This map uses shading to indicate how steep the gradient of each individual city block is, but interestingly the shading doesn't show the direction of that gradient, so you don't immediately know whether it will be uphill or downhill. But the map also includes contour lines, so if you look closely, you can figure it out from the contours even if you're unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
On the other hand, if you're generally familiar with the neighborhood, the shading might be helpful by itself because you might have an intuition about when you're going to be going uphill and when you're going to be going downhill.
I agree that replicating the cool visualization method from the linked article might be tricky in San Francisco for the exact reasons you mention.
http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html
and SFBC has a (large!) vector PDF version on their site
https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf
This map uses shading to indicate how steep the gradient of each individual city block is, but interestingly the shading doesn't show the direction of that gradient, so you don't immediately know whether it will be uphill or downhill. But the map also includes contour lines, so if you look closely, you can figure it out from the contours even if you're unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
On the other hand, if you're generally familiar with the neighborhood, the shading might be helpful by itself because you might have an intuition about when you're going to be going uphill and when you're going to be going downhill.
I agree that replicating the cool visualization method from the linked article might be tricky in San Francisco for the exact reasons you mention.