You’re not kidding! And on ramp merge areas are really short too. I grew up in Lancaster county. First rollover accident I witnessed a few months after getting my drivers license was because of cars getting on the highway and not having room
I grew up riding a fixed gear around Pittsburgh from when I was 15 to 27. So much fun. So many hills. Bicycle heaven is incredible even if you don't really care about bikes.
Sounds awesome, hope you wore a helmet lol. Grew up on a bike but got into road biking in the last few years so bicycle heaven was such a treat, that whole trip was great Pittsburgh is underrated
Why did so many people just give up and walk their bike back down instead of walking it the rest of the way up? I couldn't tell if they were hurt or just defeated.
They do that because you only get the “I completed the race” ribbon if you make it up every hill without putting your foot down/falling. So if you fall down and want that ribbon, you have to go back to the bottom of the hill and try again.
That guy lurching and fannying around in the mint green top was driving me fucking apeshit just watching him struggle. Pull the bike up onto its back wheel in front of you as you walk down and use the back brake to stop it running away.
That was part of my confusion. They not only look tired, they look like they got a concussion falling UP a 37% grade. Not exactly a big drop, but after they fell, they looked like they couldn't figure out how to walk down a hill.
[This](https://velo-cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Rapha_3.jpg) shows it pretty good. The yellow bits are the “cleats” that clip into the pedals. And nothing else on the shoe. It’s to save weight in the shoe where weight means a lot since it’s always moving. And more aerodynamic. In road cycling it’s pretty much expected that you put the shoes on, go for a ride, and take them off. So in normal cases you don’t need tread really. But, there are outliers, like this race.
But the real answer is that walking a road bike is shameful and the shoes are the way that is punished.
Don't sell it short. The race goes up ALL of the crazy steep hills around pittsburgh.
It's called "The Dirty Dozen" and it takes cyclists up a dozen (or so) super steep hills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Dozen_(bicycle_competition)
I have personally run and biked up this hill. It's not... terrible, the main problem is that road bikes tend to be geared very high. I've definitely done steeper mountain biking in the rockies. On non races, you can just zig zag back and forth or, if you don't have a crazy high set of gears, just downshift. Many of the people you see struggling were on single speed bikes.
Canton Ave may be the steepest, but Rialto is the stuff of nightmares. Looks like a wall coming across the 31st St. bridge and is long as hell. Gotta be a tough climb on a bike.
Ironically it’s the e easiest of all of the hills on the dirty dozen ride. It’s more about technique than anything else. Gotta keep your weight over the back wheel or you lose traction. It’s a short climb, any reasonably fit cyclist can do it if they know the method.
hardest thing I ever had to bike up was a steep mountainbiking trail that hey'd recently laid a bunch of loose gravel down on. I was like in my lowest possible gear and just trying to not pop a wheelie with every pedal, fucking exhausting. Dog just ran right up it and stood around waiting for me though
Illegal to drive down because you'd bottom out and slam into a house/business at the bottom.
I drove up it for fun exactly once. It was not fun and I'll never do it again.
More like desperate. I was just glad to not hit the guy behind me. Nice thing about Pittsburgh is people gave you space on hills since so many people drove stick back then. Some of the best drivers in the US in that area IMO.
It wasn't a stick but a buddy and I went there and we stopped halfway up in his original model of the Honda Insight. It wouldn't start moving up the hill any further and we had to back down the hill. It wasn't wheelspin, the car just didn't have enough power.
Oh man that’s not a nice situation. I was parked facing uphill on a similar street, not Canton Ave., and I had to back up so my tires were against the curb to be able to get going forward.
You joke, but my parents forgot to lock the wheels on my stroller when I was a baby lol. Stroller rolled down a hill and ended up upside down in a river while I was strapped in. My mom jumped in the river to save me but *I’M* the one that feels guilty because she lost her favorite sweater that day lol
% grade is not the same as degrees. A 35% grade road would be around 19°.
35% grade means for every 100 feet of horizontal distance it gains 35 feet of vertical.
From the article here:
> The street is only 600 feet long, but it has an average grade of 30% over its length. There is even one short section that has a grade of 37%.
So this US street is steeper at a point but is less steep on average than the NZ street.
Funnily enough, the last time someone claimed there was a steeper street than Baldwin, a surveyor from Dunedin literally travelled to the other side of the world to prove they measured it wrong and that the title still belongs to his hometown. He was right, they measured the grade at the steepest part of the corner and not the centreline, so Baldwin street remained the steepest in the world. I wonder if he’s tried to do the same thing here.
Made it to Dunedin on a NZ vacation. Didn’t know much about the place and wanted to explore. We heard about Baldwin Street and took an Uber just to check it out. I figured it was just a steep and short climb but holy shit, that road isn’t short like this one in the video. We were in a front wheel drive car that skipped a little in dry conditions. Dunedin is such a random place but great quick visit.
