4 ms·

SingleRide: Longest route on NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice

99 points by TMWNN 6mo ago

o10449366 6mo ago
The longest route on the NYC subway is precisely when you have an appointment and the train decides to stop because there's electrical issues, someone jumped on the track, "there's a train stopped ahead of us", the express decides to go local instead, someone is holding the door, your route involves the F/G or any line that serves less affluent neighborhoods...
- master_crab 6mo ago
  Are you saying F/G AND any line serving less affluent areas? Because if not, the G (save for maybe 2-3 stops in Bed-Stuy) is all affluent neighborhoods.
  - saalweachter 6mo ago
    Pfft, there's no G train, it's just a psych experiment to see how long people will wait at a fake train station before giving up and seeking alternative transportation.
  - rafram 6mo ago
    Right! I don't have hard data on this, but I would guess the only line that spends more of its run in affluent areas is the Q.
- jareklupinski 6mo ago
  there's a reason even the announcer says "transfer here to the F'in G line"
- grishka 6mo ago
  On the one hand, this sort of thing feels inexcusable to me. In my mind, the subway is the most reliable mode of city transportation. On the other, the NYC subway is one of the few 24/7 subway systems in the world, which makes me envious somewhat. Ours closes at midnight and opens around 5 AM.
  - afavour 6mo ago
    IMO the subway reliability issues are overblown these days. In the 2010s it was in a really dark spot but it's doing a lot better these days. > In my mind, the subway is the most reliable mode of city transportation. Even with its problems the NYC subway still is. Traffic is a nightmare. I have friends who insist on taking a cab to the airport because it's more reliable then end up complaining because they're still on the Belt Parkway or whatever.
    - busterarm 6mo ago
      In the 2010s it was so bad that I gave up on the subway and either walked, Ubered or took the bus everywhere. When the MTA bus is better than the subway, things in NY are grim -- it was like the 80s & early 90s again. The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up. So yeah, still a hard pass. In the mid 2010s i had a reverse commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn and there was a few months where 3 days a week my full commute would take 2hr+ (midtown to sunset park) because the train just sat multiple times not moving. Especially on the bridge where it could be up to an hour just stopped. The absolute worst time that I ever remember though was maybe in '89 or '90. The Lex-53rd st E/F station had a ton of ongoing construction and on weekends it was being used as a transfer station only that summer. All the staircases were closed and you could only get in/out via train -- this idea seems insane to me but that's NYC sometimes and especially in that era. Anyway, my family and I were on a train passing through that station one Saturday or Sunday morning on the way to Queens and they made us exit the train inside the station as it was going out of service. Apparently a pipe had burst (I think?) and no trains were in service. The AC in the station was not working and it was maybe 90+ degrees underground. Plus water was leaking from everywhere. And there were hundreds of us trapped on a crowded, wet, dirty platform for like 4-6 hours while no trains were running and there was no way to get out. Aside: that Belt Parkway story is why people from NY who live/work in Manhattan try to never fly out of JFK. That's the real solution. So much easier to get to EWR/LGA.
      - afavour 6mo ago
        > The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up. Eh, it’s all relative, I think you’re in less danger of experiencing issues on the subway than you are getting hit on the road. I take the subway all the time and have never had any problems.
- afavour 6mo ago
  > or any line that serves less affluent neighborhoods... Are there any lines that don’t, at some point, serve less affluent neighborhoods? The midtown shuttle I suppose…
koehr 6mo ago
So the longest subway ride in NYC is 24km (15 miles) and 1h long? We have multiple underground lines farther than this in Berlin with the longest being 32km (20 miles). But don't get fooled, the issues are the same.
- collabs 6mo ago
  Can you please elaborate more on these issues?
  - addandsubtract 6mo ago
    Delays, vandalized carts, people jumping on tracks, intoxicated people on the train, buskers, no AC in the summer / heating in the winter, people talking on speakerphone / not wearing headphones, ...
