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 fun part of the day and a bus can be “a vessel of tender reflection & romance,” per a popular post from Instagram user @navelgazinghq. Young TikTokers film themselves feeling like the main character of their reality, wistfully gazing out bus windows while listening to Lana Del Rey’s “Mariners Apartment Complex” or other similarly pensive tunes. These transit enthusiasts like to refer to themselves as “passenger princesses” when riding the bus, especially when they’re the only person in the vehicle other than the driver. On X (formerly known as Twitter), users joke about how LGBT might as well stand for “let’s go by train,” because of how queer people seem to love public transit. Others muse on how not having a driver’s licence can be reframed as a form of climate activism. In these circles, taking public transit is cool, even glamorous behaviour. 

Sharing jokes and commentary about a city’s public transportation can be an effective way to bring people together online. In April, college student Youri Barteau, an eighteen-year-old Montreal transit enthusiast, posted a video on Instagram of him taking every bus operated by the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), the city’s transit agency, over a year. The montage was the result of a challenge he’d given himself: “It just happened on a whim and then the same evening, I had already started,” Barteau tells Maisonneuve. The ostensibly niche video has racked up almost a hundred thousand views to date. Barteau is not alone in his passion for Montreal’s transit; Instagram account @passion_stm_montreal exclusively posts videos of the city’s buses, expressing affection for the vehicles or praising their drivers’ manoeuvres. The account has about three thousand followers, and some of its videos rack upward of a hundred thousand views. This type of content exists for public transportation networks across Canada—from @ilovethettc102, an Instagram account dedicated to Toronto’s 102 bus route with twenty-four thousand followers, to @ifuckinglovethehsr44, a fanpage for a bus in Hamilton, Ontario with almost five thousand followers. 

The popularity of these pages is certainly boosted by their absurd humour, but it may also be a result of how people are drawn to relatable, hyperlocal content. These accounts touch on people’s sense of belonging in their city through niche humour and references that are only legible to locals. The viral success of @fucknomtl, an Instagram account that documents trashy or wacky scenes in Montreal, shows this desire for hyperlocal content. The account, which has over a hundred thousand followers, also frequently posts media featuring the STM. Memes about transit can be especially impactful because public transportation is akin to a place’s respiratory system; it is central to many residents’ everyday lives and dictates the pace of their movements.

Public transportation agencies have caught on to the appeal of this genre of content and are adopting its style of humour to appeal to young audiences. When the STM created its TikTok account in January 2023, the page’s over-the-top and sometimes self-deprecating comedy caught people’s attention. One video has a metro car with eyelashes, juicy lips and fake nails boasting that it’s efficient, economic, accessible and sustainable. The account hops on trends: when hype about the Barbie movie dominated the internet during spring 2023, the STM posted a TikTok featuring a bus against a glittery background with text that reads “this Barbie will ghost you.” The account is now the most-followed transportation company TikTok account in North America, racking up more than seventy thousand followers and winning the Marketing and Communications Award at the 2023 Canadian Urban Transit Association Awards Ceremony.

In an interview with Radio-Canada in February 2023, STM social media consultant Thierry Bruyère-L’Abbé said he understood serious promotional messaging would not do well on TikTok, and that the account’s humorous style aims to make the brand more human. This perspective is not exclusive to the STM. TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation agency, has also begun to post memes on TikTok, like similarly personified edits of its vehicles or funny videos about everyday public transit scenes. FlixBus, a low-cost intercity bus service that operates globally, has fully committed to the shitposting bit. Among the countless memes it posts on TikTok and Instagram, a video uploaded this summer stands out: a montage of posts from young users filming themselves in FlixBus’ signature green buses, calling it “the Brat bus” in reference to pop star Charli XCX’s recent hit album and its bright green cover, reinforcing the transportation mode’s status of coolness.

