More silly map things: steep streets
I wrote a few days ago about how I love watching people do stupid map-related personal challenges on YouTube. For a while, I've also been occasionally watching another YouTuber who is pursuing a personal map-related challenge: Mitch Boyer, a guy who wants to bike up all the steepest streets in the world.
His videos frequently engage with the question of what "steepest" actually means. The Guinness World Record standard for "steepest" requires the road to be public and accessible to cars, with structures on at least one side. It requires steepness to be checked from the middle of the road, and for the submitted grade to represent the average grade of the street's steepest 10 meter section. There are so many ways to compare the steepness of streets that the record for the world's steepest street has changed quite frequently over the last decade - a process which involved a town in NZ losing the title to a town in Wales, then (successfully) petitioning Guinness to change the definition of "steepest" so that they would get the record again.
His latest video spends a long time digging into the ambiguity surrounding which streets in the world are steepest. The town in Wales which took the record for less than a year juiced its steepness numbers by measuring the interior edge of some hairpin turns. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has a bike race up its 12 steepest streets, but the sign on its supposed steepest street - which it claims is the steepest street in the continental US - is not actually even the steepest street in Pittsburgh by the Guinness standards.
Boyer also sometimes digs into how difficult it is to capture the steepness of a street using a camera and 2D footage. "Steepness" is this wild physical and visual experience which really has to be experienced to be understood - a camera on a biker or a tripod or even handheld will always make a street look substantially "less steep" to the audience at home than it would feel if they were standing there. A lot of Mitch's videos contain a moment where a stray camera angle suddenly demonstrates to me how steep the street "actually" is. Part of the reason I like watching his stuff is for these moments where he struggles to communicate what he's actually going through physically. He often seems very indignant that the physical challenges he's trying to put on YouTube so consistently elude his audience's understanding. Notably, Boyer's approach to this whole project has become more and more produced and sponsored over time... as he engages with the question of how to get people to really understand what he's going through, he's begun taking sponsorship from a camera company.
This guy is chasing a prize he will never catch, and he knows it, and he knows the debate is part of why people watch, and that he will always be able to chase this goal because the goal itself is so subjective and ambiguous that he can constantly set himself new goals within it - which is what he does in the video above. There is something extremely gamelike about this - it reminds me more than anything of live game balance. When you want to capture attention, you can get much more out of something that allows and encourages and embraces the endless movement of endless numbers of goalposts. On some level, I do love it.