If you spend a lot of time online and usually find yourself on the more progressive side of the internet, chances are you’ve seen a version of this meme: an image or video comparing car-centric city planning, in the form of a grey-toned landscape featuring highways and cars everywhere, with human-centric planning, as a bright-coloured vista brimming with pedestrians and tramways. These memes present concrete and asphalt landscapes as the sterile aesthetic of late capitalism, in contrast to modernist utopias featuring diverse transportation networks. This content is part of a genre of transit-related memes that has become popular on social media in recent years, especially among young people.

Young people have honed in on public transit with their ironic and existential humour. The notion of romanticizing your life while taking public transit frequently surfaces on social media timelines; for those who tend to daydream, a morning commute is a ...