The World's Steepest* Street!

Barley, a dog, sits beside an unpaved street so steep that her hind paws are are high as her forward elbows.

*unverified

There’s something very funny to me about urban planners who drop grids onto maps with hardly a care for their grade, creating a couple extra plots of land to sell to whomever is willing to make it work. This is especially true because, with modern civic tools, there are very real limits to how steep a road can be and remain paved. Once you get over 30 degrees, you start to run a very real risk of that the road will simply start to slide down the hill unless a lot of expensive stabilization is done underneath. For this reason, famously steep roads that must be paved will sometimes resort instead to cobblestones.

Now, I’m no surveyor, and I’ve done no formal study of the matter, but I feel like the street in the photo is definitely getting close to a 40 degree grade for this single block, and I’m not at all surprised that the city simply gave up trying to pave it at all. It’s pretty difficult to even walk down - your foot slides a bit with every step. So I’m calling it: Steepest street. I will not be taking any questions at this time.