Miles in Transit

"Miles in Transit" is a blog and later YouTube channel by Miles Taylor, a man in his 20s from Boston, Massachusetts, that covers travel on transit, ranging from city buses to cross-continental railroad trips. (The name is a very clever joke, and it is lucky that Miles' parents had the foresight to name him "Miles".) The blog was originally started in 2013, when Miles was a middle school student, and continued to grow over the years as Miles expanded his transit adventures from city bus and regional rail in the Northeast Corridor to long distance rail and bus service, as well as ferries and airplanes, across the country and around the world. Currently, Miles has over 50,000 subscribers and his most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views.

There is an entire world of "Transit YouTube", with varying types and levels of production. Some of it is technical, and some of it is polemical. There are a lot of YouTube channels where people talk about the technicalities of types of trains, and there are a lot of YouTube channels where people castigate the United States' car dependency. While there is some social background to the videos that Miles makes, most of it is focused on the experience, whether that is as simple as riding a streetcar for a half hour, or as complex as riding a Greyhound bus across the country. He sometimes also does self-imposed challenges, such as riding only local transit between Washington, D.C. and Boston, or speedruns, such as riding an entire transit system as quickly as possible. In some videos, he has had "races" where different teams use different modalities to race between two cities. (Airplane versus bus versus train, for example). If there is some way to expand the idea of getting from Point A to Point B by a vehicle, Miles has thought of it. Or will.

The production values are also surprisingly fun: with musical interludes, jingles and graphics flashing across the screen (although usually not to a distracting extent). Miles has also instituted his own slang, that has spread across transit circles, such as reinvigorating the antique word "foamer" for transit fans. He usually also has companions on his rides, with different personalities, that he plays off of. Which especially becomes interesting when it is a more difficult circumstance, such as a 3 AM wait in a transit center in the rain. Miles (along with frequent collaborator) is also a skilled musician and composes and sings song, some about transit, some about other subjects.

Overall, I would say that the success of Miles (other than his obvious determination to go difficult places under different circumstances) is that he makes his audience feel part of things. He can take a seemingly prosaic or boring subject, like riding a local bus in Boston (but also riding a train in Spain or a ferry in Argentina), and draw the audience in, making it feel we are along for the adventure and are a part of things. Related to that is the social role of the channel, which at times is very critical of America's housing and transit choices, but is also full of nostalgia for American institutions like diners, and his videos feel like a little trip where the viewer gets to both appreciate the past and think of a better future---all while watching a jiggly camera shot of people running for subway stairs.