- jordiburgos 6mo ago
  I did the same on the first ride. It is a game, you have to go jumping on different lines to get your longest.
- Ndymium 6mo ago
  It's a game. You're supposed to click on the different route options that are presented to you on the bottom of the screen. That's why it goes slower the more options there are. But I also just followed it for the first time from beginning to end, not doing anything. Because I assumed someone had already done the math.
- noxvilleza 6mo ago
  Isn't it _just_ the U7 that's longer? The U5 is the 2nd longest and that's 22km and just a ~45 min ride.
4ndrewl 6mo ago
Is this like the travelling salesman problem, but looking for the longest, not shortest journey?
- saghm 6mo ago
  Finding the longest path in a graph is itself a pretty well-described NP-complete problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_path_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_path_problem Alternately, you can listen to a Billy Joel parody that describes the problem in decidedly less academic terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ww0gwEszo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ww0gwEszo
- nottorp 6mo ago
  Hmm fun study topic: which major algorithms stay the same when you "invert" their goal, and which don't? Where invert can mean at the least: switch max/min or gt/lt, but also for find the subset, find what's not in the subset. At the least.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
RhysU 6mo ago
Fun. Needs sound effects, in particular someone muttering "Hoyt–Schermerhorn next" over a crackling intercom.
- soderfoo 6mo ago
  Don't forget the wheel squeal... is there a transmission protocol for conveying the cornucopia of odors?
  - cainxinth 6mo ago
    Also needs the occasional mariachi music and someone yelling “It’s showtime!”
  - busterarm 6mo ago
    The one or two times I uncontrollably shat myself on the subway, I at least had the decency to do it in a tunnel and between cars.
- 1-more 6mo ago
  I used to get on a 2/3 with the same driver at the same time a lot and he was REALLY into announcing in great detail how to get to the PATH with his volume absolutely cranked. It got so annoying that I'd actually get off and wait for the next one. Don't need whole minutes of announcements on how you have to go up the stairs and look for signs and yadda yadda. I got podcasts to listen to, man.
bonyt 6mo ago
Some folk on YouTube played a game like this (Snake) in real life with the South Korean rail network. It's Jet Lag: The Game - a great show, most seasons are different games. I think the one where they played Snake is one of their more complex seasons - they also play Hide and Seek and Tag across continents, and games like that. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqICVjsZbgn80SaK https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqIC...
- zzixp 6mo ago
  Love Jet Lag! I think Snake was a good idea but didn't turn out so well in execution. The game design of their current season in Taiwan has been great
macintux 6mo ago
I'm curious what someone who actually knows NYC could do. 74 stations, 41.42 miles, 3:23, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare Starting from Pelham Bay Park on the 6
- nycerrrrrrrrrr 6mo ago
  Definitely don't know the system like some people do, but: 102 stations, 60.09 miles, 4:19, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare: 6 > M > 7 > D > Q > S > C > A. Fun game :)
  - beeandapenguin 6mo ago
    The Prospect Park S is such a weird train. I love it.
    - crmd 5mo ago
      18 years living 5 blocks from Prospect Park and today I learned the Prospect Park S train exists. I'm auto-revoking my NYC card.
- zkhrv 6mo ago
  (Not from NYC, but) I found it hard to navigate due to not being able to see far enough ahead and not knowing which transfer to take to head in the direction I want (is it Ⓡ Forest Hills-71 Av or Ⓡ Bay Ridge-95 St to head left/East at Lexington Av/59 St?). So, uh, I planned ahead using the subway diagram [1] (is that cheating?). I got: 127 stations, 69.92 miles, 5:02, 4 boroughs, $3.00 Station Transfer ------- -------- ⑥ Pelham Bay Park Lexington Av/59 St -> Ⓡ Forest Hills-71 Av Forest Hills-71 Av -> Ⓔ Jamaica Center-Parsons Sutphin Blvd -> Ⓩ Broad St Broadway Junction -> Ⓐ Inwood 207 St Jay St -> Ⓕ Coney Island Stillwell Av W 8 St-NY Aquarium -> Ⓠ 96 St Times Sq -> ② Wakefield-241 St Fun challenge! [1] https://www.mta.info/map/5256 https://www.mta.info/map/5256
