Sometimes a word can elude me for years, and when I find it, I like to hold it fast. This is for anyone chasing the same word.
When I lived in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood, I often remarked at how crossing the street was like hiking over a hill, the road was so steep along the sides. When trying to describe this experience, I struggled to find the word to describe it. Roads with proper grading have an arch shape to their cross-section in order to drain water into the gutters, but what to call this shape?
The words I’ve been looking for are road crown or camber, which describe the arch of the road surface along its cross-section. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, camber is used of roads, ship’s decks, airfoils, and skis alike. Of automobiles, camber refers to the alignment of the wheels and tires, with the tops of the wheels being further apart than the base (positive camber), or wider at the base (negative camber).
A couple other words exist for the crown of a road, but I’ll never remember these: cross fall and cross slope. They make sense, but they lack the poeticism of a crown or the elegance of camber.
Related is the word cant, which refers to the angle of a road (or rail line) to accommodate or counteract centrifugal forces on a vehicle traveling a curve. The cant of a NASCAR racetrack keeps the cars from careering into the stands. The cant of a curved rail line keeps the wheels of the train from grinding along the sides (as long as that train is moving at a speed to match the cant). You also hear this referred to as a banked curve or the banking of a curve.
Incoming pun … on a straightaway, without any curve in the rail line, train tracks just cant even.
Was road crown or camber just the word you were looking for? Did you find an occasion to use one of them? Let me know in the comments!
