I pulled down Land Information New Zealand's Road Centre Line dataset to have quick look at name statistics. To analyse the data, import it to Postgres with shp2pgsql :

Download the data in the Shapefile format Extract and load into an existing Postgresql/PostGIS database: shp2pgsql nz-road-centre-line-electoral.shp | psql [database_name]

Now you can run queries against the data. To get the 50 most popular road names with their total length:

SELECT "name" , COUNT ( * ) as total_count , ROUND ( SUM ( ST_LENGTH ( geom ))) as total_length FROM "nz-road-centre-line-electoral" GROUP BY "name" ORDER BY total_count DESC LIMIT 50

And the results:

Rank Name Frequency Length (m) 1 Accessway 2414 220,876 2 Service Lane 492 54,500 3 Roadway 452 335,172 4 State Highway 1 125 2,168,214 5 George Street 74 38,105 6 Queen Street 69 50,181 7 Beach Road 69 103,280 8 High Street 68 68,671 9 King Street 66 42,302 10 Station Road 66 80,138 11 Rata Street 57 25,589 12 School Road 55 75,847 13 Grey Street 54 36,090 14 State Highway 2 52 991,692 15 Church Street 52 40,540 16 Elizabeth Street 52 21,323 17 Victoria Street 50 45,263 18 Rimu Street 48 17,075 19 River Road 48 273,968 20 Bridge Street 46 30,604 21 State Highway 6 46 1,183,521 22 Cemetery Road 46 56,800 23 Main Road 45 85,202 24 Albert Street 44 25,832 25 Domain Road 44 47,879 26 Mill Road 43 111,434 27 Short Street 43 6,575 28 Boundary Road 42 152,026 29 Miro Street 42 17,852 30 William Street 41 17,808 31 Matai Street 40 15,183 32 Totara Street 40 18,546 33 Wilson Road 39 104,471 34 Seddon Street 38 25,237 35 John Street 37 14,036 36 Princes Street 36 26,509 37 Charles Street 35 16,041 38 Oxford Street 35 23,789 39 Nelson Street 35 17,365 40 James Street 35 15,162 41 Valley Road 34 92,760 42 York Street 34 12,786 43 Tui Street 34 12,064 44 Kowhai Street 34 12,220 45 Campbell Street 32 17,273 46 Kent Street 32 18,598 47 Ward Street 32 17,431 48 Russell Street 32 14,733 49 Duke Street 32 17,436 50 Main Street 32 33,201

Short Street - clearly well named at an average length of 153m.

And of course we can get the total length of all road centrelines in the dataset with:

SELECT SUM ( ST_LENGTH ( geom )) as total_length FROM "nz-road-centre-line-electoral"

Which gives 123,086,930 metres of road.*