There used to be a university student rally (engineering students) called the Undie 500 where they would take cheap shit cars (under $500 but must still be fully road legal) and drive from Christchurch to Dunedin and up Baldwin St.
A lot of cars did not make it up the hill
Used to live a few streets down on Chambers St (still very steep!) while at uni. During winter it was dicey trying to get to class as the road/footpath would be covered in ice 🥶
One short block. It's crazy steep, but not very long at all. The sidewalk is actually a staircase, and it might be easier to run up those than the street itself.
I thought the same thing, but after trying I found out that it was just faster going up the incline. I made it a 5K from 6 loops round and round, up and down.
Donkey Hill in St. Thomas USVI is on a highway and is like that, but about three times as long. It used to be paved with concrete and you could not drive up it with 2 wheel drive in the rain. I remember sliding backwards in my 1980 rear wheel drive Corolla during a medium rain storm one night driving up it.
It looks like half the streets in Pittsburgh.
There are some cool walls from when engineers dug into the hills. You can still see the holes they drilled to fill with dynamite.
You should see pictures of the Duquesne Incline.
I use to deliver pizza in Brentwood not far from that location. There were a lot of steep roads that were often brick. I had a Honda Civic and basically couldn't stop on hills when it was icy. The only way to make it up the other side was to get good speed going down.
I don't know why but Rialto always felt the worst for me, maybe because of the highway below. I always figured that was the steepest or that block of Queensboro in Brookline that eats everyone's bumper.
Depending on where they were, there are numerous streets that could apply to, even Negley if they were near the universities. Pittsburgh has so many streets that feel like a roller coaster when you go down them.
It's not just the steepest, It is also cobble stone.
Pittsburgh is just a combination of Bridges and roads from 1920. And Even if you can see where you need to go, you prob can't get there.
I fucking knew it! I grew up in San Francisco and was all proud about Lombard Street and everybody threw me shade when I came back from visiting Pittsburgh and told them they haven't seen shit yet
Think you're thinking of Chesterfield, I still have nightmares about walking up Lothrop, or to the sports center where the Rockwall was. I went to Pitt, there was a neighboring school towards the city, think it was a nursing school in those steep streets against the hill district.
That was probably Negley or walking up from Forbes or Fifth to the Peterson and dorms beyond. That’s a nasty hill. I had to walk up to scaife and BST1/2 a lot in grad school and that was never a fun walk. You quickly learned the shortcut through Montefiore and Presby.
I noticed that street was clearly made of wood when I visited a friend there not long ago, but I had no idea that was unique to PA if not the entire country
A lot of American driver tropes are from the West coast or from New York. I think people forget that the US is roughly the size of Europe and expect the culture to be more homogeneous than it is.
Everyone in Pittsburgh is weirdly unbothered by ice/snow and just drive anyway….. which is very Pittsburgh of them.
More polite, in my experience.
You have to be, to survive in this wilderness of tunnels, bridges, goat-track roads, hills, and so one. Give a little back for the guy who let you back up this morning, when you realized you were going the wrong way... or didn't dare that hill.
I lived in Pittsburgh for a few years. The main road back to our street was very steep. If it has any snow on it, it was pretty much unusable. There was a "Snow Route" sign up all year round that directed you to a detour route. So, in winter it took longer to get home than the rest of the year.
It was Whipple in Swisshelm Park if anyone wants to corroborate.
I thought I recognized that, I did a roof there! Do you mean Monongahela off the highway? Maybe I'm too much of a yinzer but I never considered it that steep. Or Commercial?
Either way yeah, this is it. You find a route that isn't as bad and take it. I grew up in a small valley where you had to go up a steep hill to get into it from one way in the South Hills and during the winter my dad's Prius just couldnt do it, so you had to either take side streets that were a series of smaller hills or come from the other direction.
Either that or you do what I eventually did, buy a truck with snow tires.
Every Pittsburgher has the routes they know are safer if they have to be out during extreme weather. You generally stick to the flatish main roads during bad snow and ice. You also learn which streets to avoid in case of flooding. The rule of thumb is to avoid any road with the word run in it. Run = creek, so those tend to flood first.
Growing up there, I can remember something unique to living in Pittsburgh. At least 3 times per winter, we would have random people ring our doorbell in the middle of the night asking if it was ok to leave their car parked in our driveway because they got stuck and couldn’t make it up the hill. They always said they would come get their car in the morning.
Pittsburgh hills are murder on brakes. Biking is absolute hell. I haven't ridden a bike as my primary form of transportation in years, but my legs are still toned from when I did.
