Finally, there's a website that can quantify your level of New York realness by way of how many subway stations you've been to (or found yourself unexpectedly in).
Digital designer Mike Solomon created "What's your Subway Number?," which allows you to mark every station you've actually been in—passing through on a train doesn't count.
Solomon tells us the inspiration came when he was "bored out of my mind on my commute, staring at that subway map. I was looking at all those far-out stations and realized they all sounded so alien to me. It made me realize how there's a lot of the map that I've never even thought about, let alone been to. So I thought it would be fun to plot everywhere I'd been on a map. Then I realized it would be fun for other people to do, so I made a scoring and sharing system."
You start out as a NYC Outsider, but soon you'll find yourself a various levels of straphanger self-awareness:
It's very fun—and definitely makes you think about how well you know some areas versus others. And that's what Solomon is hoping for, "It would be extra cool if it encourages people to explore more and keep updating their map."
When I asked how I could further enhance my subway station awesomeness (fine, I was jealous that Rebecca got a higher score, even though I had to live NJ suburbs until I was 17 and she's a Native New Yorker), Solomon gave me good news: "I added a feature that automatically saves your results on your computer so you can come back to the map and update your progress."
