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.)
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.
> 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.
Are there any lines that don’t, at some point, serve less affluent neighborhoods? The midtown shuttle I suppose…
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.
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.)
A route out to Epping via Newbury Park would be another option though, probably elephant/bank/kingx/green park/bond instead.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll take a minor fender bender every now and again over someone hitting me in the head with a brick ever.
I can't believe the suggestion is that property damage and/or low-speed collisions would be preferable to being assaulted. And I've been tapped by cars and walked away from it several times. Plus the "well it never happened to me" is just survivorship bias. Over enough decades and enough rides something fucked up on the subway _will_ happen to you eventually.
This is the kind of thinking that I left NY over.
For what it's worth, I lived in New York for ten years and was in one car accident (cabbie, distracted by whatever phone all they're all constantly dialled into, blew through a stop sign) and zero even closer calls on the subway.
You're more than 7x more likely to die in a car in New York than on the subway. If you're the kind of idiot that voluntarily trespasses onto the tracks, you're 2x more likely.
In 2023, 112 motor-vehicle occupants died in New York [1] "97 people were fatally struck by subway trains" [2], nearly half (49%) of which are suicides and 33% of which are accidents, almost all of which involve voluntarily trespassing onto the tracks [3]. Five people were killed by assault [4].
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bicycle-crash-dat...
[2] https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/04/11/mta-operators-subway-coll...
The alternative to taking the subway for the vast majority of NYC residents is not driving to work.
And as an Uber passenger living in NYC I overwhelmingly spent my time on roads that were not highways.
I can't find exact taxi passenger deaths but between 2019 & 2023 there were 23 passenger fatalities across all rideshare services and taxis. At least one of those was a fatal drug overdose (2022).
Which is way more than the total number of homicides on the subway system. All of this is before adjusting for trip frequency. (Uber and Lyft do about a fifth of the trips as the subway.)
I lived in New York for 10 years and go back frequently. I take Ubers and cabs (and Blade) all the time. It's convenient. And sometimes, yes, I just want a quiet space in which to relax. But pretending it's safer is simply untrue.
There were 573 assaults on the subway in 2024, up from something like 150 in 2009. There were something like 1.9 billion journeys taken that year. Avoiding the subway because of the 1 in 2,000,000 danger of assault is not rational.
Exaggerated paranoid thinking is indeed the thing that leads a lot of people to unnecessarily leave NYC.
Also anyone in NY with a functioning brain knows just how underreported subway crime is. You can either get where you're going and go about your day or end it by trying to find a cop and then trying to get them motivated to even take your report.
2009 being a low point for crime should just be normal. I lived through all the bad decades in NY and you're not there yet but certainly trending towards it.
I like how multiple years of "hey why does all of this fucked up shit keep happening to me?" is "exaggerated paranoid thinking". Truly stunning and brave. Being repeatedly victimized by random crime is just a mindset, bruh.
This is not a conversation worth continuing. By your own admission you don’t even live in the city any more!
> certainly trending towards it.
which is also untrue! Subway crime was down across the board in 2025.
Okay you lived in NY for 10 years, I lived there for over 40. The subway is shit compared to where it was only a handful of years ago. In the last years that I was there, Uber was way safer.
Also I said "fatalities", which isn't just murder and isn't even necessarily a crime. There were 39 homicides in the subway[1] during that same period. So it's not less. But also those are murders whereas the 23 were mostly from accidents.
[1]: 2019: 3, 2020: 6, 2021: 8, 2022: 7, 2023: 5, 2024: 10 (source: compstat).