A triage of shuttle buses and extended routes. Ferry service both permanent and temporary. Connections to other existing subway lines. Bikes. Scooters. Private cars. Car-shares. Ride-shares. And, of course, the original mode of transport: feet.

These are the alternatives available to the 275,000 commuters who will have to reroute their daily lives come April 2019, when the L train officially goes offline between Brooklyn and Manhattan for over a year. It is a shifting urban Rubik’s Cube, one that will compose what many are calling the biggest transit challenge New York City has ever seen. Attached are the hopes and dreams that everything will, somehow, work out. But until that day comes, nobody really knows for sure what havoc the L train shutdown will wrought—or which commute will reign supreme.

That lack of clarity was the major driving force behind “Everything But the L Train: The Williamsburg Challenge,” a recent weekend event held by the Van Alen Institute. The non-profit design organization dispatched teams of participants to essentially do trial runs of the L-pocalyspe; their mission: get from Union Square in Manhattan to North Williamsburg without using the L. (Of course, some of the alternatives—the temporary ferry service, new buses, and more frequent subway service—do not exist yet.) And during the trip, participants were outfitted with data-tracking biosensors to monitor their health and mood.