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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuSci5BSyQ
A lot of this went away, not sure why. People are too glued to phones.
If you want to optimize this with software you can apparently get machine-readable topology of the system via
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.)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqIC...
74 stations, 41.42 miles, 3:23, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare Starting from Pelham Bay Park on the 6
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.
133 stations, 71.73 miles, 5:28, 4 boroughs, $3.00 fare
My route was 6 to R to 7 to L to J to M to F to N to D to 4.
The game was somewhat frustrating because despite the animation slowing down at transfer stations I still find myself thinking too slowly to press the right transfer button. I missed some transfers that could make it longer. I wish there were a pause button. I generally don’t like games where thinking is combined with reaction times so I didn’t feel like playing it a second time.
Fun game :)
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
(I calculated the shortest one that includes all lines back in the early 2000s but they've obviously changed things around since then.)
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
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.