SingleRide: Longest route on NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice (opens in new tab)

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.

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

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.)

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=PLB7ZcpBcwdC4ZwbTbCqIC...

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

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.)

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...

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

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

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.