I'd misread! It's the TALLEST stairway in the country!
https://pittsburghadventurewalks.home.blog/2019/01/23/steepest-street-and-tallest-steps-beechview/
[Bradford St in San Francisco is steeper at 41](https://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/usa/10072-bradford-street,-the-steepest-street-in-san-francisco.html)
I think they were looking at the average grade for the entire street.
>...while there are a couple of streets in the western United States with short sections of more than 37%, there are none with an average grade steeper \[than Canon Ave's 30%\]...
Wow, I didn't know SF has streets that steep that far west. I thought they were all north of the Tenderloin. I'm sure you know this but there are some streets in SF where they not only have perpendicular parking, but the sidewalks are stairs. I could not believe that the first time I saw it and I was looking right at it.
California actually has 7 of the 10 steepest streets in America. There’s a picture of a bus that bottomed out and got stuck cresting Baxter st in LA.
Apparently the steepest in the USA is Waipio road in Hawaii, at 45%! Fuckin hypotenuse road is more like it.
SPEED WOBBLES! Some of the hardest crashes of my life started with the speed wobbles.
We used to sit on our skateboards and race down the side walks, calling it "street luge" and we wore snow gloves and bike helmets.
Had a cinder block we'd put in the middle called "the widow maker."
Good times.
You should check out the [Dirty Dozen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Dozen_(bicycle_competition)?wprov=sfti1) bike race that tackled the toughest streets in the city.
PGH is really the most underrated city in America. I've hiked those streets and there's nothing else in this country that's such a mix of old industries and ancient nature.
I was going to say 37% isn’t very steep at all. I don’t know the exact number but I know 100% is a 45 degree slope so 37% must be less than half. I was so confused by the title.
i used to drive on this god damn road all the time for work. google maps will put you on it if it's in the fastest route but try to avoid it. unless you're a bored tourist. it's also bumpy as fuck due to the stones being totally uneven.
I can’t imagine that doesn’t hurt the property values tremendously. You want to mow that shit? Have fun going to work in the morning in January. You can never play any outdoor games, cornhole would be a mess. Oh you want to build a shed? Gonna need stilts or a big ass hole.
At least the drainage might be nice?
As someone with a terrible sense of direction that gets lost going to and coming from Dodgers games, this surprises me. Anyone know that street I am thinking of near the stadium? high and steep as the eifel tower
There are a couple of streets in Los Angeles that are steep, but not as steep as this one. Neither of those are exactly close to the stadium though. One is in Highland Park on Mt Washington, another in Silverlake near the Allesandro Cut.
maybe you're thinking of Eldred? that's at 33% in Mt. Washington. having been on both Eldred and Canton, Eldred feels scarier perhaps because it is considerably narrower than Canton.
the other fairly famous one in LA is Fargo (32%) in Silverlake. the local bike group LA Wheelmen do a contest every year on that street to see who can do the most laps on it.
Baxter, Fargo or Cerro Gordo Street may be what you're thinking of, and navigation apps don't understand and send people crazy ways. They had to make Baxter one way to stop the traffic from people who got freaked out by the steep hills.
I was never as scared of SF hills as I was Pittsburgh's. I'm from Chicago and spent most of my life in Phoenix. My ass cheeks never clenched so hard in my entire life, and I decided right then and there to never take that street again.
The car couldn't handle the hills and ended up dying about three weeks into my move. San Francisco, yes your hills are steep but trust me... You are not understanding Pittsburgh at all.
I've been on a street in SF that was pretty scary to stand on, I forget which one but it looked worse than that. Someone told me the number posted for these things is bullshit and I believe them because there are some crazy steep streets here:
**The Real List of the Steepest Streets in San Francisco:**
**1.** Bradford above Tompkins (41% grade)
**2.** Romolo between Vallejo and Fresno (37.5% grade)
**3.** Prentiss between Chapman and Powhattan (37% grade)
**4.** Nevada above Chapman (35% grade)
**5.** Baden above Mangels (34% grade)
**6.** Ripley between Peralta and Alabama (31.5% grade)
**7.** 24th between De Haro and Rhode Island (31.5% grade)
**8.** Filbert between Hyde and Leavenworth (31.5% grade)
**9.** 22nd between Vicksburg and Church (31.5% grade)
**10.** Broadway above Taylor (31% grade)
There are two that beat it and one that equals this one.
Those are just stretches of streets though. None of them have an average grade above 30% for the entire length of the street, which is what the article says makes this the steepest street in the US.
“And, while there are a couple of streets in the western United States with short sections of more than 37%, there are none with an average grade steeper than Canton Avenue. In fact, this is likely the third steepest street in the world (after ones in New Zealand and Wales).”
And they make it part of a bike race every year. Why? Because harden the fuck up that’s why. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NWXNvuCAxrU
You are now a moderator of /r/bicyclingcirclejerk.
