HammerTime2: Yep.. I've climbed/dropped 30% grades on my MTB and I'd say this was worse.

The data from Strava perhaps isn't worth much, but shows there's a pretty steep section of road.
http://app.strava.com/rides/22587328#z8874|8920

I may be wrong.. maybe if somebody with less fatigue (I'm knackered ) could calculate the real incline of the first section of this road using this map. The increase in elevation is 5 metres per line. Scale is also indicated at the bottom.

Link to map: http://kart.finn.no/?lng=10.69311&lat=59.83008&zoom=20&mapType=finnvector

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12 Canyon Aeroad CF 9.0 ETE
12 Canyon Ultimate AL
11 Cervélo P2

subic bay, philippines

Well I found it on google street view: http://goo.gl/maps/6ttpj

It does look horrendously steep, That's all I can say.

Edit: this link to streetview shows how ridiculously steep that road is: http://goo.gl/maps/YD5LU

CarpetFibre: Yeah.. Haha. That last link does serve some justice to the steepness Add to it that the road on the left hand side is fairly steep aswell, probably 8-10%.

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12 Canyon Aeroad CF 9.0 ETE
12 Canyon Ultimate AL
11 Cervélo P2

The Shuttle's swan song over JPL

@Esterhas.. very cool

Epic picture!

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ciclismo-espresso.com

@Esterhas my hometown and some of my favorite mountains to ride in

Where's JPL?

Guys, think we can help this poor chap out?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=107438

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Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (USA) , just Northeast of Los Angeles.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-299
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Propulsion_Laboratory
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/

I might have the wrong road here but MapMyRide shows elevation on mapped roads. You can give it a section of road and it will give you back elevation with gradient.

If you give it too long of a road it will average it out by the way.

But this road is short enough.



This is how to calculate

Percent slope =

%m = (rise/run)*100

%m = (100ft./1320ft.)*100
%m = (.0757)*100
%m = 7.6 %

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Let d be the distance along the road, and e be the elevation gain. Then the percent grade is 100*e/[square root of (d*d- e*e)] . Note that d is the hypotenuse of the right triangle with sides e and square root of(d*d - e*e). Note that in stella's formula above, e is the rise, but square root of (d*d- e*e), not d, is the run. The run is not shown on the map, and needs to be computed (as above or by mathematically equivalent procedure).

If you want to solve for the elevation gain needed for 40% grade over a given distance along the road, d, the answer is d*sin(arctan(.4)) . So for example, for a distance along the road of 500m, an elevation gain of 185.7m (185,7 european style) corresponds to a 40% grade. You can get the answer in google by doing a "search" on 500*sin(arctan(.4)) , even if you don't know anything about trigonometry. So you'd need to cross 37 contour lines of 5m elevation difference over the span of 500m distance along the road to correspond to 40% grade.

I'll leave it to someone else to identify a suitable section of the road and count the contour crossings and corresponding distance along the road on djm's map. Then plug into the formula in the first paragraph, and there's your answer (presuming the map, with its elevation contours, is accurate).

Please note that the approximation of percent grade being 100*e/d becomes more and more inaccurate as the grade increases (not bad for 6% grade, not good for 40% grade). Using this approximate method for an elevation gain of 185.7m over a distance along the road of 500m results in (an approximate) grade of 37.1%, as opposed to the actual grade of 40%.