Like Rome! Built on hills! (and sacked by barbarians?)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

What are the steepest streets in Somerville?

I can't seem to find a convenient (free) topographic map of Somerville to answer my local geography trivia questions like this. Is there an online topo map of Somerville that will display in tiff or jpg or gif or something rather than some proprietary (or at least unreadable to my machine) format?

Comments

[lbmango.livejournal.com]

googlemaps has topo maps..

[rmd.livejournal.com]

really? i checked on maps.google.com and wasn't able to select "terrain" for the somerville area.

it looks like geology.com (http://geology.com/topo-maps/) has a link to them, but I can't zoom in as far as i'd like to get a better look at our steepest streets (I assume the streets around Prospect Hill take the prize, but I was curious to compare, for instance, steepness up Central from Somerville Ave and steepness up School from Medford)

[ron_newman]

You can look at Terrain for Somerville on Google Maps, but you must zoom out five levels from the top.
Try this link: http://goo.gl/maps/Qlhu

However, Google terrain maps are not USGS maps. No contour lines, for instance.

[ron_newman]

I see 'Terrain' maps but not USGS topo maps. How do I get those?

[balsamicdragon.livejournal.com]

The road up to Prospect Hill is pretty steep, and I believe Prospect Hill is the highest point in Somerville.

[ron_newman]

In October 2009 I designed and led a bicycle tour of all of Somerville's hills. Here's the map and here's the cue sheet, which includes altitudes.

Bikely.com also provides an elevation graph, but I can't give you a URL link because it's done with Javascript. Click on the map link then select "Elevation Profile" from the "Show" menu at far left.

According to the graph, Winter and Spring hills are both higher than Prospect, and Winter is a tad higher than Spring. Walnut Hill (aka College Hill) at Tufts is higher than all of the others, but its summit is in Medford.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool. Thanks!

ETA: oh, man, bikely.com is totally a great tool for this kind of thing.

[ron_newman]

I didn't even know about the 'punishing' ride that I linked to below, until I looked up Somerville just now at Bikely.

[balsamicdragon.livejournal.com]

Gasp! The Internets have _lied_ to me! :)

[ron_newman]

And here's another bike ride that someone else designed specifically to give people a punishing workout on Somerville hills: Map, Cue Sheet (with altitudes). On this one, it looks like Spring Hill is slightly higher than Winter Hill. I'm not actually sure which one is taller now.

This one doesn't cover all of the hills that mine does, but it is much more difficult because it repeatedly climbs and descends Spring Hill several times.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

excellent. I will be training for a marathon (October) this summer, and it is a very very hilly course. I was trying to figure out the best hills around here to run. This will help substantially. I had just been running up and down the hill on Tufts' campus, but it will be nice to have some alternatives.

[ron_newman]

Glad to be of assistance! Which marathon are you running?

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

Mount Desert Island (starts in Bar Harbor, ME, and runs around/through Acadia). Should be beautiful. But a very challenging choice for my first marathon. :)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Walnut Street between Bow Street and Highland is pretty horrible. Google Maps used to have it as a bike route (up the hill) until I submitted a change request, and they emailed me back saying that they agreed it was not a reasonable route with less steep streets elsewhere. :)

If you go here http://store.usgs.gov/ and click "Map Locator" in the upper left, you get to a Google Maps interface with a Topo button. It's a little hard to read and I wish I could get a larger visible area, but it's got all of Somerville.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I regularly go up over Walnut from Union Sq. to Gilman Sq., but I think Edgar Ave., from Jaques up to Main St. is nearly impossible to do.

There's a question of steepest vs longest in considering hills. Walnut might take you up more elevation, but you get some distance to do it in.

[sonofabish.livejournal.com]

Agreed- steepness is a function of altitude and distance.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I am an extremely casual rider--I took my bike out yesterday for the first time this year, and last year I commuted or rode around a couple dozen times. Walnut may be all fine and dandy for daily riders, but for casual riders like me, there are better streets from getting to Somerville Ave to Highland.

I hope to ride more this year, though. :)

[littlecitynames.livejournal.com]

YES. I hate the Edgar Ave hill, and I work at the school that's right at the bottom of it. When I bike, I go up Fremont Street instead, even though it's 3 blocks out of my way.

[ron_newman]

If you're going from the Healey school to the Davis area, I'd continue west on Bow Street in Medford, then up Dexter to Magoun Square, rather than doubling back on Main Street to Broadway.

