Don’t know, sorry. Haven’t been up there in ages, although I do know from personal experience that (in the early 1980s) a stock 1957 Chevy Bel Air couldn’t be stopped by the time it reached the curve at the bottom of the hill. The brake linings had already melted from the minimum braking required during the descent, and had to cool off a while before they could work again.
Like I said, there are also harsh roads like that outside of cities. Including several in Pennsylvania and West Virginia that I have personally driven on, although admittedly not recently.
Insisting that all the steepest roads in the continental USA are in urban centers, as HuffPo/Fixr seem to be doing, is an extraordinary claim, and very extremely unlikely. Far more likely that nothing outside cities was surveyed…
truth is, brakes are the only thing that let us go fast. when my brake broke on my bike i went exactly as fast as my sneaker could stop me. now fixed, i’m a bat out of hell. ( and, in need of new shoes. go figure. )
On a recent trip to LA, traffic was often so terrible that getting anywhere involved hours of sitting in it. We tried Waze once, and it saved us about ten minutes, but routed us through parking lots, alleyways, and back streets, all crowded with other people like us in rental cars, getting directions via Waze.
Careening your way down Baxter Street,
Stomping on the brakes with both feet,
Well, another crazy day,
Forget the right-of-way,
Try your best to not hit anything.
But you know he’ll always keep moving
You know he’s never gonna stop moving
'Cause he’s rolling, he’s the rolling stone
Agreed, the car wasn’t near its limits and I was not in danger per se. Also I generally know how to drive in the rain. But shoulds and shouldn’ts do not translate to L.A. drivers and I didn’t know what might be coming up behind me or around the next corner.
Many L.A. drivers notoriously cannot drive in the rain, parallel park or approach an intersection safely. We constantly see car owners who don’t get their tires and brake pads replaced until belts are showing and metal is grinding. A few million drivers also have a habit of honking when there is absolutely nothing anyone else around them can or should be doing differently, which then distracts those drivers even further and you get a loop of honkers, collisions, people slowing while passing collisions, and people honking at the people who are slowing to look.
Part of what would make this hill terrifying as a Waze cut-through is knowing that these are the vehicles and drivers on all sides of me, many experiencing this grade for the first time.
If it had a Powerglide transmission, the L gear should be used for high grade roads. If it was equipped with the Turboglide then the correct gear is Hr or Gr depending on when it was produced. Hr was Hill Retarder and Gr was Grade Retarder. If it had a three on the tree, then 1st is your best bet. All this was spelled out neatly on pages 11-13 of the owner’s manual where it instructs the driver to use gearing to supplement the breaks on steep downhill driving.
absolutely there are race and privilege issues involved with the way roads are built and where they are placed.
at the same time, residential streets are designed to be residential streets. they aren’t meant to be highly trafficked through ways.
you are costing yourself money when you, and everyone else, cut down that side street your app tells you about. those roads simply arent built to take the traffic. and they won’t last like they were meant, and they will cost you to repair and rebuild.
on another front, we all deserve to be able to live without the noise, pollution, and danger of a sudden highway out our front door.
just as there is zoning for commerical and industrial building, there has been - in effect - zoning for traffic. now that everybody has an app, and those apps aren’t bound by sensible rules, that defacto zoning has disappeared. to everybody’s detriment in my view.
I saw it more as me laughing hysterically at the idea that Huffington Post is a reliable source, and sharing the personal experiences that lead me to doubt the claims made.
But hey, whatever you hear, man. Do your thang!
Three on the tree! But even with downshifting, the amount of braking required to prevent the engine or transmission from leaping out of the car caused the brakes to overheat.
Then as I rounded the corner at the bottom, there were three deer in the road. Given the dropoff on the left and the cliff on the right, there was nothing I could do to avoid them, but my passenger (the car’s owner) reached right through the steering wheel and turned off the headlights. I screamed and turned them back on and the deer were gone - they’d been frozen by the car’s headlights.
You can probably see why this incident stuck in my memory.
Hmmm, vehicle jacklighting.
Re: Waze redirecting people onto a residential, not very navigable street. Maybe someone can pop on Waze intermittently on that street and claim bad traffic; Waze will then route people around the ‘heavy traffic area’. If Waze is in fact creating accidents there, it’s not a lie.
There’s a great deal of confusion generated by the disappearance of Edendale from the neighborhood maps.
Edendale is the valley that separates Silver Lake’s valley from Echo Park’s valley. A major trolley line – later a PE Red Car line – ran up the valley on its way to Glendale.
Edendale was the home of LA’s first movie studio, and was the center of silent-era filmmaking in LA.
Mack Sennett, Tom Mix, William Fox, Selig-Polyscope, Bison studios, Norbig, and Pathé all had studios there. The trolley line allowed studio personnel an easy commute, and it was far enough “outside the city” back then to permit open-air movie lots.
There’s still an Edendale Post Office and an Edendale Library, but the territory has been cut up and grafted onto Silver Lake or Echo Park, resulting in endless confusion, since both SL and EP residents will claim that Edendale “isn’t really [SL/EP]”.
On one hand it certainly is a hazard to residents and i think that Waze should take complaints like these seriously. On the other the road is public isn’t it? Do the residents on that street get special privilege over a public road? (legit question, not being snarky).
I tried out Waze for awhile. There were never any cops where it reported cops, and on the way into San Francisco the app shit the bed and stopped displaying roads. Just my little yellow car, floating in a pale void, surrounded by meaningless icons, and even a full restart (hazardous while driving) didn’t fix it. Google maps fired right up and had accurate up-to-the-minute route times. So: tried it out, it failed when I most needed it, and one of its main selling points (road hazard/cop info) was useless in practice. Deleted.
There are less extreme options such as adding curves like on Lombard in SF, warning signs, warning lights, raising the road elevation on the lowest section, closing the street to vehicle traffic, make the intersection a 4 way stop, etc. Personally I like curves. It adds personality and charm to an otherwise boring and dangerous bit of road.
Careening your way down Baxter Street,
