At noon today, Stefanie Gray, the campaign coordinator for NYC-based Transportation Alternatives, swiped her Metro card at Penn Station. If she can visit every single one of the New York City subway system’s 468 stations in the next 22 hours, 52 minutes, and 35 seconds, she will have made the fastest tour of the entire subway system in history and broken a Guinness World Record.
She’s not doing it for the glory, though. She’s doing it to call attention to proposed fare hikes that could raise the standard subway fare to $2.50, a change that would affect the subway’s poorest riders the most.
According to the Guinness rules, Gray can only count “visits” made on local trains that stop at every station. But she can use express trains to retrace her steps, i.e. to get from the end of the line back to a transfer point. She’ll probably rely on buses, too, to ferry her between lines and stations, she told the New York Post.
We’re rooting for Stefanie. It’s aggravating enough to sit on a stalled train on any normal day; we can only imagine how crazy-making it will be when she’s down to the last few stops and has been on the train for 22 hours straight.
