The longest station names in the game, and why most of them are in New York

We counted the keys needed to type every station once in each of our six cities. For New York, London and Singapore that is just the number of characters in the name, spaces and hyphens included. For Paris it is the letters and digits only, since accents cost nothing. For Seoul it is Hangul jamo, and for Tokyo it is the letters of the romaji plus one. The methods differ a little, so treat the comparison as a rough one. The gap is large enough that it does not matter.

The record

The longest name in the game is Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue-JFK Airport, on the E and J lines in Queens, at 43 keys. Next is Créteil - L'Échat (Hôpital Henri Mondor) on Paris Line 8, at 40. After that come 42nd Street-Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York and Aubervilliers - Pantin - Quatre Chemins on Paris Line 7, both at 39, and Westchester Square-East Tremont Avenue at 38. Of the 15 longest names in the whole game, 11 are in New York and four are in Paris.

Averages by city

The average name takes 7.5 keys in Seoul, 9.8 in Singapore, 11.1 in Tokyo, 11.8 in London, 13.8 in Paris and 16.1 in New York. The typical New York station takes more than twice as many keys as the typical Seoul one. Part of the reason is the script: a Korean name like 구로 is two syllables but four jamo. The other part is how the cities name their stations. New York puts the street and the neighbourhood or a landmark in the same name, so you get 81st Street-Museum of Natural History and President Street-Medgar Evers College. London, Tokyo and Singapore tend to use one place name.

And the shortest

Singapore has the shortest: Ubi, at three keys, with Hume and Expo at four. Paris has Rome, Cité and Iéna at four. London has Bank and Oval. Tokyo has Oji. In Seoul, Guro, Sosa, Bugae and Seocho are all four jamo. New York's shortest is Bowery, at six, and the next three are Avenue I, N and P, at eight. The median New York name is 13 keys, which is already longer than the average name in four of the other five cities.

If you want to feel the difference, play a short Seoul line and then a long New York line. The difficulty ranking shows how much the names change a line's score.