Friday was a record-breaking day for the New York City subway. Six friends, all grads of Regis High School, broke the record for fastest per-navigation of the New York City Subway on a single fare.
Headed by New York City transit buff Bill Amarosa, the group completed their Rapid Transit Challenge more than 90 minutes faster than the previous best. Here’s what New York 1 had to say:
“It was a unique experience it was definetely worth ten years of waiting for,” said Amarosa. “It is probably something I won’t do again in the immediate future; but it was great to spend a day on the subway with other New Yorkers, with my friends and classmates. It was just an awesome experience.”
“I was really proud because he was planning this for a long time and when he said he was actually going to do it, it was great, really great,” said Carol Amarosa, Bill’s mother. “He’s wanted to do it for 12 years.”
The group started out at 3:30 Thursday afternoon at the Rockaway Park station in Queens and they made it to the 241st Street station in the Bronx by 4 p.m. Friday.
By starting at Rockaway Park in Queens, the group of friends made sure to cover the hardest-to-reach stations first. They started on the outskirts of the New York City subway and made their way eastward (with some backtracking during the day).
The group included their 125 favorite photos from the day on their website. It will still be a while before the Guinness Book of World Records certifies this new run as the official world record.
Image from Rapid Transit Challenge.
4 comments
hey.. why don’t you just re-size this image to make it a lil’ smaller so that the entire right column comes back to its originial position?
Nice Blog..by the way.
I think that should have fixed it. Thanks for the catch, Arjun. I was using a bigger screen than most when putting this one up.
[…] Joining me on Wednesday, February 2 at 6:30 p.m. will be Bill Amarosa, New York City Transit’s Manager of Service Data Analysis. Amarosa has been monitoring the city’s subway ridership and analyzing station usage for years. As an intern with Transit’s OMB, he compiled ridership data by station back to 1940 and later continued that research so OMB could publish a 1904-2004 ridership report for the subway’s 100th anniversary. He returned to Transit in 2008 as OMB’s Manager of Ridership and Revenue Analysis and in November 2013 moved to Operations Planning as Manager of Service Data Analysis. In 2006, Amarosa also broke the Guinness World Record for riding the entire NYC Subway in the shortest time, visiting all 468 stations on a single fare in 24 hours, 54 minutes, 3 seconds. (I covered that story way back in 2007.) […]
[…] Joining me on Wednesday, February 5 at 6:30 p.m. will be Bill Amarosa, New York City Transit’s Manager of Service Data Analysis. Amarosa has been monitoring the city’s subway ridership and analyzing station usage for years. As an intern with Transit’s OMB, he compiled ridership data by station back to 1940 and later continued that research so OMB could publish a 1904-2004 ridership report for the subway’s 100th anniversary. He returned to Transit in 2008 as OMB’s Manager of Ridership and Revenue Analysis and in November 2013 moved to Operations Planning as Manager of Service Data Analysis. In 2006, Amarosa also broke the Guinness World Record for riding the entire NYC Subway in the shortest time, visiting all 468 stations on a single fare in 24 hours, 54 minutes, 3 seconds. (I covered that story way back in 2007.) […]