- afavour 6mo ago
  173 stations, 85.05 miles, 6:53, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare. In fairness a couple of my connections required knowledge of express vs local stops and I don’t think it’s fair to expect an out of towner to know that! My strategy was to avoid midtown as long as I possibly could because so many lines intersect there. It's funny how you end up leaning on the part of the system you know best. For me that was Brooklyn. Atlantic Terminal is really key there. Could probably have made more mileage out of Queens/Bronx but wasn't confident. More importantly, I need to put this thing down before I lose the entire day.
zimpenfish 6mo ago
Now I'm wondering what the longest Underground trip is without visiting a given line more than once. Probably needs a rule about the District and Circle lines where they overlap since you could get a lot of mileage out of that. (I calculated the shortest one that includes all lines back in the early 2000s but they've obviously changed things around since then.)
- hdgvhicv 6mo ago
  My gut feeling would be Chesham/harrow/rayners lane/hammersmith/edgeware/earls court/green park/stockwell/embankment/elephant/bank/aldgate east/liverpool st/bond street/baker/kingsx/cockfosters A route out to Epping via Newbury Park would be another option though, probably elephant/bank/kingx/green park/bond instead.
  - zimpenfish 5mo ago
    Noted for whenever I have enough tuits to get around to Prologicising or SATifing the question.
TuringNYC 6mo ago
When i was younger I would sometimes ride the F-train back and forth several times in the evenings just so I could think and put articulate thoughts into a notebook. This is before underground network connectivity, before smartphones, etc. The hum of the train was great and the speed of the F train at segments of Queens were exhilarating, a bit like listening to EDM while coding.
- busterarm 6mo ago
  I used to do a few different versions of this for most of the 30+ years I lived in NY. I used to love walking all over manhattan alone late at night. I would do like 10 mile walks just for the heck of it with music going. Or I would hop on the bike and do similarly. When there would be friends involved, we'd usually be at Chinatown Fair all night until close, then walk down to Elevated Acre and hang out there (this was pre-9/11) until 3 or 4, then walk our friends from Staten Island to the Ferry. If the mood was particularly good, we'd take the ferry with them and then ride it back and everyone go their separate ways. There used to be houseboats around lower manhattan back then and it was a nice (albeit sketchy) walk from Chinatown down to the tip of the island. There was also pretty briefly this wild hole-in-the-wall DUMBO nightclub projecting porn on the walls that we would frequently stumble into on our way down there. Things like that were honestly the best part about living in NY, but also it's long in the past.
  - TuringNYC 6mo ago
    Similar! I think my experiences were best captured by the song SOFI TUKKER - Summer In New York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ A lot of this went away, not sure why. People are too glued to phones.
    - 1-more 6mo ago
      Summer 2020 I was out there after creating as much shareholder value as I could at my then-WFH 9-5. First it was delivering postmates on rollerblades, then I did it on my bike (working better and better apps every time to offset the depreciation inherent to riding a bike), then I'd just do a 4 boro bike tour Brooklyn over the Pulaski bridge up to Astoria, get souvlaki, take the Triboro to the Bronx and then head to Manhattan on a different bridge every time (High Bridge is still my fave). Just putting up like 40–60 mile rides noodling around that town. There's no better way to see the city, and no better place to bop around on a bike, in my experience.
schoen 6mo ago
Like other people, I first missed that this is a game where you have to choose your connections, not just a demo showing off the developer's solution. If you want to optimize this with software you can apparently get machine-readable topology of the system via https://www.mta.info/developers https://www.mta.info/developers and write your own graph traversal pessimizer for it. (Easier for stops/graph diameter maximization rather than physical distance, which I don't think is included in this particular dataset.)
- jubilanti 6mo ago
  It's like you couldn't write a more ambiguous title if you tried!

