The best way to do a walking tour of New York City

In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the US, Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how we can use the exact same algorithm to optimize walking tours in large cities.

If you’re anything like me whenever you stop in a big city, you have a few main attractions that you’d like to visit and end up haphazardly spending half your day staring at maps and trying to figure out the public transit system.

However, by focusing on a limited few attractions, we’re missing out on dozens of interesting places that we could’ve visited along the way. This is where the route-optimization algorithm can come into play again: If we hand the algorithm the list of popular attractions in a city, it can provide us an efficient walking tour around the city that hits all of those attractions.

Below, I’ve mapped out an optimized walking tour for New York City that hits the most popular attractions in the city according to TripAdvisor. This walking tour by no means represents the “definitive” walking tour for the city, but it's guaranteed to give you a great taste of the city while you’re there.

Optimized walking tour of New York City

If skyscrapers, museums, and large crowds are your gig, then this walking tour is for you. In 4.5 hours of walking, you’ll hit major sights like Central Park, Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and more. This walking tour covers 14 miles of Manhattan, so come prepared with your walking shoes for what will add up to a half marathon.

Of course, if you want to stop and actually enjoy the sights along the way (which I strongly advise!), this tour could easily end up taking several days. Between long lines, hour-long museum tours, and frequent stops for Cronuts, you’ll likely only be able to hit a handful of stops per day before everything closes down. Keep that in mind when dividing this trip up over several days.

If 14 miles of walking sounds like too much, you can easily cut down on walking by taking the subway or bus for some of the longer legs of the trek. Or better yet, the same tour can be followed on a bike instead.

Here’s the Google Maps walking directions: [1] [2] [3]

Here’s the full list of attractions in order:

1. American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West, New York, NY
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10028
3. The Frick Collection, East 70th Street, New York, NY
4. Central Park, New York, NY
5. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), West 53rd Street, New York, NY
6. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 5th Avenue, New York, NY
7. Rockefeller Center, 45 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10111
8. Radio City Music Hall, Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY
9. Theater District, New York, NY
10. Times Square, New York, NY
11. Bryant Park, New York, NY
12. New York Public Library, New York, NY
13. Chrysler Building, Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
14. Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY
15. The Morgan Library & Museum, Madison Avenue, New York, NY
16. Empire State Building Observation Deck, 5th Avenue, New York, NY
17. Madison Square Garden, Pennsylvania Plaza, New York, NY
18. The High Line, New York, NY 10011
19. Chelsea Market, 9th Avenue, New York, NY
20. Ground Zero Museum Workshop, West 14th Street, New York, NY
21. Greenwich Village, New York, NY
22. Washington Square Park, New York, NY
23. SoHo, New York, NY
24. Tenement Museum, Orchard Street, New York, NY
25. St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway, New York, NY
26. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York, NY 10006
27. Statue of Liberty

SEE ALSO: This Google Maps Update Makes It Easier To Plan Your Next Roadtrip Or Run

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