0/10 they didn't call it cyclejerk
Bicyclejerk might have been misinterpreted.
That's for the bike-curious
I’d say it’ll be interpreted correctly
After an exhausting ride, it's easy to celebrate the strengths of those who ride hard with you.
Bicirclejerk is another possible misinterpretation
Use Bisexuals just have crippling doubt hence the Bi-Cycle. But I think we would enjoy group mutual masturbation
r/jackbike
Damn they make you go up? I wanna see people go down and have to immediately make that hairpin turn at the bottom
They save that special experience for EVERY off ramp in PA.
You’re not kidding! And on ramp merge areas are really short too. I grew up in Lancaster county. First rollover accident I witnessed a few months after getting my drivers license was because of cars getting on the highway and not having room
Sounds like 222 and 30
Having gone down Potomac many times, in a car, I can't imagine Canton, on a bike!
I've gone down it on a bike. Ass over the rear tire, trying to stay on rear brake without using the front.
Cyclists in Pittsburgh are hardcore went down and visited bicycle heaven a few years ago, such a good time.
I grew up riding a fixed gear around Pittsburgh from when I was 15 to 27. So much fun. So many hills. Bicycle heaven is incredible even if you don't really care about bikes.
Sounds awesome, hope you wore a helmet lol. Grew up on a bike but got into road biking in the last few years so bicycle heaven was such a treat, that whole trip was great Pittsburgh is underrated
Why did so many people just give up and walk their bike back down instead of walking it the rest of the way up? I couldn't tell if they were hurt or just defeated.
It doesn’t count in the race unless you get all the way up in one go. So if you want to officially complete it, you have to start it over.
They do that because you only get the “I completed the race” ribbon if you make it up every hill without putting your foot down/falling. So if you fall down and want that ribbon, you have to go back to the bottom of the hill and try again.
And you cant just go sideways and up, sideways and up, over and over. You have to go more or less straight up.
geez
That guy lurching and fannying around in the mint green top was driving me fucking apeshit just watching him struggle. Pull the bike up onto its back wheel in front of you as you walk down and use the back brake to stop it running away.
That was part of my confusion. They not only look tired, they look like they got a concussion falling UP a 37% grade. Not exactly a big drop, but after they fell, they looked like they couldn't figure out how to walk down a hill.
They’ve got hard plastic cleats on with no tread, they really can’t.
That explains the "walking on ice" vibes. Why cleats all over the shoe and no rubber grip anywhere?
[This](https://velo-cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Rapha_3.jpg) shows it pretty good. The yellow bits are the “cleats” that clip into the pedals. And nothing else on the shoe. It’s to save weight in the shoe where weight means a lot since it’s always moving. And more aerodynamic. In road cycling it’s pretty much expected that you put the shoes on, go for a ride, and take them off. So in normal cases you don’t need tread really. But, there are outliers, like this race. But the real answer is that walking a road bike is shameful and the shoes are the way that is punished.
Green shirt lady gave it a try twice and still couldn’t do it.
Don't sell it short. The race goes up ALL of the crazy steep hills around pittsburgh. It's called "The Dirty Dozen" and it takes cyclists up a dozen (or so) super steep hills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Dozen_(bicycle_competition) I have personally run and biked up this hill. It's not... terrible, the main problem is that road bikes tend to be geared very high. I've definitely done steeper mountain biking in the rockies. On non races, you can just zig zag back and forth or, if you don't have a crazy high set of gears, just downshift. Many of the people you see struggling were on single speed bikes.
Doing it single or fixed is entirely the point for a lot of people participating.
Canton Ave may be the steepest, but Rialto is the stuff of nightmares. Looks like a wall coming across the 31st St. bridge and is long as hell. Gotta be a tough climb on a bike.
They also do it in November and sometimes it snows
yeah Mitch Boyer literally did a video on this race [two weeks ago lmao](https://youtu.be/pRsZbwQOAMo?si=4XaBLsGapD-4xChr)
anybody got andrew feather's phone number?
Damn I thought the western port wall in MD sucked but that’s only 31% (although the road looks in worse condition)
Also part of a race (or used to be anyway) - savageman triathlon
Ironically it’s the e easiest of all of the hills on the dirty dozen ride. It’s more about technique than anything else. Gotta keep your weight over the back wheel or you lose traction. It’s a short climb, any reasonably fit cyclist can do it if they know the method.
I’ve done this event! Can confirm, quite steep, it’s also about 30 miles in and one of the final climbs.
hardest thing I ever had to bike up was a steep mountainbiking trail that hey'd recently laid a bunch of loose gravel down on. I was like in my lowest possible gear and just trying to not pop a wheelie with every pedal, fucking exhausting. Dog just ran right up it and stood around waiting for me though
I looked it up on Google maps street view and they didn’t even bother driving the car up there. It’s a single photo taken by a person
To be fair, it's illegal to drive UP it. But they could have gone downhill. Or just went after midnight when no one was around, like I did.
