Here’s one way to get your money’s worth before the MTA’s fare hike.
A Brooklyn woman will attempt to break the Guinness record for the fastest trip through the entire city subway system tomorrow, part of a protest against the 2013 fare increases.
Stefanie Gray, 24, will try to hit all 468 stations in less than 22 hours, 52 minutes and 36 seconds using her unlimited MetroCard.
“Its like preparing for the Olympics,” she quipped.
Except it requires more brains than brawn, broken escalators aside.
Navigating the stations — not to mention service interruptions and skip-stop service — is so complicated, she’s yet to find a computer algorithm to come up with an ideal course.
So Gray, who has a bachelor’s and a master’s in geography, will also use good old-fashioned brain power to plot the route.
“It’s fascinating to compare the computer’s logic with human logic and figure out the pros and cons of each,” said Gray, a campaign coordinator at the mass-transit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.
She’s still planning the route but has several options:
She could swipe her MetroCard once and stay in the system, transferring between subways and buses, or she can leave the system and walk between some stations.
Gray is leaning toward using buses, especially in The Bronx.
Her colleague Joseph Ferris, a subway obsessive who is helping her plot the course, thinks she should do it all on one swipe.
She does know her journey will begin at noon at Penn Station, most likely on the 2 or 3 train — though she still doesn’t know whether she’ll head up- or downtown from there.
Uptown could bring her to The Bronx, a thorny transit spot where lines end with few connections.
“The question is, do you want to get that out of the way first?” she said.
Guinness rules require her to be on trains with doors that open at every stop, meaning express trains don’t count. But she can ride express to double back.
Although she’s hopeful she’ll beat the record, her main goal is to pressure Albany to provide more funds to the MTA to stop the hikes, which will be the fourth in five years.
“If I don’t win, it’s going to be disappointing, but it backs up our message that we’re paying more for less,” she said.
The record was set in 2009, prior to the devastating service cuts the MTA enacted after losing about $260 million in transit funding.
Transportation Alternatives has collected more than 15,500 signatures asking Gov. Cuomo to stop the fare hikes by increasing funding for the MTA. The group will follow Gray’s trip on Twitter with the hashtag “#stopthefarehike.”