Enzo Wu is 17 years old and has the fastest known time for visiting every station on the San Francisco Bay Area's BART system. He does not hold the record. He may hold two of them, depending on whom you ask.
Speedrunning is the term for transit obsessives who aim to visit all the stations along a city's fixed public transit lines in record time. They spend hours studying schedules and building routes.
Success requires a willingness to skip bathroom breaks, a perfect sense of timing, and the luck of not meeting a train delay. For most people, spending 22 hours crossing the entire New York City subway would be a nightmare. For Wu it is a goal.
The clock, and the three answers
BART has 50 stations and 131 miles of track, which makes it a good testing ground. Zaid Maayah, a computer science major at UC Berkeley, recorded the first finish under six hours in early 2024.
That March a group of seven Berkeley students went around in five hours and 47 minutes, and Guinness World Records certified it. Then Wu and Maayah ran it together in five hours and 30 minutes, after two failed attempts. Then Wu ran it with a YouTuber in five hours and nine minutes.
| Three claims on one system | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Seven Berkeley students | 5:47:00 | Certified by Guinness |
| Wu and Maayah | 5:30:00 | No witnesses, not certified |
| Wu and a YouTuber, with a bike | 5:09:00 | Credited by BART, refused by Guinness |
| Kate Jones, New York subway, 2023 | 22:14:10 | The standing New York mark |
Depending on whom you ask, there are three world records for BART. The community has argued about it ever since.
Where the minutes came from
The five-and-a-half-hour plan required a move most people thought was impossible. It folded in an airport tram trip off a BART station, with zero margin for error on the transfers at both ends.
So they practiced those transfers every day for a week. They skipped stairs running between platforms. And they found they could shave time at the turnstiles by switching from their phones to physical fare cards.
That last detail is the best thing in the story. They went backward in technology because the slower-looking option tested faster. Nobody assumed. They timed it.
Why the fastest time does not count
The 5:30 run was legitimate. It simply had no witnesses, and Guinness requires them. So Guinness still recognizes the Berkeley students as kings of the BART, and the faster pair got the top spot on the TransitRuns leaderboard but no Guinness certificate.
The 5:09 run has a different flaw. Wu found that doubling back on a commuter rail line could save 20 minutes, but the transfer needed a four-minute mile and a freeway crossing. He used a bike.
The BART website credits Wu and his partner with the time. Purists say a bike is a disqualifier, and the loudest of them is Maayah, the former teammate who helped set the earlier mark. Guinness does not recognize the time, and TransitRuns followed suit.
TransitRuns is the group whose website hosts the rankings, with a Discord server used by hundreds of speedrunners. Its adjudicators have reviewed and certified 335 runs from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Santiago, Chile.
The lesson, which is about proof
Here is a teenager with the fastest number on the board and no trophy, because the method and the paperwork failed. That is not a sad story. That is how any credible scoreboard has to work.
Investing runs on the same rule. An unverified track record is not a track record. A great result produced by a method nobody can inspect is a story, and stories are not evidence.
Ask how a number was measured, over what period, with which fees included, and who checked it. If the answer is fuzzy, treat it as fuzzy, no matter how good the number looks.
Wu later made a run at New York City, the holy grail of speedruns. Several train delays killed it. "The NYC subway is a whole other beast," he said.
He plans to go to college in the Northeast, preferably a city with good transit. He also brought a timekeeper on that New York attempt, which tells you he learned the first lesson before he solved the second one.
Two other runners explain why any of this is worth doing. Joabe Barbosa, a psychology doctoral student who holds the Guinness record for Chicago, says it lets him embrace his inner explorer. Kate Jones gave up long-distance running after an ankle injury, and setting the New York record restored her sense of autonomy.