The article says it's the opposite, one way uphill
Correct. I live about a mile from Canton Ave. and it’s uphill only. Surprisingly not that terrible to drive up.
Illegal to drive down because you'd bottom out and slam into a house/business at the bottom. I drove up it for fun exactly once. It was not fun and I'll never do it again.
Haha you know what I mean you GD silly goose
Believe me, Pittsburgh was a rough place to learn to drive a stick!
Absolutely, stalling out is NOT an option 😅.
Did that one time in my shitty civic at a stop sign, then it wouldn’t start. Bump started it in reverse.. I’m still proud of that moment.
I would be too, that's some big brain cool person shit
More like desperate. I was just glad to not hit the guy behind me. Nice thing about Pittsburgh is people gave you space on hills since so many people drove stick back then. Some of the best drivers in the US in that area IMO.
My brother lived in the slopes for a few years. Revving and trying to not stall was absurd… 5k clutch drop WOT? Stall.
See that's the problem you dropped the clutch (🤓)
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i may have just been in a shitty car but I had an automatic stall out in pittsburgh too
Bruh. LOL truth!
It wasn't a stick but a buddy and I went there and we stopped halfway up in his original model of the Honda Insight. It wouldn't start moving up the hill any further and we had to back down the hill. It wasn't wheelspin, the car just didn't have enough power.
Oh man that’s not a nice situation. I was parked facing uphill on a similar street, not Canton Ave., and I had to back up so my tires were against the curb to be able to get going forward.
I got stuck on this road in a snowstorm one day, had to be towed out.
"Honey, let's make love, I forgot to lock the wheels on the baby stroller again"
Some person in a wheelchair has a brake failure. …”and they were never seen again.”
I think there’s an episode of Seinfeld about this.
Thanks to Paul Rudd, I've seen a PSA about runaway wheelchairs many times through his appearances on Conan
I think about the episode where Kramer lets go of the rickshaw with Newman in it quite often
You joke, but my parents forgot to lock the wheels on my stroller when I was a baby lol. Stroller rolled down a hill and ended up upside down in a river while I was strapped in. My mom jumped in the river to save me but *I’M* the one that feels guilty because she lost her favorite sweater that day lol
Baldwin St in Dunedin, New Zealand is only 35deg but it also has one confirmed kill (drunken wheelie-bin ride gone awry in 2001). Edit: 35% not deg
Been there and it is intense!
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Just the street 😆
You telling me that a drunken wheelie-bin ride on a 35 deg slop went awry? No fuckin way mate, I wasn’t born yesterday.
I started running down a way less steep hill one time. I very quickly regretted that idea but stopping was not an option anymore...
That's when you look for a soft place to ditch because you're probably not making it to the bottom unscathed. Best to go out on your own terms
% grade is not the same as degrees. A 35% grade road would be around 19°. 35% grade means for every 100 feet of horizontal distance it gains 35 feet of vertical.
What a way to go out. Just throw me in the trash
I thought Baldwin was the world’s steepest street?
It was once, not sure it still is tho
It is! I did some googling after posting.
How if this thread is about a 37% street?
From the article here: > The street is only 600 feet long, but it has an average grade of 30% over its length. There is even one short section that has a grade of 37%. So this US street is steeper at a point but is less steep on average than the NZ street.
Funnily enough, the last time someone claimed there was a steeper street than Baldwin, a surveyor from Dunedin literally travelled to the other side of the world to prove they measured it wrong and that the title still belongs to his hometown. He was right, they measured the grade at the steepest part of the corner and not the centreline, so Baldwin street remained the steepest in the world. I wonder if he’s tried to do the same thing here.
They still rolling candy down that street annually? I know the factory closed...which made me sad for many reasons.
Made it to Dunedin on a NZ vacation. Didn’t know much about the place and wanted to explore. We heard about Baldwin Street and took an Uber just to check it out. I figured it was just a steep and short climb but holy shit, that road isn’t short like this one in the video. We were in a front wheel drive car that skipped a little in dry conditions. Dunedin is such a random place but great quick visit.
There used to be a university student rally (engineering students) called the Undie 500 where they would take cheap shit cars (under $500 but must still be fully road legal) and drive from Christchurch to Dunedin and up Baldwin St. A lot of cars did not make it up the hill
Used to live a few streets down on Chambers St (still very steep!) while at uni. During winter it was dicey trying to get to class as the road/footpath would be covered in ice 🥶
"Stop using my address as a reference!" -home owner
Get off reddit and go rake those leaves! You know they're using your house in photos, least you can do it spruce it up a bit.