99 points by TMWNN 6mo ago

The longest route on the NYC subway is precisely when you have an appointment and the train decides to stop because there's electrical issues, someone jumped on the track, "there's a train stopped ahead of us", the express decides to go local instead, someone is holding the door, your route involves the F/G or any line that serves less affluent neighborhoods...

master_crab 6mo ago
Are you saying F/G AND any line serving less affluent areas? Because if not, the G (save for maybe 2-3 stops in Bed-Stuy) is all affluent neighborhoods.
- saalweachter 6mo ago
  Pfft, there's no G train, it's just a psych experiment to see how long people will wait at a fake train station before giving up and seeking alternative transportation.
- rafram 6mo ago
  Right! I don't have hard data on this, but I would guess the only line that spends more of its run in affluent areas is the Q.
jareklupinski 6mo ago
there's a reason even the announcer says "transfer here to the F'in G line"
grishka 6mo ago
On the one hand, this sort of thing feels inexcusable to me. In my mind, the subway is the most reliable mode of city transportation. On the other, the NYC subway is one of the few 24/7 subway systems in the world, which makes me envious somewhat. Ours closes at midnight and opens around 5 AM.
- afavour 6mo ago
  IMO the subway reliability issues are overblown these days. In the 2010s it was in a really dark spot but it's doing a lot better these days. > In my mind, the subway is the most reliable mode of city transportation. Even with its problems the NYC subway still is. Traffic is a nightmare. I have friends who insist on taking a cab to the airport because it's more reliable then end up complaining because they're still on the Belt Parkway or whatever.
  - busterarm 6mo ago
    In the 2010s it was so bad that I gave up on the subway and either walked, Ubered or took the bus everywhere. When the MTA bus is better than the subway, things in NY are grim -- it was like the 80s & early 90s again. The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up. So yeah, still a hard pass. In the mid 2010s i had a reverse commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn and there was a few months where 3 days a week my full commute would take 2hr+ (midtown to sunset park) because the train just sat multiple times not moving. Especially on the bridge where it could be up to an hour just stopped. The absolute worst time that I ever remember though was maybe in '89 or '90. The Lex-53rd st E/F station had a ton of ongoing construction and on weekends it was being used as a transfer station only that summer. All the staircases were closed and you could only get in/out via train -- this idea seems insane to me but that's NYC sometimes and especially in that era. Anyway, my family and I were on a train passing through that station one Saturday or Sunday morning on the way to Queens and they made us exit the train inside the station as it was going out of service. Apparently a pipe had burst (I think?) and no trains were in service. The AC in the station was not working and it was maybe 90+ degrees underground. Plus water was leaking from everywhere. And there were hundreds of us trapped on a crowded, wet, dirty platform for like 4-6 hours while no trains were running and there was no way to get out. Aside: that Belt Parkway story is why people from NY who live/work in Manhattan try to never fly out of JFK. That's the real solution. So much easier to get to EWR/LGA.
    - afavour 6mo ago
      > The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up. Eh, it’s all relative, I think you’re in less danger of experiencing issues on the subway than you are getting hit on the road. I take the subway all the time and have never had any problems.
afavour 6mo ago
> or any line that serves less affluent neighborhoods... Are there any lines that don’t, at some point, serve less affluent neighborhoods? The midtown shuttle I suppose…

koehr 6mo ago

So the longest subway ride in NYC is 24km (15 miles) and 1h long? We have multiple underground lines farther than this in Berlin with the longest being 32km (20 miles). But don't get fooled, the issues are the same.

collabs 6mo ago
Can you please elaborate more on these issues?
- addandsubtract 6mo ago
  Delays, vandalized carts, people jumping on tracks, intoxicated people on the train, buskers, no AC in the summer / heating in the winter, people talking on speakerphone / not wearing headphones, ...
jordiburgos 6mo ago
I did the same on the first ride. It is a game, you have to go jumping on different lines to get your longest.
Ndymium 6mo ago
It's a game. You're supposed to click on the different route options that are presented to you on the bottom of the screen. That's why it goes slower the more options there are. But I also just followed it for the first time from beginning to end, not doing anything. Because I assumed someone had already done the math.
noxvilleza 6mo ago
Isn't it _just_ the U7 that's longer? The U5 is the 2nd longest and that's 22km and just a ~45 min ride.

