No 'Candy Land' on San Francisco's Real Crookedest Street

If you own a computer -- or even just look at one from time to time -- you probably heard about the transformation of the curvier-than-Carol-Doda stretch of Lombard Street into a giant "Candy Land" board. We're still getting Google alerts about it even though it happened last Wednesday.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with fun news and spectacles. But we do have a problem with the promulgation of misinformation. Lombard Street is not only not the curviest or crookedest street in the world -- it isn't even tops in the city.

That honor belongs to the 800 to 900 block of Vermont Street near McKinley Square in Potrero Hill -- a quarter of the city where, unlike Lombard's famous stretch, one doesn't get the feeling that neighborhood association rules require every third home to have a Lotus parked out front. In fact, as you can see at the tail end of the above video, there's a guy at the bottom of the street fixing his broken-down car. You won't catch that at Lombard.

While Vermont Street has only seven curves to Lombard's eight, an actual measure of the sinuosity ratio of the two streets shows the lesser-known channel to be curvier. We took a bike ride to the real curviest street in the city to see if any board games had sprung up without us noticing.

As you can see from the video, there were no spectacles to be found on Vermont Street -- at least not right now.