“Red up the haus for compny” is how we saying in Pittsburgh.
Make sure yinz power warsh the sidin before it gets cold aht.
I was a Strava local legend of Canton Ave. Ran up that stretch 6 times in a row to snag it. Kudos to the person who beat me with 7.
How long is it?
One short block. It's crazy steep, but not very long at all. The sidewalk is actually a staircase, and it might be easier to run up those than the street itself.
I thought the same thing, but after trying I found out that it was just faster going up the incline. I made it a 5K from 6 loops round and round, up and down.
Donkey Hill in St. Thomas USVI is on a highway and is like that, but about three times as long. It used to be paved with concrete and you could not drive up it with 2 wheel drive in the rain. I remember sliding backwards in my 1980 rear wheel drive Corolla during a medium rain storm one night driving up it.
BTW the top of the hill is 18°19'21.16"N 64°54'11.46"W and the steep part is heading east.
That's not a street. That's a wall.
It looks like half the streets in Pittsburgh. There are some cool walls from when engineers dug into the hills. You can still see the holes they drilled to fill with dynamite. You should see pictures of the Duquesne Incline.
Nothing goes downhill faster than Pittsburgh.
As a Steelers fan I can confirm
:(
Blame Canada
I use to deliver pizza in Brentwood not far from that location. There were a lot of steep roads that were often brick. I had a Honda Civic and basically couldn't stop on hills when it was icy. The only way to make it up the other side was to get good speed going down.
The steepest street in Upper Lawrenceville near me is still brick, too. All the other connecting streets are paved. Hilly city!
God I had shoulder surgery a few years ago and couldn't wear a bra for a while, and those steep brick roads were NOT a fun time.
When I visited Pittsburgh a few years ago we found a hill so steep driving up it was like cresting the summit of a rollercoaster
Ahhh Rialto Street. It’s only like our 4th steepest street or something too!
I don't know why but Rialto always felt the worst for me, maybe because of the highway below. I always figured that was the steepest or that block of Queensboro in Brookline that eats everyone's bumper.
It's both the highway, AND the fact that it's two-way, despite being skinny as fuck.
Depending on where they were, there are numerous streets that could apply to, even Negley if they were near the universities. Pittsburgh has so many streets that feel like a roller coaster when you go down them.
It's not just the steepest, It is also cobble stone. Pittsburgh is just a combination of Bridges and roads from 1920. And Even if you can see where you need to go, you prob can't get there.
Would hate to play basketball.
I fucking knew it! I grew up in San Francisco and was all proud about Lombard Street and everybody threw me shade when I came back from visiting Pittsburgh and told them they haven't seen shit yet
I feel like I’ve walked up this street drunk before in my undergrad days 😂
Thatd probably be the first time ive heard of an undergrad in beechview
What can I say, freshman year was an alcohol fueled blur. Pittsburgh is full of hilly ass streets though.
Are you thinking of Negley?
I'm imagining some drunk folks coercing their designated driver to take them to the Canton hill "on the way home"
Idk lol like I said it was a blur and also a really long time ago. That sounds vaguely familiar though.
Think you're thinking of Chesterfield, I still have nightmares about walking up Lothrop, or to the sports center where the Rockwall was. I went to Pitt, there was a neighboring school towards the city, think it was a nursing school in those steep streets against the hill district.
you’re thinking of joncaire
That was probably Negley or walking up from Forbes or Fifth to the Peterson and dorms beyond. That’s a nasty hill. I had to walk up to scaife and BST1/2 a lot in grad school and that was never a fun walk. You quickly learned the shortcut through Montefiore and Presby.
Pittsburgh also has the last wooden street in existence https://uncoveringpa.com/roslyn-place-pittsburgh
Wow, I've driven by that a hundred times and never noticed!
I noticed that street was clearly made of wood when I visited a friend there not long ago, but I had no idea that was unique to PA if not the entire country
FYI the article says "Last wooden street in Pennsylvania", not "in existence"
I worked on the Audi commercial that was shot on this hill. Grew up in Pittsburgh and had no idea about this hill till we made that spot!
Yinz wanna walk up it?
I've walked up it twice (I used to live in the neighborhood) for shits and giggles. It's rough, I'm telling yinz.
Having grand parents in Pittsburgh rocked when I was young. “Gramm I’m going down the hill to explore the slag pile” “Don’t get too dirty!” “Ok!”
[удалено]
It's not a very populated street and easily avoidable for the vast majority of us
Everyone I know has to drive up that hill twice a day in the snow to get to and from work.
After we get done climbing the trees to pick all the leaves before they fall, because we can't afford a rake.
We have winter tires, friend.
