My impression wasn’t that his tires were slipping but that his brakes were. I am a lardass weighing in at over 400 pounds and havn’t done much biking lately but I seem to remember from my younger days that while my hand brakes could indeed lock my tires down going forward they would not do near as good a job at keeping me from going backwards. Also he said that he pushed on the pedal to try to stop this backward movement further indicating to me that his brakes not his tires were slipping
I’m surprised that overheated brakes don’t cause more problems on roads like the Troll’s Ladder, a popular tourist road in a mountainous area of west-central Norway. This road probably isn’t going to break any records for steepness, but it is on a consistently steep incline for a looooong time. Its popularity, alas, extends to tourists who have never driven mountain roads before, who have overloaded vehicles often pulling camping trailers, and who don’t know to shift to low gear! :eek:
Very entertaining to drive down, but only if you’re behind these folks. Being in front of them is not good for the nerves, and there’s only two small places to pull over and let them past…
The steepest street I know of – and I haven’t encountered steeper ones, even in San Francisco – is Third South between 8th and 9th East in Salt Lake City. That block is literally built on a fault line (one block over is Fault Line Park), and it’s the one street I couldn’t go up by bicycle (It was between my apartment and the University - I used to go one block over on either side, or else walk it up)
Here’s an account, with good photos, of a bicycle hill climb in Los Angeles. 33% is no record, but it’s steep.
There are, of course, alternative ways to get bikes up hills. Like this fine example from my former hometown of Trondheim 
It’s not an extremely steep hill, by the way - a gradient of about 1 in 5 - but it is soul-sappingly loooooong.
I thought the Seattle streets were pretty damn steep right by the water, but apparently the steepest is only 21% grade.
SF is the only place I’ve seen where the sidewalks were actually stairs.
I nominate Canton Street, Beechview, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Cobblestone paving. Stairstepped sidewalk. Grade of 37%.
Hey, I’m in Fayetteville, but don’t know where you are.
Aside from that, I’d nominate my road. It’s hard to get up in 3rd, and you. can’t. do. it. in 4th.
How can we check something like that? I’m serious, guys, I think that I win.
Several streets in my hometown (Morgantown, WV) have stairs for sidewalks in places.
North Spruce St. stands out – I recently took a Jersey City-born friend there and she freaked when we drove up it.
[Math geek]Although none of the people responding to this thread have made this mistake, someone posting on one of the linked pages confused % grade (the vertical rise divided by the horizontal run) with the angle between the road and horizontal (the arctangent of the grade).[/MG]
Hardknott Pass in Cumbria, England is often quoted as the steepest road in Europe being 33% it is due originally to them there barmy Romans who liked to build roads straight between their forts.
I’ve cycled up most of the well known UK steep roads.
The main problem with Hardknott pass is the to reach it from the Lakeland area, you have to ride over Wrynose Pass first, that is a real hard climb, because its 1in4 but its dead straight, with one bend in the middle, mostly 1in5 but the last couple hundred metres are the steep 1in4 bit, just when you think you have nothing left to give it rises up.
Riding up Wrynose Pass, my front wheel was just lifting slightly and skimming the ground from time to time, so when I got down the other side I stopped to put some rocks into my handlebar bag to keep the front stuck down better, since I knew of Hardknotts reputation long before I got there.
Hardknott for the most part is not as hard to ride as Wrynose, even though it is noticeably steeper, because it has a lot of bends on the lower steeper parts and you can swerve a bit to ease the gradient.
When you climb hills as steep as this, most cyclists will zig zag across the road, but the problem comes that as you do so, the sheer gradient can push you into zig zagging back downhill, and no matter what you do, once you are turned downwards, you just cant get it to turn back up again.
Rosedale Chimney Bank is a bit of a monster, when you ride up this one, the first part seems steep, its 1in5, but you soon forget this relatively flat part, because the road just rears up at you.Here again, your problem is that the steep part comes straight at you, you cannot zigzag, you just have to take it as it comes.
If the road is damp and you have high pressures in you tyres, they will lose grip and spin.
I’ve ridden this a few times, I live within (just) riding distance, to do it you have to jockey ride it, you use your whole body in the process, by bobbing up and down, timing your pedal thrust with you dropping your body a little faster than the pedal stroke, so that you increase your tyre grip on the power stroke.
