We're in the Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_Challenge.  Feel free to vandalize at will.

4:40 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The greatest television program ever

If you're bored between 11 and 11:15 tonight, check out the streaming broadcast at www.tv26newyork.com.  Matt will be jabbering with some lawyer about riding the subway.  This show apparently also airs on some cable channel, but it is unclear which provider carries it.

3:30 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Freedom of Information Law

We've had a few questions about our attempt to obtain information from the MTA about restrooms and riding records.  For those who are interested in the workings of an awesome bureaucracy, here is what happened.

We first sent an email to the MTA asking for two pieces of information: 1) did they have any record of anyone since 1998 besting Mike and Sal's time of 25:11 and 2) could they send us a list of the location and hours of all restrooms in the subway?

The next day they sent us a response, saying:

This is in response to your recent e-mail message to MTA New York City Transit requesting information on the subway riding record and a listing of public restrooms in our subway system.

We truly appreciate your interest in New York City Transit.  In response to your inquiry, the information you seek must be obtained through our Department of Law.  If this statistical information is available under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), your request will be processed as soon as possible. As such, please write to Ms. Denise Fraser at MTA NYCT-F.O.I.L., 130 Livingston Street, Room #1214, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

They also included a little blurb about the state of the restrooms and about their list of restrooms, but did not provide any information from that list:

New York City Transit is unable to maintain public restrooms in all subway stations because of security and maintenance concerns.  However, every effort is made to have restrooms available for customers at terminal stations, transfer points and our more heavily used stations.  While these restrooms are regularly inspected, they may sometimes be temporarily closed because of vandalism or for structural repairs.  In these instances, maintenance personnel take necessary corrective action to return the restroom to service in a timely manner.  Supervision in our Department of Subways will continue to regularly inspect restrooms to ensure that they are clean and in proper working order.  While the list that the Customer Correspondence and E-Maill [sic] Unit currently has is dated 2004, most locations should still be operable, except for as mentioned, temporary closure for repairs.

So we wrote a letter and mailed it to the Department of Law.  A week or two later, we heard back from them.  Here is the text of their letter (the bold formatting near the end is theirs, not ours):

MTA New York City Transit

June 23, 2006

Re: Freedom of Information Law

Request No. 12010

Dear Mr. Green:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your Freedom of Information Law request, wherein you request to know if anyone beat the record of 15 [sic] hours, 11 minutes to ride the entire subway system without exiting and a list of the bathrooms in service in the subway system and what hours they are open.

Your request has been forwarded to the appropriate department(s) for research.

Please be advised that the NYCT FOIL Unit receives a high volume of requests ranging from a simple request for one document that can be readily located to complex requests for multiple documents, such as records relating to a construction project. Typically, the FOIL Unit requests documents from other departments, which then must locate the documents and forward them for review by the FOIL Unit to determine if they are disclosable under the law. As a result, the time and effort required to complete a response can vary significantly. NYCT endeavors to complete each request in a time period that is reasonable under the circumstances. A few examples of the types of requests and estimated times for responses are:

A.)   Requests for accident reports, Payment and/or Performance Bonds for a particular contract, Board Minutes or other records that can be identified and located by going to one source - one to three months.

B.)   Requests requiring research to determine the type of records that may be responsive - six to eight months.

C.)   Multiple or voluminous requests seeking to obtain records pertaining to contracts - six months to one year.

We believe that your request falls into the category that usually takes 6 Months to complete. We would expect that our response should be completed by 12/21/2006.

We will notify you if we cannot provide you with responsive records within the aforementioned time.

If you are able to narrow or further specify the records you seek, it may permit the FOIL Unit to complete the process in a shorter time period. Please use the above number when corresponding to advise us of this more narrow request.

The fee for this service is $.25 per page of material provided. NYCT will advise you of the cost as soon as responsive documents are made available to us. Upon receipt of a check or money order to cover the costs of the documents, we will forward those records that are disclosable.

Should it become necessary to inquire further regarding this request, please refer to the above Freedom of Information request number in your correspondence.

Sincerely,

Gail Rogers

Deputy Foil Officer

So there you have it.  If anyone here likes filling out forms in triplicate, stamping said forms multiple times, then filing them away in a vast warehouse out on Staten Island, I would recommend a job with the MTA's Department of Law.  Also you would get a sick sense of satisfaction in ensuring that all those people who make your job possible by requesting information never get the information they are looking for.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

7:37 AM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Some photos

Here are some photos from our trip.  These were taken by TalismanPHOTO and generously shared with us.  Now some legal mumbo-jumbo:

The copyright for these images is held by TalismanPHOTO.  Any reuse requires the written permission of the photographer, Talisman Brolin, who can be contacted at info@TalismanPHOTO.com.

8:22 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

WILD SUBWAY-RIDING SCANDAL

Leave it to the editors at the NY Post to try to infuse controversy into a story about two morons sitting on the subway for a really long time.

Let's state this once again, just to be clear.  The record we broke, with a time of 24 hours, 2 minutes, is not the Guinness record, nor was it ever intended to be.  It is the Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee Class C record as defined here.  This record allows the contestants to ride express trains.

The Guinness record requires all local trains, but also allows the contestants to exit the system, taking a bus or walking from the end of one subway line to the end of another.  Ironically, it was the Post that clearly explained the difference between these records in an article published in 2004:

"The Guinness rules require contestants to stop at each station but not ride every stretch of track.  They also permit contestants to exit and re-enter the system, a definite no-no among traditionalists."