Transit agencies may have caught on to the hype, but this isn’t the case among politicians. Over the past year, transit has been a source of discord between the provincial and municipal governments in Quebec. Premier François Legault, of the conservative Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), and Geneviève Guilbault, the province’s minister of transportation, have been pushing back against cities’ requests for more public transit funding. This April, Guilbault said managing public transportation was not her responsibility, claiming the province’s mission was managing roads—a puzzling statement that showed her disinterest in financing transit in any significant way. That same month, Legault called municipalities “beggars” for asking for funds to go toward maintaining public transit services, although he apologized a month later. In early May, the province officially offered $200 million to the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM), the organization that coordinates Greater Montreal’s transportation agencies, to help finance its 2025 budget. But this was less than half of what had been asked for, and the amount doesn’t include any funds for long-term development or maintenance. 

All over Canada, advocates for public transit development say our governments should be making considerable, long-term investments in the sector, as opposed to injections of short-term funds. In Quebec, the provincial government has been stuck debating the organization of public transit financing for years, without delivering plans for sufficient and durable funding. In the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis, Quebec’s 2024–2034 infrastructure plan still heavily prioritizes road networks over public transit infrastructure, with promised investments of $39.7 billion toward the former and only $14.5 billion toward the latter. In Ontario, those priorities are reversed; the provincial government’s  2022 budget promised an investment of $61.6 billion in public transit over ten years, against $25.1 billion for highway expansion and rehabilitation. 

But this problem isn’t unique to Quebec. At the federal level, transportation plans such as the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan and the Action Plan for Clean On-Road Transportation do not set targets for increasing public transit use. While the reality of climate change clearly shows that we need to massively develop sustainable transportation now, our governments are too slow and not ambitious enough. Their disinterest in prioritizing public transportation is at odds with not only the environmental reality we’re facing, but also the feelings of many young people. The engagement that public transit attracts online, particularly among younger generations, and the grassroots movements advocating for more public transit, show that a growing part of the population wants the issue to be prioritized.

The Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOT), which has more than two hundred thousand members, was created in 2017 by University of Chicago students. The group connects transit lovers around the world through memes, but it also fosters serious conversations about transportation, inviting comparisons between cities’ transit systems and critiques of car-centric urban sprawl. Members discuss topics such as public transit usage and class politics in the comment sections under posts. In this bubble, the futuristic and expensive Tesla Cybertruck stands no chance against a good old city bus.

Transit experts and enthusiasts, like the young urban planner Brittany Simmons, also create community through their social media pages. Simmons’ popular TikTok and Instagram accounts are devoted to educational content about walkability, the importance of public transportation and the logics of suburbia and car-centricity. She and her loyal followers are passionate about urban issues like pedestrian-friendly planning and the importance of third spaces, public places besides the home and the workplace where one can socialize—subjects that go beyond public transit but are connected to it. The TikTok accounts @talkingcities and @traingirlsummer have gained followings of over two hundred thousand and almost forty thousand users, respectively, by posting about urban planning-related topics. In the comment sections of posts from accounts like these, users speak of a longing for dynamic, transit-rich cities that aren’t centred around cars. Some even say that they have been inspired to pursue urban planning as a career path.

The general appreciation for public transit online, particularly among youth, isn’t surprising. Although comprehensive data is sparse, young people are a loyal demographic for public transit use, in part because many youth don’t have a licence or the means to own a car. Some studies suggest today’s youth are using public transportation at a higher rate than previous generations, and waiting longer before getting a driver’s licence. Barteau doesn’t envision himself living with a car. “I see myself continuing [to take public transit], and [having] my licence on the side, for travel,” he says. It’s a common attitude among young people living in large urban centres today. 

There may be a larger, more existential reason why young people are expressing appreciation for public transit. Gen Z, along with Gen Alpha and younger millennials, have grown up with the threat of the climate crisis looming over their heads and are typically aware of its main causes, which include car-centric transportation. “I think the climate crisis is omnipresent for our generation, clearly,” says twenty-three-year-old Victor St-Louis, a member of Écologie Populaire, a Quebec-based collective dedicated to promoting degrowth and sustainability in the province. The group’s first campaign centred around developing public transit and making it free. “We need to rethink our consumption habits and life habits so as to not need to extract as much,” says St-Louis.

