The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #29

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Spotlight Story is all about speedrunning real-life public transit networks and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and new TAS movies. Check it out HERE.

Spotlight: Enzo 🔦

I love non-gaming speedruns. Really cool things emerge when the speedrunning formula is applied to everyday activities that everybody is familiar with. In past publications I’ve already talked about Excel and (briefly) baking, and today I’d like to put the spotlight on another one: public transit networks.

The goal is fairly simple: use public transport to pass through every station on its network, as fast as possible. Time starts when the doors close at the first station and ends upon leaving the train, tram, bus or monorail after having ticked off all others on the network. It is simple, but also much more complicated than it sounds.

The majority of it might be an autoscroller with no way to speed up the vehicle you’re in, but that just means that other factors become much more important. Arguably, the most important part of any speedrun is the route, and in an open scenario like this one a lot of questions need to be answered:

• Where should my route start / end?
• Where do I transfer from one line to the next?
• How do I minimize the amount of stations I visit multiple times?
• Are there any shortcuts between stations / lines outside of the network?

The answers to these are an exercise in graph theory and a classic travelling salesman problem, with the additional constraints that we are restricted to lines, can only change them at specific points and - most importantly - are also optimizing the route for speed. Any time spent waiting at a station or bus stop is completely wasted. The frequency of different lines and the time it takes to change at a station need to be carefully considered.

During a run, the stakes are high. For any multi-hour speedrun, resetting is a serious blow, especially far into the run. But for public transit systems and on optimized routes, an opportunity where the right lines align at the right time might only present itself once or twice a day. Additionally, randomness (RNG) is rampant and trains or buses can run into a myriad of issues, causing them to be delayed or even cancelled. Committing a day of your time to a run shows serious commitment, whether in real life or in video games.

The idea of clearing entire networks has been around for a while. There are many recognized Guinness world records and popular content creators that have attempted these challenges, but they haven’t been called a speedrun until recently. And only when they did, they appeared on my radar.

I first came across this phenomenon through a video by YouTuber Adam, in which he attempts a run through the Bay Area Rapid Transit network, or B.A.R.T. for short, using a route that promised a new record if completed successfully.

BART gets a special shoutout here because they recognize, embrace and encourage speedruns of their network. On their website you’ll find a chronological list of verified runs as well as information about how to start your own.

A map of the Bay Area Rapid Transit, showing all the lines and all the stops.

Compared to networks like the London Underground, BART is fairly simplistic, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to optimize, let alone finish a good run. The architect of the fastest route through the system is young high school student Enzo. He is a strong advocate for public transit and has not only perfected the route through his local network, but recently went to Los Angeles to speedrun the metro system there as well. Check out the full video on his YouTube channel!

Eager to learn more, I reached out to Enzo and received not only a quick, but also an exceptionally comprehensive response. The full version of the text-based Q&A sadly goes far beyond the scope of this article and there are cuts I needed to make, but I will follow up with an extended version as a separate publication in the near future.

Insights from Enzo

Q: Would you like to introduce yourself?

I’m currently a 15-year-old sophomore in high school, advocating for transit through journeys and experiences that appeal to audiences of my demographic. Speedrunning helped me incorporate myself into the transit community, but I’ve since branched to other areas like content creation and networking with communities to advocate for transit.

Q: How did you get into speedrunning public transit systems?

I had a passion for transit and considered myself an enthusiast, but wanted to make something out of it. A difficult and creative challenge was the perfect opportunity, and seeing as I was already an active gamer, speedrunning my local system, BART, checked all the criteria on my imaginary list. I was first exposed to the idea of transit speedrunning through the YouTuber tomo tawa linja, and found myself invested in their videos on the subject.

Q: Finding the quickest possible route is a big focus. How do you analyse a new transit system for speedrunning?

When I’m completely unfamiliar with a system’s layout or operations, it’s generally a better idea to learn how it functions as a whole before diving straight in. For example, I had never ridden the LA metro system before and figured it was a better idea to learn the lines’ headways, important station layouts, and fare system, among other basic things. After gaining some familiarity with the system - which you can do online, but I would highly suggest scouting in person - the next step is to open up a spreadsheet and plot the current fastest time route, using whatever format you prefer, as well as noting any strategies (like where to stand in which car of the train to optimize transfer positioning). Then, open up a to-scale system map, and observe possible shortcuts in the WR route or consider swapping end/start points. If the WR route is already extremely optimized, it doesn’t hurt to consider options that you might have crossed out for one reason or another before brute forcing them, as sometimes the wildest routes are the fastest.