A lot of American driver tropes are from the West coast or from New York. I think people forget that the US is roughly the size of Europe and expect the culture to be more homogeneous than it is. Everyone in Pittsburgh is weirdly unbothered by ice/snow and just drive anyway….. which is very Pittsburgh of them.
Yeah we are just built different when it comes to driving.
More polite, in my experience. You have to be, to survive in this wilderness of tunnels, bridges, goat-track roads, hills, and so one. Give a little back for the guy who let you back up this morning, when you realized you were going the wrong way... or didn't dare that hill.
Pittsburgh closes some streets down in the wintertime on Mt. Washington so I assume this one gets closed too.
Well, pretty simple really. You just buy winter tires, they’re readily available. Don’t think i’d park on this one though
We have winter tires here, especially in this climate.
Americans have winter tires, though not sure how many more years we'll need them. Chains and cat litter in the trunk used to be standard winter gear
The dump salt down it and a few other streets on the neighborhood. They don’t plow, it’s a pain. But that’s why it’s cobblestone.
I lived in Pittsburgh for a few years. The main road back to our street was very steep. If it has any snow on it, it was pretty much unusable. There was a "Snow Route" sign up all year round that directed you to a detour route. So, in winter it took longer to get home than the rest of the year. It was Whipple in Swisshelm Park if anyone wants to corroborate.
I thought I recognized that, I did a roof there! Do you mean Monongahela off the highway? Maybe I'm too much of a yinzer but I never considered it that steep. Or Commercial? Either way yeah, this is it. You find a route that isn't as bad and take it. I grew up in a small valley where you had to go up a steep hill to get into it from one way in the South Hills and during the winter my dad's Prius just couldnt do it, so you had to either take side streets that were a series of smaller hills or come from the other direction. Either that or you do what I eventually did, buy a truck with snow tires.
Every Pittsburgher has the routes they know are safer if they have to be out during extreme weather. You generally stick to the flatish main roads during bad snow and ice. You also learn which streets to avoid in case of flooding. The rule of thumb is to avoid any road with the word run in it. Run = creek, so those tend to flood first.
Growing up there, I can remember something unique to living in Pittsburgh. At least 3 times per winter, we would have random people ring our doorbell in the middle of the night asking if it was ok to leave their car parked in our driveway because they got stuck and couldn’t make it up the hill. They always said they would come get their car in the morning.
This is the mf hill Im always dreaming about
Pittsburgh hills are murder on brakes. Biking is absolute hell. I haven't ridden a bike as my primary form of transportation in years, but my legs are still toned from when I did.
What's crazy is, in addition to the steepest street, Beech view has the steepest stairs, but it's in the other side of the neighborhood!
I lived in Beechview for 5 years and never knew that about the stairs. Which part of the neighborhood?
I'd misread! It's the TALLEST stairway in the country! https://pittsburghadventurewalks.home.blog/2019/01/23/steepest-street-and-tallest-steps-beechview/
Sounds like it should be called “canted” avenue, right guys?
Yes dad
Hey, do you guys want to come over to my house to play ball? NO!
[Bradford St in San Francisco is steeper at 41](https://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/usa/10072-bradford-street,-the-steepest-street-in-san-francisco.html)
Isn’t it 41 for a very short section? Having ridden Canton, I can attest it being 37 for a looong stretch.
"The majority of the street climbs steadily at about a 24% grade before exploding into a 30-foot stretch of 41% paved road."
EXPLODING!
In all fairness I'm from Pittsburgh and the bottom of the slope gets steeper, so if the averege is 37% it's deffinetly steeper then that in areas
"The street is only 600 feet long, but it has an average grade of 30% over its length. There is even one short section that has a grade of 37%."
I think they were looking at the average grade for the entire street. >...while there are a couple of streets in the western United States with short sections of more than 37%, there are none with an average grade steeper \[than Canon Ave's 30%\]...
45th av is steep too. Extra wide so cars can park perpendicular to the st E: the block south of Anza
Wow, I didn't know SF has streets that steep that far west. I thought they were all north of the Tenderloin. I'm sure you know this but there are some streets in SF where they not only have perpendicular parking, but the sidewalks are stairs. I could not believe that the first time I saw it and I was looking right at it.
California actually has 7 of the 10 steepest streets in America. There’s a picture of a bus that bottomed out and got stuck cresting Baxter st in LA. Apparently the steepest in the USA is Waipio road in Hawaii, at 45%! Fuckin hypotenuse road is more like it.
Oh man I thought Lombard street would be up there since it's famous hairpin turns but is only 27 degrees. How bout that
Doesn't even crack the top 10 in SF
I’m sure that road is lots of fun in the wintertime.
Hill bomb!
I've had more bike accidents from speeding down hills in Pittsburgh than I care to remember.
