A few months ago, I became aware of a new transit phenomenon endemic to Los Angeles: the Public Transit Baddie. You probably know the type – young women who combine streetwise confidence with femininity in a way that reminds a Gen Xers like me of the “around the way girls” of the pre-internet age. The PTBs, though, are social media influencers – which, understandably, might rub one the wrong way. The concept after all, evokes young women shilling for some restaurant or other with seemingly exaggerated flat affect… or young men with seemingly fixed Joker smiles and signature-gatherer energy frantically demanding “make sure you hit that like and subscribe!” But I reckon there’s more than one way to be an Influencer — and there’s definitely more to the Public Transit Baddies than meets the eye. With each Instagram Story, TikTok, or YouTube video, these influencers are calmly, surgically slicing away the smoggy bits of Los Angeles’s necrotic car-brain. And how many missions are more important than that?
I first noticed the baddies back in May. My good friend, Jackie Lam, joined me as we previewed the Metro D Line extension, which extended the D’s length from Koreatown to Beverly Hills. In doing so, Metro restored rail transit to the former streetcar suburb that had, by then, gone 71 years without modern mass transit. It had to be a source of deep embarrassment for a city as notoriously obsessed with image and status. Jackie had also accompanied me on the previous year’s A Line extension to Pomona but Jackie observed that the D extension hit different. Having been to half a dozen such events, I had to agree. There was something new in the air.
Within 24 hours, the shift was reflected by Nobody Drives in LA’s Instagram algorithm. Instead of the normal stream of content from mobility activist organizations, transit agencies, and advertising from brands like OneWheel and Wombi, there were the unfamiliar faces of young women filming videos of themselves in the new D Line station, expressing amazement at the cleanliness, and more often than not, stating that it was their first time riding not just the D, but any Metro line. After the purple smoke cleared, some faces began to come into focus. They were all previously unfamiliar to me (which isn’t saying much) but they spoke in what seemed to me the language of influencers. I wondered whether transit agencies were paying them to promote mass transit. Most of them issued videos (or texted me when asked) that they were not – and I have no reason not to believe them. In fact, riding around town, I have seen a few in the wild. I thought I recognized Sage Ye walking through Union Station after we recorded an episode of the podcast at Traxx Bar with Greg Ghielmetti of Metti Mart. Another time, I thought I saw Jasmine Britt (the “LA Metro ‘It’ Girl) leaving Hollywood/Vine Station. I told my co-host, Ivy, “I think I saw Jasmine Britt! She had a backpack with Mickey Mouse on it.” With the latter detail, Ivy self-assuredly replied, “Oh yeah, that was definitely her.!”
When I first took notice of the PTBs, I wasn’t sure how to characterize them. Perhaps I had seen Serena Morris use the term, “Public Transit Girlie.” That’s what I searched up, which brought me to a piece on the Substack, No Bad Days, titled “The rise of the LA Metro TikTok ‘influencer.’” It mentioned many of the PTB accounts with which I was familiar: Britt, Sage, Serena, and @emily0nthego. Others, like @celinemilien and @nicole.a.chu, appeared to me primarily focused on non-transit content – but occasionally posted PTB-type videos. The algorithm also suggested content from @babetraveling and @jagkoleen but, upon further research, most of their focus was in other areas. I began to wonder what makes a transit baddie a transit baddie?
There are prominent female voices in the local transit conversation writing deeply informed pieces; women like Alissa Walker, Maylin Tu, and Sahra Sulaiman – but I don’t really think of them as Public Transit Baddies, per se. There are women who make lots of transit content on social media that stars themselves riding bikes, buses, and trains whilst stylishly dressed; women like @fixthecityla, @kelsey.vdb, @samantharoxas, @miche1ada. Are they Public Transit Baddies? Do you have to be a woman? @b.e.morton doesn’t seem to think so and posted a video of himself striking a pose overlaid with the text, if memory serves correctly, “I’m a public transit girlie.” What if you’re a baddie who takes mass transit but doesn’t post about it? That would describe more than a few women I know. I suppose, at the end of the day, it’s not really for me to say.
I looked for PTBs in other cities. I found the baddie-coded @enjoylifewithmichaela in Seattle and @transitbarbie in San Diego, but that was it. It’s hard to imagine them thriving in cities without metro systems. Only 246 cities in the world have metro systems. Only fifteen American cities have heavy rail. In cities like New York, DC, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia — where large percentages of the populace routinely take mass transit – there’s not really an angle to exploit for the would-be PTB. It’s true that only New York City consistently ranks higher than Los Angeles in annual mass transit boardings… but ranked by percentages of residents who routinely take transit, Los Angeles ranks 50th, just behind the much-smaller city of Providence and just ahead of Atlanta. It boggles the rational mind – especially when you consider that only the massive New York-New Jersey urban area has more transit coverage. The nation’s second-most populous is served by the second-largest mass transit network – but two out of every three Angelenos rarely, if ever, uses it. Trips cost $1.75. It only rains 34 days a year. Make it make sense.
