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Licensing & reuse

This survey is built on open data and publishes open data. This page says exactly what you may reuse and on what terms, and what we owe the sources we build on. Short version: take any climb's page, charts or numbers with credit; take the whole dataset under an open licence; don't clone the site.

What you may reuse

Any individual climb — CC BY 4.0

The text, gradient-profile charts, hillshade map images and figures of any individual climb page may be copied, adapted, translated, printed and republished — commercially or not — under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Credit “HowSteep — howsteep.org” (with a link where practical), name the climb's page, and note any changes you made. This grant applies per climb asset: it covers using particular climbs' pages and charts, however many you need; it is not a licence for the site as a whole (see the compilation below).

The dataset — ODbL 1.0

The catalogue CSVs (UK, US, Switzerland, Austria, France, New Zealand and Norway), the per-climb OCL documents and the map GeoJSON are one database, published under the Open Database License 1.0. Use it, analyse it, build and sell products on it — with two obligations: attribute (“Contains data from HowSteep (howsteep.org), licensed ODbL 1.0, incorporating OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors”), and if you publicly use a database derived from it, offer that derivative under ODbL too. Route geometry derives from OpenStreetMap, so ODbL obligations flow through this data regardless of anything we could grant.

The OCL format — CC BY 4.0 / MIT

The OCL specification text is CC BY 4.0 and the JSON Schema is MIT-licensed. Implement the format in any tool, open or closed, commercial or not.

The site as a whole — not licensed

The compilation — the survey's selection and arrangement of climbs, the complete page corpus, and the database rights in the collection as a collection — is © HowSteep, all rights reserved. Systematic reproduction of the site beyond the ODbL dataset (bulk scraping of pages, wholesale republication, mirroring) is not covered by the per-asset grant above. Planning something bigger than the licences allow — a book, an app, a mirror, a derived product on our own contributions? Ask: these licences are non-exclusive and separate terms are always negotiable. Open an issue on GitHub or use the report form.

The “howsteep” name is not licensed: don't present reuse as made or endorsed by this survey.

What we owe others

Every measurement here derives from open sources, each carrying its own terms, credited in the footer of every page:

Each country's line is the same credit its own pages carry in their footer, so the two can never drift apart; a country joins this list the day its pages ship. Community and commercial gradient databases (Strava, Climbfinder, PJAMM and similar) are not incorporated in the published dataset: where we consult them at all it is for private cross-checking only, and none of their values are republished.

Cite this survey

Preferred form for the survey as a whole:

Hirst, P. (2026). HowSteep: a LiDAR gradient survey of road climbs, methodology v1.0, dataset as of the date you consulted it. howsteep.org. Data ODbL 1.0; per-climb assets CC BY 4.0.

For a single climb, cite its page URL and the “as of” date in its footer, and quote the window length with every gradient (the format makes a distance-less maximum impossible to express; please keep it that way in citations too). Method changes are versioned; data changes are continuous and listed on the updates page.

No warranty

CC BY 4.0 and ODbL 1.0 both disclaim warranties, and so does the survey itself: measurements are terrain-model derived, not vetted on the ground, and nothing here is a route recommendation — see the note in every page footer. Reuse doesn't change that, and reusers should carry the same caution to their readers.