You are right that as a local if I were to read the full address out loud I'd put a pause after 'West' instead of before, pairing it with the house number instead of the street. Unfortunately, since that cardinal direction is not usually signed on the street sign or on buildings, it doesn't have an obvious home according to typical OSM conventions. However, the local conventions linked above follow the patterns used by most local GIS departments, so that's we've settled on for now. I'm working on a proposal to put forward to the larger OSM community eventually to get more proper support in other OSM based software. 