4ndrewl 6mo ago

Is this like the travelling salesman problem, but looking for the longest, not shortest journey?

saghm 6mo ago
Finding the longest path in a graph is itself a pretty well-described NP-complete problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_path_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_path_problem Alternately, you can listen to a Billy Joel parody that describes the problem in decidedly less academic terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ww0gwEszo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ww0gwEszo
nottorp 6mo ago
Hmm fun study topic: which major algorithms stay the same when you "invert" their goal, and which don't? Where invert can mean at the least: switch max/min or gt/lt, but also for find the subset, find what's not in the subset. At the least.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

RhysU 6mo ago

Fun. Needs sound effects, in particular someone muttering "Hoyt–Schermerhorn next" over a crackling intercom.

soderfoo 6mo ago
Don't forget the wheel squeal... is there a transmission protocol for conveying the cornucopia of odors?
- cainxinth 6mo ago
  Also needs the occasional mariachi music and someone yelling “It’s showtime!”
- busterarm 6mo ago
  The one or two times I uncontrollably shat myself on the subway, I at least had the decency to do it in a tunnel and between cars.
1-more 6mo ago
I used to get on a 2/3 with the same driver at the same time a lot and he was REALLY into announcing in great detail how to get to the PATH with his volume absolutely cranked. It got so annoying that I'd actually get off and wait for the next one. Don't need whole minutes of announcements on how you have to go up the stairs and look for signs and yadda yadda. I got podcasts to listen to, man.

bonyt 6mo ago

Some folk on YouTube played a game like this (Snake) in real life with the South Korean rail network. It's Jet Lag: The Game - a great show, most seasons are different games. I think the one where they played Snake is one of their more complex seasons - they also play Hide and Seek and Tag across continents, and games like that. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqICVjsZbgn80SaK https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqIC...

zzixp 6mo ago
Love Jet Lag! I think Snake was a good idea but didn't turn out so well in execution. The game design of their current season in Taiwan has been great

macintux 6mo ago

I'm curious what someone who actually knows NYC could do. 74 stations, 41.42 miles, 3:23, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare Starting from Pelham Bay Park on the 6

nycerrrrrrrrrr 6mo ago
Definitely don't know the system like some people do, but: 102 stations, 60.09 miles, 4:19, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare: 6 > M > 7 > D > Q > S > C > A. Fun game :)
- beeandapenguin 6mo ago
  The Prospect Park S is such a weird train. I love it.
  - crmd 5mo ago
    18 years living 5 blocks from Prospect Park and today I learned the Prospect Park S train exists. I'm auto-revoking my NYC card.
zkhrv 6mo ago
(Not from NYC, but) I found it hard to navigate due to not being able to see far enough ahead and not knowing which transfer to take to head in the direction I want (is it Ⓡ Forest Hills-71 Av or Ⓡ Bay Ridge-95 St to head left/East at Lexington Av/59 St?). So, uh, I planned ahead using the subway diagram [1] (is that cheating?). I got: 127 stations, 69.92 miles, 5:02, 4 boroughs, $3.00 Station Transfer ------- -------- ⑥ Pelham Bay Park Lexington Av/59 St -> Ⓡ Forest Hills-71 Av Forest Hills-71 Av -> Ⓔ Jamaica Center-Parsons Sutphin Blvd -> Ⓩ Broad St Broadway Junction -> Ⓐ Inwood 207 St Jay St -> Ⓕ Coney Island Stillwell Av W 8 St-NY Aquarium -> Ⓠ 96 St Times Sq -> ② Wakefield-241 St Fun challenge! [1] https://www.mta.info/map/5256 https://www.mta.info/map/5256
afavour 6mo ago
173 stations, 85.05 miles, 6:53, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare. In fairness a couple of my connections required knowledge of express vs local stops and I don’t think it’s fair to expect an out of towner to know that! My strategy was to avoid midtown as long as I possibly could because so many lines intersect there. It's funny how you end up leaning on the part of the system you know best. For me that was Brooklyn. Atlantic Terminal is really key there. Could probably have made more mileage out of Queens/Bronx but wasn't confident. More importantly, I need to put this thing down before I lose the entire day.