Car-brain is pathological. Perhaps it cannot be cured – but only treated… but when middle-aged and elderly slebs like James Corden, Jerry Seinfeld, and RuPaul make content in which they hang out with other slebs in cars, they normalize it. It’s meant to capture the vacuous “only in LA” mentality and reality. It’s the same thing mocked in Saturday Night Live’s 2010s soap opera parody, titled “The Californians,” which squeezed laughs from its characters’ long, complicated, and highly specific car commutes. I hear and read all of time that you have to have a car in Los Angeles – even though 30% of us live without them, depending not just on mass transit but by cycling and walking in a city where, we’re also assured by those in the know, that bike lanes are always empty and nobody walks.
The Public Transit Baddies are more compelling, though, than me. They don’t, for the most part, toss out statistics or facts, they just make it look easy… and somehow simultaneously mundane and romantic. If I’d posted this two months ago, I’d’ve said they made being car-free look “kinda chic.” Their comment sections are populated, largely, but supportive women but, of course, pick-me bros hoping to save them from the certain death that awaits any woman navigating any public space without the protection of a man and his emotional support vehicle. The PTBs, for the most part, ignore them and keep moving forward.
After Metro released its line of merchandise targeting “bus baddies, passenger princesses, and metro mamis” I reached out to several of these women. One a couple got back to me but I’m not mad. PTBs are out there doing work. Serena Morris seems to have traveled to London, Emily0thego went to Chicago, Karmen Huerta, who coined or at least popularised “Metro Mami,” also had to travel for work and has been organizing clean-ups of MacArthur Park with CD 1’s Eunisses Hernandez and Hondurans in LA. I’m struck by the fact that these women are, in their own ways, all community activists – even when just sharing makeup routines on the train.
Sage Ye’s content tends to fall between more “traditional” PTB content and that of a nerdy transit-splainer – so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when she told me she used to be a bus driver in Irvine. She explained to me the root of her mission. “Online public transit spaces and forums have traditionally been male-dominated, and I think women who use and advocate for public transportation can bring a different and more nuanced perspective — particularly because safety is such a significant part of the conversation around transit.” She prefers “Transit Enthusiast” to “Transit Girlie” – although she doesn’t reject it. I would add, too, that those forums tend to be dominated by white people like myself – even though, no matter how well meaning we may be – we account for less than 9% of Los Angeles’s transit users so our experiences are different from most.
Women have been somewhat better represented in the cycling community than other modes of transit – although that, no doubt, required some intentionality since bike bros are often the quickest to raise their hands with the answer. Women in cycling, too, have a different history from women in mass transit. Angelenas formed the Los Angeles Wheelwomen back in ‘94 – 1894, that is. Since then, we’ve seen female-led bike crews and rides like Bodacious Bike Babes, Clitoral Mass, Hot Babes in Charge Bicycle Club, Mixed Race, MoMacitas MoM Ridaz, and Ovarian Sycos, the names of which often employ a similar reclamation of language as is now common with PTBs, many of whom adopt self-descriptors like “#youngho.”
It’s somewhat ironic, then, how few women regularly ride in Los Angeles today. When I visited Osaka, I was struck by how many cyclists were women – roughly 64%. In London, too, I was struck by how many women there were, with no lycra in sight, navigating a metropolis that’s 29% larger than Los Angeles, which we are frequently told is too big for bikes. But Los Angeles is much less safe. In 2025, six cyclists were killed by motorists in the Big Smoke. In the Big Orange, where we have less than half the population and fewer than half the cyclists, more than 30 cyclists are routinely killed by motorists. In London, roughly one in three cyclists is a woman. In Los Angeles, it’s closer to one in seven.
Mass transit is different. Male doctors warned female cyclists that bicycles would cause infertility, birth defects, displacement of the uterus, and cause embarrassing physical pleasures. They even coined an imaginary nervous condition called “bikcycle face.” Women in transit was, it seems, less controversial. Jennie Shand became the first female conductor of a Los Angeles Railway yellow car all the way back in 1918. But those were the days when most Angelonos rode LARy’s yellow cars and the red cars of Pacific Electric Railway, the largest interurban electric rail network in American history. That was before Judge Doom came to Toon Town with his “freeways.”
People from cities with better infrastructure, for example China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, tend to be rudely awakened or even unpleasantly surprised by the comparative lack of transit in the US. Sage was born in Shanghai. But even in a city where trains are mundane, she was a “big train nerd since the ripe [age] of 4.” Since starting the Nobody Drives in LA podcast, we’ve encountered so many people whose train love originated in China that you’d think transit-triggered paranoiacs would arrive at the more plausible conclusion that it’s not Metro who is infiltrating social media and our podcast with plants, but the CCP!