The previous record of 25 hours, 11 minutes that we cited was a Class C record, not a Guinness record.  It was set in 1998 by Mike Falsetta and Salvatore Babones, two "cowboys" who "winged it" using their familiarity with the subway.  It took a lot of work and study on our part to beat their time, and we tip our hats to their innate subway-riding talents.

At any rate, we mostly did this for the sheer silliness of it all, not for the record.  We thought it would be a cool and different way to experience New York, and something to tell the grandkids about.  But if we can bring Mike and Sal out of retirement and rekindle interest in competitive subway riding by setting a new record, then that would just be icing on the cake.

In conclusion, I guess we should just count ourselves lucky that the Post headline wasn't "Mayor's Nude Corpse Found Dismembered in Subway Riders' Backpacks."

8:15 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Break out the laser pointers

This graph shows how far ahead or behind our schedule we were at each point in the trip.  The schedule predicted a 24-hour ride, so we had a 70-minute buffer between our scheduled time and the record time.  So when we hit 40 minutes behind schedule less than halfway into the trip, we didn't think we had much of a shot.  Fortunately some good luck late at night, combined with insane sprints through several stations, allowed us to make all that time back.

10:27 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The official log

And now, some riveting entertainment.  Without further ado... the official log of the 24 hour, 2 minute trip.

Legend:
Arr - Arrival time (when the doors of the train first opened upon arriving at the station)
Dep - Departure time (when the doors of the train last closed prior to departing the station)
Est Arr or Est Dep - The arrival or departure time that we estimated based on the published schedules
+/- Min - How many minutes ahead or behind of our estimated schedule we were at any given point
* - If a * precedes the car #, this means we were on the same train as the previous row, but we had moved cars before the train turned around

There are a few rows where there is no estimated time given.  In these cases, we departed from our original route and so had no scheduled time to compare against our actual time.

In our mad dashes around Fulton St, we forgot to record whether the trains we boarded were J/Z, 4/5, or 2/3.  We did record the car numbers, however.

MySpace does not seem to be able to display this correctly as a table, so here it is as an image.

9:15 AM - 1 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Ridiculous answers to questions

Check the video from CBS News, it's awesome:  right here.  Although, they didn't quite get that the record is the *amateur* subway riding record, not the world record (like Guinness Book).  Don's answer to "what he learned" was exactly what I expected of him.  I think they seem a lot livelier than they actually were.

The THIRD video on that CBS News website is hilarious.  Matt and Don were on their game.  Don's joke that the subway bathrooms should be clean, publicly accessible, and conveniently located was probably my favorite comment. 

HAH, the WCBS report turned out, under the headline "'Nerds' Complete Subway Challenge."  Make no bones about it, these dudes are nerds.

Read and listen

He asked Matt and Don what they learned.  I think they may have cut out Don's response not only for time, but also because his first answer was very sarcastic. 

AMNY had a subway tracker.  Apparently, the NYCT was "neutral" about their ride.  There's also a blog entry before that one about the challenge.  I'm also glad that AMNY has a follow-up story in which they correctly called the challenge a "self-described moronic" one. 

Apparently, the story in the NYTimes was one of the most e-mailed.  Nice.  If you read the AMNY blog, they have an interesting commentary on why the publicity got so big on it. 

The Daily News article is actually pretty sweet.  I like the picture of the boys, not yet beaten from the grueling day.

Yesterday's Reuters article.

8:55 AM - 3 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

The sweet taste of success, the surprisingly ok-smelling-boys

Chris here!  I met the guys at Pelham Bay Park this morning at around 6:06 a.m. and they were in good, grumpy, and relieved spirits.  There was a surprising number of media people; when I arrived at 5:50, CBS radio and Reuters were there but some media people were already on the train.  The Reuters lady told me that they were on BBC World!  How crazy is that?

So yes, they did accomplish the goal of beating 25 hours and 11 minutes.  They can give you that run-down when they get back from CNN in Midtown.  They gave a ton of interviews, and I doubt any of us remembers what we said to whom.  [I did give two interviews, but I don't remember to whom.] 

Tell us where you saw us this morning!  I don't know that the guys care, but I do.  I videotaped most of the craze.

Ah!  I *just* saw a blurb of Don and Matt on CBS; it's hilarious because Don looks so grumpy in just the few seconds they showed.  I think he was looking for a bathroom and didn't expect people to be following him.

The Post has a two inch blurb today that says "Record 'derailed'" which talks about how the guys didn't break the Guinness Book record-- that's silly because they've said from the beginning that they're not trying to beat that record.  It allows for out-of-subway system transfers, and they are following the amateur rules.  The writer from the Post says that his article was actually much longer but it got chopped up.  Surprising.  The guys are too tired to care: they just want to go to bed.  Matt also says his pants haven't been this loose in a long time.

Thanks to Travis for referring from Subwayblogger.com's blurb
which refers you to the WCBS site report.

8:26 AM - 1 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Less news

Chris, one last time.  So I got a call from Don.  Apparently, they need water.

I wasn't able to catch the evening news, so all I can say is that the voicemail number is full and I hope to get an update from them soon.

4:41 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment