SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) – When a fresh layer of snow comes just in time for the weekend, skiers may be excited to hit the slopes. Drivers avoid them.
With so many hills in the Syracuse area, there’s a good chance that your commute involves traveling up or down a steep street. In the snow, you may plan an alternate route to avoid slipping backwards.
“It’s really quite funny, and maybe quite sad when you see a car with amazing snow tires and four-wheel drive get stuck behind a car with two-wheel drive,” said Steven Diaz, professor of mathematics at Syracuse University.
However, the most difficult way of getting up a hill in fresh snow is by foot. To settle which hill pedestrians are most likely to fall down, it’s time to revisit middle school mathematics.
By finding the length and height of a hill, and using a tangent function, the angle of a hill will emerge, according to Diaz.
“You’d have to sort of get some criteria in your mind, because given any hill, it’s probably not uniformly the same slope. Probably goes up fast then slows down a little and goes up fast,” said Diaz.
For ease, this calculation will use the average height and distances of hills as provided by the measuring tools on Google Maps.
Due to the amount of viable contenders in Syracuse, this study will focus on two strong candidates.
First, the hill on Clarendon Street between Livingston Street and Sumner Avenue.
“I mean it’s the steepest hill I’ve walked up or down in Syracuse,” said Al Bell, a resident of Toronto, Canada.
However, even residents of Clarendon hill itself have a stronger hatred for a different hill.
“I think that the hill going up to Comstock is the steepest. But I think this one is cooler because of the brick,” said Serafina Bell, a resident of Clarendon hill.
The hill that Bell refers to is on East Adams Street between Walnut Avenue and Comstock Place.
Its residents agree that this is a fair assessment.
“Well I live on the hill and I love walking up it sometimes. Except in times like this. It’s cold, man. You can’t be walking down with any type of shoes on. You need Timberlands. Timbs, bro,” said Safiatou Barry, a resident of East Adams hill, who slipped on the way down.
Most pedestrians that frequent these street slopes may have a personal choice, but there is a mathematically correct answer.
The length of the hill on East Adams Street measures 480 ft, with an altitude increase of 75 ft.
While the Clarendon Street hill measures 173 ft, with an altitude increase 36 feet.
This puts the angle of East Adams Street at nine degrees, and the angle of Clarendon Street at 11.75 degrees, almost three degrees higher.
However, perhaps the length of East Adams Street gives pedestrians more opportunities to slip.
“This could be a sidewalk made of salt. And you are going to fall if you don’t have some nice Timberlands,” said Barry.
Keep in mind that this is a limited study.
