In New York, You're Never More Than Five And A Half Blocks From A Starbucks, Data Says

We know that Starbucks is ubiquitous, but nowhere is the presence of America's largest coffee chain felt more than in New York City. One college student set out to prove that Starbucks is literally everywhere in the five boroughs through hard, cold-pressed data.

CUNY Baruch College student Aleksey Bilogur analyzed Yelp to discover just how many Starbucks' there are in Manhattan (more than 200), and  how far any random caffeine-deprived pedestrian is from a location at any given time: The answer is an average of 5.6 blocks, or a little over two avenues.

How did he accomplish this? Bilogur created a data cloud of 2,000 random points on the island of Manhattan and used an algorithm to determine the distance to the closest Starbucks location. He then calculated the average of each data set and voila! came up with the magic number of 1,335 feet, or about 5.6 blocks.

Surprisingly, Starbucks is not the number one chain restaurant on the list. Bilogur repeated the same process for multiple chain stores and found that pedestrians are never more than 5.3 blocks from a Dunkin' Donuts or 4.8 blocks from a Subway. You'll stumble upon a McDonald's at least every 6.4 blocks, and a Chipotle location every 14.4 blocks. Unfortunately, you may have to walk 39 blocks to get a salad from Chopt.