What is a paper street? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

In addition to being a story title, we have used the term "paper street" on more than a few occasions without actually defining it. A quick googling brings mostly references to Fight Club's Paper Street Soap Co, but no actual definitions. So here goes:

A paper street is a street, roadway, boulevard, path, etc. which only exists on maps or lists, in planning, development, or governmental offices, and not at all in real life.

In places that are not Pittsburgh, these streets are typically the result of a planned development of which only a few phases were implemented. The streets still exist legally as rights-of-way that cannot be built upon, but they are otherwise useless if one wishes to walk, bike, or drive them.

In Pittsburgh the definition gets a bit more complicated because the maps of real streets tend to themselves have errors or oddities without even bringing legal-construct-only streets into the mix. That is to say, so much of the city is built on hills and in valleys that maps might show two streets connecting when in fact one is a bridge sixty feet above the other; or they might show a street that seems to be a thoroughfare but is actually undrivable public steps for a few blocks before becoming pavement again. Something might be called a street, when it should be more accurately called a flight, or a span.

There are many paper streets in this town.

More metaphorically, Paper Street, capital P capital S, is that strange street which you turned on to once late at night and ended up two neighborhoods away without understanding how, or which took you up a hill and showed you downtown from an angle you thought impossible. It is the physical instantiation of everything weird about this town's geography. In the story of same name, the narrator encounters such a street, with disastrous consequences.

Finally, a street with a similar name, Paper Way, does exist in Pittsburgh, just north of Friendship Park. Expect a report from

Your obedient servant in the field,
James