Could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson Have Stopped That Bomb If They’d Just Taken An Uber?

You could apply the public data unblock by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission to reveal critical insights about urban transportation trends . Or you could habituate it to carry on a completely serious probe on the plausibility of one of the transferral scenarios in Die Hard : With a Vengeance .

To be bonny , developer Todd W. Schneider does both as hecrunches a mammoth datasetincluding1.1 billion New York City taxi tripsfrom 2009 to 2015 , and19 million Uber ridesfrom 2014 and 2015 . Schneider answer plenty of enthralling questions with hisexcellent analysisof this entropy . But scan through his findings , I forthwith wanted to know the solvent to this specific question : Could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson really have made it from the Upper West Side to Wall Street in 30 minutes ?

As you think back in Die Hard : With a Vengeance , John McClane and Zeus Carver are at 72nd and Broadway when they pick up that a bomb is about to go off at the Wall Street 2/3 subway station . They have 30 minutes to get there , and of course it ’s morning rush hour .

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Here ’s Schneider ’s take :

McClane and Carver leave the Upper West Side at 9:50 AM , so I took all taxi rides that :

pick up in the Upper West Side census tracts between West 70th and West 74th streets

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throw away off in the downtown tract containing the Wall Street 2/3 underground discontinue

break up up on a weekday morning between 9:20 and 10:20 AM

And made a histogram of locomotion times :

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There are 580 such hack head trip in the dataset , with a mean travel fourth dimension of 29.8 moment , and a median of 29 minutes . That means that one-half of such trips actually made it within the allotted clip of 30 minutes ! Now , our heroes might need a few moment to commandeer a taxi and get down to the tube platform on foot , so if we shell out 3 minutes for those labor and 27 moment for driving , then only 39 % of trip make it in 27 minutes or less . Still , in the movie they make it seem like a herculean project with almost zero probability of achiever , when in reality it ’s just about fair . This seems to be the rare action motion-picture show chronological sequence which is actually easier to recreate in real life than in the moving picture !

Now if that ’s not a good economic consumption of publicly usable data point , then I do n’t know what is .

Although there is no good answer to this question : Why did n’t they just take the subway system ? Update : SORRY I forgot the plot . They were not allowed to use public transportation . Okay , what about Citi Bike ?

Photo: Jae C. Hong