Every stop along the way

Two young men have set a new record for visiting every New York subway station in the shortest possible time.

Matt Green, 26, and Don Badaczewski, 24, stumbled out of Pelham Bay Park station early yesterday morning after spending 24 hours and 2 minutes riding through the city's more than 400 stations. They beat the previous record, held by Mike Falsetta and Salvatore Babones since 1998 by more than an hour.

During the record attempt, a defiant Mr Badaczewski told Reuters: “Lots of nerds can sit in a room and use their computer to come up with the best route but we’re willing to put our route on the line and actually come out here.”

They survived on beef jerky — an American snack of dried meat strips — and bottled water and tried not to think about peeing. "I’m pretty tired, not that hungry,” Mr Green told the clutch of reporters and photographers who greeted the pair. “My speech is definitely slurred... I’m just glad to be done.”

According to The New York Times, Messrs Green and Badaczewski met as students at the University of Virginia and in the past have competed to eat the most tacos, both consuming 18 before agreeing an honourable draw. On their My Space website, (which also has pictures of the record-makers) they described their record attempt in the third person:

"While many in New York City show a casual interest in riding the subway, these two men will take it to another level, spending a steamy August day and night trapped in the sweltering subway, subsisting only on beef jerky and water, riding the rails until they have passed through every single station. It is unclear why two men would voluntarily submit themselves to such a harrowing ordeal; it probably has something to do with a need for attention or perhaps blunt head trauma sustained at a young age."

The challenge of finding the quickest way to completely ride the subway system is a variation of the Travelling Salesman Problem or TSP. This clear website offers a good guide to the history of the problem which has amused and baffled mathematicians (and, presumably, salesmen) for centuries. It has TSP nostalgia, TSP achievements — the shortest route around 24,978 Swedish towns has been worked out — and for the brave: unsolved TSP quandaries.

The London Underground has attracted the attention of plenty of TSP aficionados and straight-up train lovers. Geofftech offers this very full history of record attempts on the Tube. As far as we can tell, the current record is held by Geoff Marshall, as in Geofftech, and his ally Neil Blake, who visited all 275 stations in just 18 hours, 35 minutes, 43 seconds. But the acknowledged master of the system is the now-retired Robert Robinson, who made 51 attempts to travel the system between 1979 and 2000, setting new records on eight occasions.

Comments

[John Charlesworth]

I suppose there is some merit in this attempt but at the moment the reasoning fails me!

I suppose it gives an idea of the minimum time it would take to travel the whole of the subway. I am sure planners might be able to use this. I personally, when making a journey, cannot wait to get out of the Subway!