- This is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, on the South Island of New Zealand.
It is quite steep here at top,
if you say it's a 35% slope, it sounds really impressive.
If you say it's 19 degrees, it doesn't sound that great,
but you try walking up it.
It actually holds the Guinness World Record
for steepest street in the world,
a fact that brings an increasing number of tourists
to what was, before social media, a quiet bit of suburbia.
I got here early in the morning on the offseason,
and there are already lots of people taking pictures.
If you've seen my channel before, though,
you can probably work out what the next question I'm going to ask is.
What actually counts as the steepest street in the world?
- 1877 was the year when Baldwin Street, as a 10-acre section,
was purchased by Captain William Baldwin.
And then he decided to subdivide it
into 132 separate building sections.
The reason why the streets are steep
is because the initial subdivision was into 10-acre lots.
They were constrained because once the 10-acre lots
had been put in straight-sided rectangles,
there wasn't much choice and all those straight roads
were put in straight whatever the topography,
so if they had to go up a steep bit of mountainside, they did.
- We've had to put in traffic control infrastructure
and we're constantly adapting that
as the modes of transport of the visitors changes.
It's a difficult street to negotiate if you're not used to the steepness.
Occasionally, someone breaks down or
gets themself in a tight spot with a big camper van,
where they find they're not quite as adept
at backing and parking and turning as they thought they were.
It is a challenge for the residents of the street.
From time to time, they look out their windows, for instance,
and find visitors standing on their front lawn or in their garden,
taking photos, because we don't always
have front fences in New Zealand.
Baldwin Street has always garnered a lot of attention.
Instagram would've exacerbated that, if you like,
it's exposed Baldwin Street to more people around the world
and we think that's a good thing.
It's a point of difference for the city,
we've got wildlife, we've got heritage architecture,
and we've got Baldwin Street, steepest street in the world.
- Now, Guinness defines the world record
as "steepest street over a continuous distance of 10 metres".
And Guinness is the international standard arbiter of things like that because, well,
because no one else was doing it and they got there first.
But the record here is challenged.
If you take Baldwin Street over its whole length,
well, down there, it's flat at the bottom,
so along the whole thing, the average is much lower.
But that doesn't seem a sensible way of measuring it.
There's a street in Wales that claims to be steeper,
although that might depend on how you measure around a corner.
Do you take the centre line or do you take the steepest part on the inside?
And professional data analyst Stephen von Worley
found one street in San Francisco that briefly hits a 41% grade,
a good bit steeper than this,
for just under 10 metres. Not quite long enough to qualify.
- When I was young, and I was born in 1929,
nobody took much notice of Baldwin Street.
Everybody knew it was a steep one,
it wasn't seen seen to be unique in some ways.
But it's established itself, there isn't any doubt about that.
- Other towns and cities may quibble about the definition,
but "steepest 10-meter stretch of road"
isn't quite as catchy as "steepest street in the world".
And in the end, it's a nice Instagram photo opportunity,
another tourist attraction to bring people to the town.
And if you are going to crown a steepest street,
then you have to draw the line somewhere.
Even if you have to draw that line
at a bit of an angle.