- 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.
Imagine being one of the poor pricks that lives on this street and having the dumbass Mayor thinking it's a good thing that you have annoying tourists invading your privacy and stomping all over your lawn.
He fully went down the whole country churning out some good videos about our home.
duhkneeden