Q: Before the run, I noticed that you scout some stations where key changes will take place. How else do you prepare for the day of the run?

To be honest, most of the preparation and logistic readiness come long before the attempt. […] you should be mentally ready for anything. During the night before the attempt, prepare a backpack with goods such as power banks, food and drinks, and other miscellaneous items as applicable, from recording equipment to hand sanitizer.

Q: While on the speedrun, Do you actively monitor multiple lines and their delays? Could you see yourself changing your route on the fly?

Of course, runners should monitor conditions on the system and off the system, like weather patterns, delays on the system, and other factors. Should something dire occur, a spontaneous route swap is possible. If you do, maybe it's best to tank the delay/cycle and continue with your route, or maybe it's best to swap routes. Normally, if there is a segment of the run that is vulnerable to fluctuations and variability, it's a good idea to plan a backup route in advance. However, as with many systems, if the run is already exceptionally optimized, one missed transfer likely kills your run.

Q: How have schedule updates or line changes affected your speedruns?

[…] major changes, such as new line openings or station additions/removals warrant complete leaderboard resets, similar to how different versions of Minecraft have different leaderboards. Of course, in real life, you can’t rollback to play an older version of a system, so rather than completely removing and forgetting the leaderboard, a system’s leaderboard is archived, and then reset for its current state.

Q: Do you plan to improve the BART record?

BART is already one of the most optimized systems in the entire world in transit speedrunning. With their schedules having changed recently on the 13th, any hopes of beating my time of 5 hours, 9 minutes, and 35 seconds is virtually non-existent.

Q: How does transit speedrunning compare to gaming speedruns?

Similarities: The spirit of speedrunning, and what a speedrun fundamentally is. Additionally, things like optimization, planning, brutal fails, close calls and lucky RNG are all shared factors between gaming and transit speedruns. There are shortcuts for many systems and anything that counts as public transit is fair game.Differences: There isn’t a website or page like speedrun.com for transit. Thus, there’s often controversy in some runs that push rule sets and boundaries to their limits, as a symptom of a lack of moderation. Real-world runs and video game runs are very different, in the sense that you can’t pause (obviously), resetting takes MUCH longer, and there are often more variables and external, uncontrollable factors compared to video game runs.

Q: What advice would you give to newcomers?

[…] the best advice I can give is to not overthink it and start the process of researching past runs, combing through timetables, finding a fast route, and executing it. You’ll learn a lot over the course of the run, and if you continue to make attempts on the same or different system, your experience will carry you through.

Q: Is there a global transit speedrunning community?

Unfortunately, each metropolitan area kinda has its own community, and sometimes (like in the case of the USA), there may be some public but inactive communities on various social media platforms, banding together to try to record every attempt on every system to make sure nobody gets left out. However, because of this, there isn’t a network that connects all speedrunner hobbyists under one roof. Odds are, if you google '[system name] speedrun', ex. 'WMATA speedrun', multiple results will come up with past and current runners battling locally for the top spot.

Q: How do you see the future evolving, and what role do you hope to play in it?

My transit speedruns weren’t really intended to gain much recognition at all and were my way of advocating transit through a fun experience that I thought tied my past life with my new passion well. However, now that I’ve seemingly adopted a transit speedrunner title, I’m not going to stop what I’ve been doing; my realistic future goals would be to sweep the West Coast, including cities like Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Diego, as well as tackling some East Coast giants like Boston’s MBTA and DC’s WMATA. In the distant future, I hope to one day take my chance at titans like Tokyo and Shanghai. In general, though, my role in transit speedrunning has largely played out already; influencing people who may or may not have previously been transit enthusiasts to go out and try something similar, spreading advocacy for the fact that, yes, if you plan a transit trip well, it can be very efficient and cost-effective, and to hopefully project a better image for public transportation systems on the online world.

I think that’s a beautiful sentiment to end it on. Once again, a huge thank you to Enzo for his time. Make sure to check out his YouTube channel to watch his run through the LA metro system and to stay updated on future ones.

And you, dear reader, let me know in the comments or on the Gold Split Discord: have you been inspired to try this in your local city or town? If so, which one?

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