cross-street reference.

Referring to the petitioner, Miller said Hunt should tell them to put up a street sign conforming to county street sign standards. He said that in a year or less that named driveway will make its way into Google Maps and will be shown as every other named street on GPS systems. But if no sign announces it, it can confuse emergency services people trying to find the address at the end of that driveway. They’ll look for a cross street that appears on their GPS map but is nowhere visible, realizing that they’ve gone too far only when they see the next cross-street sign.

To help emergency services people find them more easily, and to secure some small measure of fame, people with long driveways may want to do as these people did, and put the family name on their driveway.