Over the summer, Écologie Populaire attended protests for accessible public transit and other environmental issues. In late June, members joined a protest to denounce the ARTM’s planned transit fare hikes that ended up taking effect on July 1. That month, Écologie Populaire joined protestors at Place Émilie-Gamelin, a public space in downtown Montreal, to demand more governmental action against climate change and an end to fossil fuel extraction. “Last year, [Canada’s] fire season was six times worse than our average firefighting season,” Jenna Usick, a twenty-three-year-old organizer from the environmental campaign Last Generation Canada, tells Maisonneuve. “It was terrible. We lost 5 percent of the boreal forest in Canada.” Usick, who is from a small community in Manitoba with no public transportation, thinks investing in transit is critical if we want to move away from oil and gas. Upgrading and having more public transportation in general “is huge,” they say.

Investing in public transit can be a key way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In 2019, 43 percent of Quebec’s greenhouse gas emissions came from transportation. Road transportation contributed a fifth of all of Canada’s emissions in that same year. This number has not been decreasing; from 2005–2019, emissions from road transportation in the country went up by 18 percent. Despite the climate crisis, people are not only using cars more, they are also buying larger, more heavily polluting vehicles, like pickup trucks and SUVs.

A trip by public transportation emits 55 percent fewer gas emissions compared to one by personal vehicle. According to a 2024 report from Environmental Defence, a policy-focused environmental organization, Canada could decrease its greenhouse gas emissions by sixty-five million tonnes by 2035 through expanding public transit services. In order to make this decrease happen, Environmental Defence calculated that the federal government should double its promised $3 billion per year investment in public transportation, planned to take effect by 2026. The overall total of these suggested doubled investments from 2026 to 2035 would be “near the projected cost of building the Trans-Mountain pipeline ... [a] transportation project designed to move oil instead of people,” the organization writes.

A 2024 study published by nearly sixty climate scientists in the journal Earth System Science Data warns that the window to halt global warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is already closing. Approaching and going beyond this point will bring more extreme and frequent weather events like heatwaves, floods and droughts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says many of the impacts of reaching and surpassing this 1.5°C benchmark will—and already do—disproportionately fall on poor and vulnerable people. Younger generations are aware of these environmental risks, and what’s at stake. Faced with the colossal threat of climate collapse, enthusiasm for public transit can serve as an outlet for young people’s climate anxiety, as well as a way to advocate for and mobilize around solutions with humour and creativity.

The funding of public transit in Canada has always been a somewhat contentious topic, and the Covid-19 pandemic only intensified the discourse. Before 2020, the STM already had a growing deficit for multiple reasons, including the continual shrinkage of the Fonds des réseaux de transport terrestre, the provincial fund that finances the construction and maintenance of transportation infrastructure. The STM’s funding is derived from contributions from the federal, provincial and municipal governments, as well as from fares and taxes paid by drivers and residents. Jean-Philippe Meloche, a professor in urban planning and public finance at the Université de Montréal, notes that despite this deficit, things had been promising in terms of public transit development. 

In the years before the appearance of Covid-19, all levels of government seemed excited about investing in new projects. The Politique de mobilité durable 2030, a plan brought forward in 2018 under previous Quebec premier Philippe Couillard’s government, aimed to further develop public transit networks across Quebec and make commutes more efficient, including through significant measures like requesting that municipalities work toward urban densification. Couillard promised an investment of almost $10 billion over five years in public transit, a move that was welcomed by environmental organizations. 

The development of public transit was a hot issue during the 2018 Quebec provincial election and the 2019 federal election. The CAQ’s campaign emphasized expanding the public transit network. It included building an extension of Montreal’s blue metro line and working toward expanding the yellow metro line; building the REM de l’Est, a light rail service that would have operated across the underserviced east side of the island of Montreal; and generally increasing access to transit in the suburbs of Montreal. On the federal level, the Liberal campaign promised an investment of $28 billion in public transit over ten years, and to work toward making public transit vehicles electric for increased sustainability.

