A statistician and visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute has discovered the Brooklyn residence that is farthest from any subway: 2336 National Drive in Mill Basin. See how your place compares.
Ben Wellington of I Quant NY analyzed freely available data from NYC Open Data to create a kind of heat map of Brooklyn subway access. The darker areas have less subway access, and the lighter areas should be side-eyed without mercy if they ever complain about a walk to the train.
Image via I Quant NY.
“As the pigeon flies,” Wellington writes, 2336 National Drive is 2.2 miles from the nearest subway.
The top ten Brooklyn neighborhoods for subway access, according to Wellington’s analysis, are: Greenpoint, Gravesend, Ocean Hill, Broadway Junction, Kensington, Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Boerum Hill. It’s important to note that this data doesn’t take into account which subway residents have excellent access to, and that small neighborhoods are likely to score higher on the list even with only one train—e.g., Greenpoint and its sorry old G.
But as G train apologists will tell you, often without being asked, it’ll get you there, despite its bad rap. And the point, really, is how far people have to walk to even get to a bad train.
The bottom ten neighborhoods for subway access are, in descending order: Spring Creek, Flatlands, Starrett City, Gerritsen Beach, Georgetown, Marine Park, Sea Gate, Bergen Beach, Mill Basin, and Mill Island. Eleventh-worst was Red Hook.
For the sake of comparison, Manhattan’s least subway-accessible building is a mere 0.7 miles from the nearest train, meaning we never, ever have to listen to Manhattanites complain about having to walk too far to the train, since York Avenue is now officially, quantifiably not that far. But the Second Avenue subway is totally necessary, we’ve been assured.
Follow John Sherman on Twitter @_john_sherman.
