In the 1995 action epic "Die Hard with a Vengeance," Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have to do what they take to be an impossible task — take a taxi down the length of Manhattan in 30 minutes to prevent a bomb from blowing up Wall Street.
Software engineer Todd Schneider wanted to find out if that's actually possible.
Schneider drew on publicly available data from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which he recently used to make a breathtaking visualization of 1.1 billion New York taxi cab pick-ups and drop-offs.
He noted that John McClane (Willis) and Zeus Carver (Jackson) leave 72nd St. and Broadway on their way to Wall Street at 9:50 a.m., so he included in his sample all trips picked up in that area, dropped off at their destination, and within the window of 9:20 a.m. to 10:20 a.m.
The TLC data showed 580 trips met those criteria with a median travel time of 29 minutes. That meant half of all trips were actually faster than Hollywood's flame-filled blitz downtown.
Schneider does hedge a little bit.
He notes that McClane and Carver may need time to actually commandeer the cab (though, in the movie, McClane has no trouble carjacking the poor cabbie). If that takes a few minutes, that means they'll only have about 27 minutes of travel time, which Schneider says reduces the number of matches to about 39% of trips.
"Still, in the movie they make it seem like a herculean task with almost zero probability of success," he writes, "when in reality it's just about average."
Fair, but if Hollywood had done its homework, that would mean Bruce Willis wouldn't have been able to to drive a commandeered taxi through Central Park in broad daylight. He could have just hailed a cab like a normal person.
But what fun is that?
