Train Nerds Taking Over BART This Weekend for Trendy Sport: Speedrunning

A granola bar. Hand sanitizer. A BART train schedule. These are among the supplies Harvy Chang and his friends plan to bring this Sunday as they attempt to break a new record: visiting every BART station as quickly as possible with as many people as possible.

It’s called a “speedrun,” and Chang’s group of Bay Area high schoolers is organizing the largest ever attempt in the Bay Area. As of Wednesday, 80 people have signed up.

“I want to see a hundred people going to do this,” Chang said, “because right now, the transit speedrunning community isn’t that big.”

The term “speedrunning” was popularized in video gaming culture when a player attempts to complete an entire game as quickly as possible. But transit nerds have co-opted the trend and turned it into a real-life game, by visiting every train or bus station — traveling up and down every arm of the transit system — as quickly as possible. The prize: bragging rights. And possibly internet fame.

Chang got interested in the sport last year after seeing a viral YouTube video about it. He contacted the speedrunner to plan a route, but Chang said the runner didn’t want to share his plans.

“Because he wanted to get the record,” Chang said. “At that point, when he didn’t really want to share, I was like, okay, I got to [plan] this myself. So then I did.”

While speedrunners have raced on San Francisco’s MUNI trains, San Mateo’s SamTrans bus lines and Santa Clara’s VTA light rail, among other Bay Area transit agency routes, BART is the most popular. The commuter rail agency has even created a webpage dedicated to speedruns and posts a log of each attempt its staff can find online.

The current Guinness World Record (yes, there’s also a Guinness World Record for speedrunning) is held by a group of seven UC Berkeley graduate students, specializing in transportation, who completed the run in 5 hours, 47 minutes and 42 seconds in March 2024.

Chang and a group of 20 others unofficially beat that time in July, ending the race in 5 hours, 43 minutes and 10.95 seconds. The group submitted their fastest time to the record-setting organization and is awaiting certification.

During that July run, Chang’s cadre also broke the unofficial record for the largest group to complete a BART speedrun, which he hopes to break again this weekend.

To achieve that, Sunday’s event will prioritize participation over time. For Chang and his friends, that means working out a lot of logistics. Nowhere is that more critical than at transfer points, when the speedrunners will have to get on and off the trains en masse as quickly as possible.

Even mere seconds can matter: Chang has found that, if one BART train enters the station and the connecting train holds its doors for passengers to board, it can throw off the whole schedule and possibly mean missing the next train.

“Before your first transfer, you’re kind of just chilling there,” the 17-year-old said. “As soon as you get your first transfer, it starts getting real.”

With a group of Sunday’s expected size, that also means planning for banalities like bathroom breaks and trips to the water fountain — no easy feat with a group of 20, let alone the 80 who registered. To manage the crowd, Chang expects Sunday’s speedrun to take about 6 hours to complete.

“Even if you make your transfer really long, a BART station is only going to have — at most — two bathrooms, so that’s going to be something that we have to deal with,” he said.

While it’s not a widely documented sport, transit speedrunning’s origins trace back to 1960, when the Guinness World Record started tracking the “Tube Challenge” on the London Underground. Two United Kingdom residents broke the record in August 2024, visiting all 272 stations in less than 18 hours.

BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said her staff recently learned of the trend when content creators started sharing their experiences — and records — on social media. According to the agency, its popularity had grown over the past decade, ever since Jim Yu, a Moraga resident, completed the first documented speedrun in 2012.

Yu doesn’t call himself a train nerd or a public transportation activist, but rather, a modern-day explorer who prefers to let someone else take the wheel. Over the course of 11 years, he’s traveled, on and off, from the top of North America (Prudhoe Bay, Alaska) to the tip of South America (Ushuaia, Argentina) using only buses.

When he completed his first BART speedrun, it was an opportunity to enjoy the Bay Area’s dynamic landscape and destinations along BART’s station map that he would never visit on a regular commute.

“Even though the San Francisco Bay Area is not a very large area geographically, you have everything here from oceans to almost desert-like dryness in the East Bay, and everything in between,” he said. “If you [ride] BART— not even for a speedrun, just to sit there and look out the window, you get to see everything that is in the Bay Area.”

Since then, the speedrunning community has grown — and so have opinions about what qualifies as an official race. Last October, a popular YouTuber — the same one who inspired Chang to join the sport — teamed up with another speedrunner and completed the run in 5 hours, 9 minutes and 35 seconds. But they achieved that time by visiting stations out of order and using bikes to catch some of the trains.

Despite following the official Guinness World Record rules, Chang said the Bay Area Transit Discord is still deciding whether it is fair to use a bike. For now, he and many others will continue speedrunning using only their feet and a Clipper card.

Ultimately, Chang and other high school students care less about who is right and more about who shows up. For them, speedrunning isn’t just fun, it’s a chance to explore nearby cities without needing a car or a driver’s license.

David Rabinovich, a 15-year-old from Foster City, is the board president of the California High School Transit Alliance, an organization aiming to connect high school transit clubs across the state and raise awareness of how convenient buses and trains can be for young people.

As he helps Chang and others organize the Bay Area speedrun this Sunday, Rabinovich is also coordinating with a high school in San Diego to organize a speedrun there, also on Sunday. That group will traverse the San Diego Trolley. As both groups speedrun together, Rabinovich hopes to inaugurate California Speedrun Day.

“Transit is very important for high schoolers because some of us can’t drive. If you can drive, you have all these costs: gas, insurance, getting the car— and that’s not something high schoolers can do really,” he said. “So transit is a lifeline.”

The BART speedrun takes place on Sunday, Sept. 14. The event will start at 9:40 a.m. sharp at the Millbrae BART station. For more information, visit: https://luma.com/yj73dmrc.