Covid-19 brought this enthusiasm to a halt. “During the pandemic, we told people to stop taking public transit,” says Meloche. Many commuters stopped going to work in person, and revenue from fares declined rapidly and dramatically. Public transit naturally dropped in priority for all levels of government. “There is an ensemble of crises, in healthcare, in education, that became much more important than public transit,” says Meloche. The ARTM, Greater Montreal’s transit authority, projects that it’ll take until 2027 to reach pre-pandemic fare revenue levels. Over the last year, Legault and Guilbault have been pushing back against Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Laval and many other municipalities’ requests for support with public transit funding. 

In October 2023, the STM feared it would have to cut the services it offers. There was talk of the metro closing at 11PM, rather than at 1AM Sunday-Friday and at 1:30AM on Saturday, and of certain bus lines being eliminated. While these cuts were ultimately avoided thanks to internal optimization measures, the projected deficit for future years remains high. By 2028, the STM’s deficit is projected to reach $700 million, according to the city. With a large deficit to tend to just to make sure the transit system doesn’t sink, “we have moved to survival mode,” Meloche admits.

In May, Montreal’s Commission sur les finances et l’administration, which examines the city’s financial issues, organized public consultations on transit funding to brainstorm recommendations for the city ahead of the 2025 budget. Representatives from community organizations, unions and transportation companies, as well as many experts and residents, participated in the consultations. Their opinions were varied, and sometimes contradictory. For example, the city’s chamber of commerce, the organization that represents businesses, gave a recommendation in line with Legault’s view: that the STM and the city optimize their expenses, primarily by cutting employee wages. The conclusion of public transit groups and experts diverged from the chamber of commerce’s view: they argued the government’s main goal should be to increase ridership. This would bring in higher revenues which could be funnelled to increased quality and accessibility, thus creating a cycle that generates higher and higher rates of ridership. 

This endless focus on deficits and profits may not be the best angle to take on the issue of public transportation. Like many other young people, St-Louis from Écologie Populaire wants transit to be seen not just as something that needs to be profitable, but rather as an investment that improves society. “We talk a lot about the budget gap, but not about making public transit better. That’s a problem,” says St-Louis. He hopes governments will make courageous, forward-looking decisions and allocate funding toward creating a more breathable future, regardless of any deficits that might exist.

Moving away from thinking about public transit in terms of deficits and profits implies a paradigm shift, one that was frequently mentioned during the public consultations in Montreal in May. This shift would mean starting to treat public transportation as an essential service, like hospitals or waste collection, or even like roads—which are expensive and typically don’t create any profits. This would mean recognizing public transportation’s absolute necessity for the functioning of a city, and therefore not calling the existence of its services, or its need for sufficient funding, into question. 

Laura Blanchette is a twenty-three-year-old recent Carleton University graduate who is passionate about this issue. Over the last year, she’s worked on Good Golly Miss Trolley, a zine about Ottawa’s transit that includes writing and art from her and other young people in her social circle. She says she started working on the zine because she was frustrated, “as many of us are in Ottawa with the state of our public transit,” but also with the goal of celebrating the city’s public transportation. 

Throughout the zine’s pages are calls to rally for better transit and descriptions of peaceful commutes. The work speaks to a common desire to be able to move around the city more freely. “Free transit is a social justice issue,” says Blanchette. According to the 2024 Environmental Defence report, public transit users are disproportionately low-income workers, racialized people and women. Nationally, 64 percent of public transit users do not have access to a car, and fare increases particularly impact marginalized populations. Transport poverty, or a lack of access to transportation, increases social exclusion and prevents people from using community resources. Conversely, transportation that is free and accessible lowers the barriers to social inclusion for elderly, racialized, disabled and low-income people. 

Young transit enthusiasts usually recognize public transit as a tool for inclusion and equity. In January 2023, a coalition of organizations in British Columbia launched a campaign called Transit for Teens, which advocates for raising the province’s age limit for free transit for youth from twelve to eighteen. The campaign frames public transportation as a social good; youth who can move around freely are able to “attend school regularly, access tutoring, participate in extracurricular activities and access vital resources like food banks without worrying about transportation expenses,” members of the Transit for Teens youth leadership coalition wrote in the Tyee about the campaign earlier this year. In Regina, the organization Better Bus Youth successfully pressured the city to embrace fare-free transit for riders thirteen years and under in 2022; the organization’s next target is to extend the right to all youth under eighteen. These campaigns posit that accessible public transportation is necessary for the flourishing of young people, in that it allows them to more easily partake in their academic, professional and social lives. All the while, improving the accessibility of public transportation helps remove cars from the road, making it easier to reach the carbon emission reduction targets needed for a viable future.