It looks odd, gets you very hot, but you do not have the humiliation of falling off.
On hills this steep, if you stop, your cycle is at quite an angle on the hill, and your bars are relatively high up, whilst where you feet land is relatively low down, so that to push the cycle you are pretty much carrying the damn thing with your arms almost fully extended.
It makes you have to lean forwards and your feet may easily slip.
One friend with me was trying to ride Rosedale Chimney, but he just ground to a halt, and gracefully tipped sideways, like a great felled tree.
When he eventually landed(somehow the fall seems much further than one on level ground) he didn’t stop moving.
The road is so steep, that you literally slide down the face of it, and in my friends case, he was still attatched to his cycle by his toestraps, and every time he tried to reach uphill to the pedals and release his feet, he slid further downhill.
Laugh ? I absolutely pissed myself!
The worst hill I’ve climbed is the Shibden Wall, its 1in4 buts it’s cobbled, and this breaks your tyre grip.
http://www.cyclingphotos.freeserve.co.uk/cycling4/fondriest.html
Actually there are plenty of nasty cobbled climbs in that area, all are total bas****s to climb, you can feel you bike frame flex under the effort.
Cyclists will tell you that is easier to climb on fixed wheel than gears, which is true, dont know why but fixed wheel is the thing for such specialist climbing challenges.
casdave, what gearing do you use for these climbs?
Ho ho hol, you should visit the Bronx! (And upper Manhattan.)
Entire streets are staircases! (And every damn map shows them as through streets.)
OK everybody, look at that picture…see the house at the bottom of the hill, in direct line with the road?! Can you imagine living/sleeping/going into that house - knowing it is only a matter of time until something comes crashing through the wall at about 148 miles per hour!
It would be my luck to inherit that house from old Aunt Mildred.
There’s a “Whitley Terrace Steps” near the Hollywood Bowl. Driving by, you just see a masonry wall with a gate in it, over which stands the standard white-on-blue L.A. street sign naming the street. Also, a canyon or two over you can find “Tavern Trail”, which is nothing but a very long steep staircase, with apartments and houses alongside. Notwithstanding that these places that are still maintained and lived in, the bottom of this ‘street’ bears a sign from the city saying that Tavern Trail is withdrawn from public use–probably because it was too steep for the City to want to take the responsibility for it.
Something like this happened near where I live. Moeser Lane in El Cerrito, CA is very steep (not nearly as steep as Baldwin Street, but considerably longer). A fully-loaded asphalt truck lost its brakes near the top of Moeser and made it almost all the way to the bottom before crashing into a house. There was a fire, and the elderly occupant of the house was saved by a passing UPS driver. The driver of the truck was severely injured but survived. The end of the house the truck ran into was almost completely demolished, and the house has since been rebuilt.
The driver had been breaking a local ordinance - the truck exceeded the weight limit for the street by quite a bit. He also broke the laws of common sense - he had no business trying to drive a vehicle that heavy down a street that steep.
Riding hills that steep on fixed I’d use 36chainwheel and 26 sprocket.
On gears though, its maybe 28 or 30 chainwheel and maybe 26 or 28 sprocket.
You can undergear yourself, (26 chainwheel and 32 sprocket - you also risk tearing the hub apart with that low gear too) so you end up pedalling fairly easily(comparitively) but you haven’t got the momentum to stay upright and you just wobble off, or wobble in a circle and get forced downhill.
Mountain bikes are hopeless for this type of climb, you can’t get far enough over the front wheel because of the position of the bars.Mountain bike bars are fairly high up anyway, and on a hill of this angle they end up even higher, comared to the rest of the bike and you just can’t pull on them.
It’s odd but track bars are really good, they are so low that they offset the sheer steepness of the hill and end up in a reasonable place to grip.
Balance is a crucial element too, you do end up going so slow that you need to be able to control it, the closest I could describe the handling problem is like riding free standing rollers, and doing it by standing on the pedals and pedallling fairly slow.
So what’s the difference between gears and fixed? I was thinking at first that fixed meant that the pedals were on the same axle as the wheel, like on kids’ tricycles or old-style big front wheel bikes, but casdave talks about sprockets on fixed.
Fixed refers to a bicycle with a single pair of gears - the one at the crank and the one at the rear axle.
More accurately - a single pair of sprockets, rather gears.