zimpenfish 6mo ago

Now I'm wondering what the longest Underground trip is without visiting a given line more than once. Probably needs a rule about the District and Circle lines where they overlap since you could get a lot of mileage out of that. (I calculated the shortest one that includes all lines back in the early 2000s but they've obviously changed things around since then.)

hdgvhicv 6mo ago
My gut feeling would be Chesham/harrow/rayners lane/hammersmith/edgeware/earls court/green park/stockwell/embankment/elephant/bank/aldgate east/liverpool st/bond street/baker/kingsx/cockfosters A route out to Epping via Newbury Park would be another option though, probably elephant/bank/kingx/green park/bond instead.
- zimpenfish 5mo ago
  Noted for whenever I have enough tuits to get around to Prologicising or SATifing the question.

TuringNYC 6mo ago

When i was younger I would sometimes ride the F-train back and forth several times in the evenings just so I could think and put articulate thoughts into a notebook. This is before underground network connectivity, before smartphones, etc. The hum of the train was great and the speed of the F train at segments of Queens were exhilarating, a bit like listening to EDM while coding.

busterarm 6mo ago
I used to do a few different versions of this for most of the 30+ years I lived in NY. I used to love walking all over manhattan alone late at night. I would do like 10 mile walks just for the heck of it with music going. Or I would hop on the bike and do similarly. When there would be friends involved, we'd usually be at Chinatown Fair all night until close, then walk down to Elevated Acre and hang out there (this was pre-9/11) until 3 or 4, then walk our friends from Staten Island to the Ferry. If the mood was particularly good, we'd take the ferry with them and then ride it back and everyone go their separate ways. There used to be houseboats around lower manhattan back then and it was a nice (albeit sketchy) walk from Chinatown down to the tip of the island. There was also pretty briefly this wild hole-in-the-wall DUMBO nightclub projecting porn on the walls that we would frequently stumble into on our way down there. Things like that were honestly the best part about living in NY, but also it's long in the past.
- TuringNYC 6mo ago
  Similar! I think my experiences were best captured by the song SOFI TUKKER - Summer In New York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ A lot of this went away, not sure why. People are too glued to phones.
  - 1-more 6mo ago
    Summer 2020 I was out there after creating as much shareholder value as I could at my then-WFH 9-5. First it was delivering postmates on rollerblades, then I did it on my bike (working better and better apps every time to offset the depreciation inherent to riding a bike), then I'd just do a 4 boro bike tour Brooklyn over the Pulaski bridge up to Astoria, get souvlaki, take the Triboro to the Bronx and then head to Manhattan on a different bridge every time (High Bridge is still my fave). Just putting up like 40–60 mile rides noodling around that town. There's no better way to see the city, and no better place to bop around on a bike, in my experience.

schoen 6mo ago

Like other people, I first missed that this is a game where you have to choose your connections, not just a demo showing off the developer's solution. If you want to optimize this with software you can apparently get machine-readable topology of the system via https://www.mta.info/developers https://www.mta.info/developers and write your own graph traversal pessimizer for it. (Easier for stops/graph diameter maximization rather than physical distance, which I don't think is included in this particular dataset.)

jubilanti 6mo ago
It's like you couldn't write a more ambiguous title if you tried!