St-Louis agrees that public transit should be treated as an essential service, and should eventually be free. “Everyone needs to move around, but the main way that’s accessible to everyone right now is public transit,” he says. If Montreal were suddenly devoid of public transportation, essential workers without personal vehicles wouldn’t be able to get to their jobs. Downtown residents would use more of the city’s road capacity, impacting workers coming in from the suburbs. Public transit is necessary for all residents to be able to participate in their city, stimulate the economy and cultivate social relations.

In Canada, public transportation has long been treated as a way to simply fill the gaps in a car-centric system. We need a shift in our way of thinking. The tricky part of bringing about this change is that investments alone may not alter people’s transportation habits. Meloche explains that even if we spend large amounts of money to build extensive public transportation projects, we cannot expect drivers, who are used to the convenience and comfort of a personal vehicle, to change their minds. “If you want to change people’s habits, we need the cost of using cars to increase faster than the cost of using other forms of mobility,” he says. These moves need to go hand in hand. But for decades, our governments have failed to restrict car use. 

Discouraging car use can be achieved through higher fees for drivers, which would also help fund public transportation. More financial contributions from drivers toward public transportation were recommended by nearly all of the experts at Montreal’s public budget consultations in May. The immediate solutions proposed included raising registration and fuel taxes, expanding non-residential parking taxes and creating a vehicle sale tax, with higher fees for heavy or luxury vehicles. Longer-term recommendations included installing tolls and implementing a mileage tax, which would charge drivers based on the distance driven. In late June, the commission that held the consultations recommended that the city apply the short-term solutions and plan to implement the long-term ones. But for these measures to be put into place, the provincial government needs to cooperate and enable their implementation. 

It’s important that measures discouraging car use are carried out simultaneously with expansions and improvements that make public transit more accessible. This especially matters for residents who live in neighbourhoods poorly served by transit routes. “Getting from downtown to Montréal-Nord, for example, takes an hour by bus,” says St-Louis. “Obviously, people will use their car, but by increasing the public transport available to them and reducing the advantages of the car, the transition would be smoother.”

Applying measures to discourage car use and investing in transit both require political courage. There is something to be said about some people’s sensitivity when their access to a car is called into question—partly explained by the personal vehicle representing an old-school ideal of individualistic freedom and success. Conservative politicians know that appealing to drivers can be a way to garner support. For example, Legault has been going back and forth for years on his promise to build a third road link for cars and trucks between Quebec City and Lévis, cities that are on opposite sides of the St. Lawrence River. Several expert reports discourage the project and suggest developing public transit instead. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who is leading in the polls for the upcoming federal election, claimed in June that he wouldn’t give “a cent” toward a tramway project in the Quebec City region, denouncing what he called the Liberals’ “war on the car.”

Traditional ideas about the car being the pinnacle of freedom may be falling out of favour with younger generations. “A city can be so much more vibrant when it is walkable, when you can get around it reliably on the train or on the bus,” Blanchette says. Transit-loving youth want to be part of an interconnected, animated city, and believe that this can be achieved in part through improving public transportation. For these youth, social media is a space to imagine this possible future. In the NUMTOT Facebook group and on urbanist TikTok pages, users from places poorly served by transit support each other and provide tips to get around isolation. They share images of a future that is less fantastically utopian than fairly ordinary: dense social housing near transit stations, fast bus networks, maps of imaginary light rail systems. For these youth, liberation can be found through reliable public transit because, unlike a car, it doesn’t provide freedom of movement to just a single person or family—it grants this freedom to an entire community. ⁂

Juliette de Lamberterie is a freelance writer and researcher in Montreal with a background in feminist research and new media. She cares about local politics, ethics in technology and pop culture.