In the recent past, China has probably supplanted Japan as the country pointing the way to the transit-rich future. In the US, you will encounter naysayers ignorant of history, culture, and geography who will claim that the US is too big for rail to ever be viable. Meanwhile, ine China, they’ve built over 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail since 2008 – enough to connect every single city in the US with a population of more than 100,000. If we had high-speed rail in the US, we could take a train from Los Angeles to New York in ten hours. Instead, though, it takes ten hours to get to Tucson and long distance train travel remains, primarily, the providence of retirees… the land version of a Caribbean cruise.
When Sage’s family moved to East Lansing, her father told his co-workers, to their amusement, that he planned to take the subway to and from work. In their new Middle Western home, there are only five Subways – and all of them franchises of the fast food chain. Neighboring Lansing boasts Penn Station – yet another purveyor of submarine sandwichs, not heavy rail. East Lansing has only buses and shuttle vans. Sage later lived in Salt Lake City – which, compared to East Lansing, is a hyper-connected transit hub with one whole streetcar line, one whole light rail line, and a whopping three commuter rail lines. In 2017, Save moved to Orange County for college. Since then, she’s mostly been car-free. She did get a car in June 2024 – but when it was totaled a year later – she did the math, returned to car-freedom, and made a video about it for her followers. She moved to Little Tokyo, a neighborhood blessed with charm, walkability, and decent mass transit. Not that being car-free in a Downtown neighborhood doesn’t come with its own challenges. Sage explained to me that “it’s difficult to be close friends with people who are more car oriented.” “People who are car oriented” tend to be limited in their conversations, she finds, to discussing “how bad the traffic is and where to park.”
Far Sage and her network ,mass transit is a cherished third place. She encourages her boyfriend to leave the car at home on dates. She pre-games at home with friends before going to bars – so that no one has to be the designated driver. Sage, like most of the PTBs, does acknowledge that being reliant on Metro isn’t always dreamy. When she got a job in El Segundo, she had a long commute on the J and C lines which took their toll on her. Luckily, she no longer has to commute to the office as often. I suspect her commute would benefit from extending the J Line’s dedicated lanes through Downtown, instead of sticking it in general traffic’s gridlock. Her wishes, though, encompass that and more. She’d like to see reliable service at night, better service in lower income areas, and cars reserved for women and children – something common in several Asian cities as well as Mexico City. My favorite wish, though, is for a car dimly lit quiet car with air kept at a warmer-than-normal temperature.
Not that I want to encourage men to pester women more than they already do – but I wonder if any car-brained dudes are coaxed out of their Rivians but the prospect of meeting attractive, young, independent women on buses and trains. Bus drivers, too, are not going to ask you out if you’re in an adjacent car. For people who lack status, though, status symbols like cars can take on an absurd importance. Consider the young man who drove his Dodge in a circles in front of my apartment this morning at 5:15, choking the air with smoke that caused my cat, Alan, to have an asthma attack and lingered in the air like burnt vomit for an hour afterward. I’m sure all of the single ladies in my building were disappointed when he blasted his fart cans and took off down the road before anyone could get his deets.
Perhaps we should direct more of our collective disdain in the direction of cars…. but maybe they don’t need that. They’re already circling the drain – although not fast enough for my liking. Today, Los Angeles ranks 27th in per capita car ownership in Los Angeles County. In other words, Los Angeles isn’t just no longer America’s capital of car culture, it’s no longer even the car capital of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, only 14% of sixteen-year-old Californians have a drivers license and that figure is dropping. Buying a car when you’re sixteen is no longer a right-of-passage, it would seem, it’s chopped and it’s giving unc.
The other Public Transit Baddie with whom I conversed goes by @hotgirltransit. Unlike Sage, she’s a new mass transit convert. She only used Metro for the first time in June of this year, when her car broke down and she rode the D to the Korean Colombian Escala K-Town. Whereas Sage was moulded by transit-normativity in China, hotgirltransit (she prefers to keep her name private) is a third generation Angelena. As a new transit user, I was especially curious about what she sees now that she’s not focused on navigating the streets unscathed. She replied, “I actually see the city. I notice the architecture, independent businesses, public art, historic buildings, and neighborhoods I would normally speed past. I also walk so much more, which has made Los Angeles feel less like a collection of disconnected destinations and more like a real, living city.”
As with the other PTBs, “community” has become a “huge and unexpected part” of her transportation transition. Immediately upon embarking on her car-free journey, helpful followers offered routes, destinations, tips, and shared with her their transit stories. Many of hotgirltransit’s observations will be familiar to more seasoned transit users. “The system is much more extensive than people realize… Sometimes it takes longer, but I don’t have to park, pay for a rideshare, or spend the entire trip staring at brake lights. The journey can become part of the adventure. It’s a familiar observation that bears repeating and one at the core of the transit baddie.
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