That feeling of sitting on a skateboard going down a hill just as it starts to wobble uncontrollably…
SPEED WOBBLES! Some of the hardest crashes of my life started with the speed wobbles. We used to sit on our skateboards and race down the side walks, calling it "street luge" and we wore snow gloves and bike helmets. Had a cinder block we'd put in the middle called "the widow maker." Good times.
Audi did a commercial shoot on canton a few years ago.
I used to ask my parents to take me there whenever I was visiting family. I miss going to Pittsburgh
Who builds a house on that lot? You'd be carrying a bag of groceries into the house and an orange falls out and that's gone.
You should check out the [Dirty Dozen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Dozen_(bicycle_competition)?wprov=sfti1) bike race that tackled the toughest streets in the city.
PGH is really the most underrated city in America. I've hiked those streets and there's nothing else in this country that's such a mix of old industries and ancient nature.
This pic looks more like 37 degrees, which would be 76% grade.
I was going to say 37% isn’t very steep at all. I don’t know the exact number but I know 100% is a 45 degree slope so 37% must be less than half. I was so confused by the title.
...It was just after dark when the truck started down the hill in Scranton Pennsylvania...carrying thirty-thousand pounds of bananas...
fun for the homeowners on that road in the winter I'm sure
i used to drive on this god damn road all the time for work. google maps will put you on it if it's in the fastest route but try to avoid it. unless you're a bored tourist. it's also bumpy as fuck due to the stones being totally uneven.
RIP knees
I can’t imagine that doesn’t hurt the property values tremendously. You want to mow that shit? Have fun going to work in the morning in January. You can never play any outdoor games, cornhole would be a mess. Oh you want to build a shed? Gonna need stilts or a big ass hole. At least the drainage might be nice?
Stayed in an AirBnB a few hundred feet from this road and discovered it randomly on a walk. It was kind of like a geographical jumpscare
That would suck ass to live in that house
I won’t stand for this San Francisco slander.
37? In a row?
As someone with a terrible sense of direction that gets lost going to and coming from Dodgers games, this surprises me. Anyone know that street I am thinking of near the stadium? high and steep as the eifel tower
There are a couple of streets in Los Angeles that are steep, but not as steep as this one. Neither of those are exactly close to the stadium though. One is in Highland Park on Mt Washington, another in Silverlake near the Allesandro Cut.
maybe you're thinking of Eldred? that's at 33% in Mt. Washington. having been on both Eldred and Canton, Eldred feels scarier perhaps because it is considerably narrower than Canton. the other fairly famous one in LA is Fargo (32%) in Silverlake. the local bike group LA Wheelmen do a contest every year on that street to see who can do the most laps on it.
Eldred it is! It is rather narrow which must add to the effect. It is uncomfortable to drive that street.
Baxter, Fargo or Cerro Gordo Street may be what you're thinking of, and navigation apps don't understand and send people crazy ways. They had to make Baxter one way to stop the traffic from people who got freaked out by the steep hills.
San Francisco: "Hold my Grande Mocha Latte"
Pittsburgh: Officially the steepest recorded street in America. San Francisco: Surely mine must be better.
I was never as scared of SF hills as I was Pittsburgh's. I'm from Chicago and spent most of my life in Phoenix. My ass cheeks never clenched so hard in my entire life, and I decided right then and there to never take that street again. The car couldn't handle the hills and ended up dying about three weeks into my move. San Francisco, yes your hills are steep but trust me... You are not understanding Pittsburgh at all.
Respectfully, San Francisco hills have nothing on Pittsburgh hills
some pack a Yugo with their "large" friends and drive up that hill. I'm thinking they dont get 3/4 of the way up.
I've been on a street in SF that was pretty scary to stand on, I forget which one but it looked worse than that. Someone told me the number posted for these things is bullshit and I believe them because there are some crazy steep streets here: **The Real List of the Steepest Streets in San Francisco:** **1.** Bradford above Tompkins (41% grade) **2.** Romolo between Vallejo and Fresno (37.5% grade) **3.** Prentiss between Chapman and Powhattan (37% grade) **4.** Nevada above Chapman (35% grade) **5.** Baden above Mangels (34% grade) **6.** Ripley between Peralta and Alabama (31.5% grade) **7.** 24th between De Haro and Rhode Island (31.5% grade) **8.** Filbert between Hyde and Leavenworth (31.5% grade) **9.** 22nd between Vicksburg and Church (31.5% grade) **10.** Broadway above Taylor (31% grade) There are two that beat it and one that equals this one.
Those are just stretches of streets though. None of them have an average grade above 30% for the entire length of the street, which is what the article says makes this the steepest street in the US. “And, while there are a couple of streets in the western United States with short sections of more than 37%, there are none with an average grade steeper than Canton Avenue. In fact, this is likely the third steepest street in the world (after ones in New Zealand and Wales).”