[littlecitynames.livejournal.com]

I do :) But sometimes I head to my boyfriend's after work instead, which means I have to go down Central St. I did that the day I posted the comment, so that's the route that was in my mind.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I used to cut up Walnut all the time, but it was as an alternative to going up and over Prospect Hill. It's one of the better ways to cut through there IF you need to cut through without going up halfway to Davis, but that's about it.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Halfway to Davis? If you go just three small streets NW to Prescott, the hill is much less steep--it's the alternate route I started taking after realizing that Walnut was too much for me.

I've never had cause to go directly up Prospect Hill, though. I'm sure there are more difficult routes than Walnut; my statements are just from my experiences.

[acidgalore.livejournal.com]

MassGIS has the scanned USGS Topo maps http://maps.massgis.state.ma.us/MassGIS3DTopos/viewer.htm

[ron_newman]

As a bicyclist, my gut feeling is that Lowell Street in Spring Hill is steeper than anything else, but I don't know if that's really correct. Another steep one is Packard Ave, but the summit is a couple blocks into Medford.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That's a brutal one, too. I don't travel it that much, so I forget about it.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I used to live on Lowell, and it would get my vote.

No matter what direction I approached home, I had to go UPHILL. And up Lowell was the worst. :

[fefie.livejournal.com]

I live near Lowell, it sure gets my vote. (Feels steeper than Cedar and Central imo, probably matches Porter.)

The bikely route of steep roads/hills is great! Will be helpful the next time I want a quick challenging ride.

[turil.livejournal.com]

I agree. I lived on Lowell, and did it every day for years, and would indeed say that it's the longest, steepest hill in Somerville. It might not have the steepest incline of hills, geographically, (Prospect at the monument is steeper), but the ROAD is the longest steep incline out there.

[vonelftinhaus.livejournal.com]

So where would the highest "natural" point in Somerville be? I would then have to ask where would the highest point be-natural or unnatural, on top of a building most likely

[ron_newman]

If the highest point is on Winter Hill, it would be on the side road next to Broadway a bit west of Central Street.

If the highest point is on Spring Hill, it would be around Bailey Park, or perhaps on nearly Brastow Ave or Crown Street.

I think all of the Somerville part of Walnut Hill is lower than these, but I'm not 100% sure.

[ron_newman]

And my guess for highest artificial point is the top of this apartment building at or near the zenith of Winter Hill on Broadway. I don't think any building on Spring Hill, or the Somerville part of Walnut (College) Hill, is that tall.

The one possible competitor I can think of is the Prospect Hill Tower, but even if it's a taller building, its base is lower.

[noire.livejournal.com]

Porter Street between Summer and Highland is rather nasty as well.

[aquaflame16.livejournal.com]

Edgar Ave (Healey school up to Main st), especially the top block, is pretty steep.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall Stone (in Union Square) looks vertical.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

If you want a paper map, REI has sold them for years. I think there's a Boston store, and if not, there's definitely a store just off of 128 in Wakefield/Stoneham/Reading???

[ron_newman]

REI is in the Fenway, but I bet Globe Corner Books in Harvard Square sells topo maps too. EMS in Harvard Square might also have them.

Rubel's Boston Bikemap is an overlay of a USGS topographical map. You can buy this at any bike store or book store, and I've even seen it occasionally at drug stores and supermarkets.

[turil.livejournal.com]

Just as a random, related, comment... I like to call the road up to Prospect Hill "Somerville's own little Lombard Street", since it does that switchback thing, so that it's not so steep a road... But it's so short, and doesn't have the same impressive effect as San Francisco, so it's just really cute. :-)

[xuth.livejournal.com]

USGS maps are public domain (as all works of the federal government are). USGS at least was charging a fee for them so 5 years ago a group of people bought all of them and put them online at the internet archive (archive.org). The specific map you want can be gotten here:
http://www.archive.org/download/usgs_drg_ma_42071_d1/k42071d1.tif

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, I was one of those people. :)

Thanks! I hadn't been able to figure out which the correct map was when I posted this.

[ron_newman]

How do i read this file? Google Chrome asks me if it's OK to run Quick Time (I don't know why, but I say yes), and then all I see is a black screen.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

This is a standard tiff image file. I'm not sure what OS you're running but most full fledged image viewers (though not the preview app that come with windows or at least the versions I've run) should have no problems reading it. On windows I'd try IrfanView or an image editor like gimp. On mac, based on a quick google search, maybe something like Xee. This comes with the disclaimer that I've not run windows or macos for a very long time.

[hissilliness.livejournal.com]

There's a very short incline on Liberty Ave between Morrison and Hall Ave that's strikingly nasty.