Ah, transit. So convenient! So green! So … when the hell is the train going to get here?
Living in New York, you get spoiled. And the gadmillionth time that the train takes forever to arrive and then lingers, because of “train traffic ahead of us,” in the dark, gloomy tunnel, you start to think: I could have gotten there faster if I had walked.
Well, Noah Davis decided to test that theory. And he found that he could beat the subway on foot. He did have to run, though. For a week straight, he ran everywhere. No trains or buses allowed. He writes for Outside Online:
Frequently, it was dramatically faster to run. A friend and I left a bar at the same time Friday night. It was 1.7 miles away from my apartment. I made it home in 12 minutes. It took her 40. That was fun.
Davis’ experiment yielded three key findings:
- If you’re traveling under five miles, it’s faster to run than to take the train.
- You get really, really sweaty doing that.
- Carrying stuff sucks.
Likely, this first point is even more accurate in places where transit is even spottier. Still, we are going to vote for keeping the subway. As Davis writes about his first train ride post-running experiment, “It took forever, but damn, it was easy.”
We agree. Plus, all these calculations depend on running an eight-minute mile or so. Which is probably normal for Outside Online readers, but not for us mortals.
