Sometime in Fall of 2023, my dear friend Connor took a trip to Japan. Connor being himself brought me back a few lovely gifts, one of which was a small empty notebook labeled “Transit Book”, another was a receipt for a trip on the Shinkansen¹. Since then, I’ve been filling the book up one line at a time with every transit trip I’ve taken – short or long, big or small – with that Shinkansen receipt as my book mark. Why?

Well when I was growing up, my parents kept track of every tank of gas in the “gas book”. I naturally do this as well, and it’s something I’ve always thought was a fun little way to keep track of what I was up to. I can look back on old road trips, remember the time gas was 99¢ during 2020 but I foolishly didn’t fill up or the time Seth left my car running overnight, and just generally feel connected to my family. Incidentally, my grandfather was big on this kind of tracking too – though he was an accountant².

Anyways, even though I loved having a gas book I never really was sold on the whole “paying for gas” or “driving” aspects of it. Sure, I had my long road trip phase, but in my heart I’ll always be an obstinate 19 year old answering incredulous looks about not having a driver’s license with a completely absurd and unfounded sense of superiority. Enter the transit book from Japan, and I knew I had to start tracking my transit rides instead.

And just as was the case with my gas book, I have the joy of having a record of the minutiae of my life for the past few years. Little notes ranging from “rode one stop because I forgot to give keys to Olivia” to “Seahawks traffic force us to bail to Link after waiting ten minute at 3rd and Main” are vignettes into random days of my life where events big and small took place. I like being able to look at that stuff for the sheer nostalgic value.

Broad Trends

But of course, I also like to observe broad trends like the obvious one: I started riding transit a lot when we moved to Seattle. Working full-time has played a role, but really it’s been a lifestyle choice.

Instead of driving to a hike on the weekend, we’ve been hiking by bus in our free time. This has meant that the “expected” bias towards weekday transit riding (a bias reflected in every transit agencies schedule) really hasn’t existed for me.

I find this sort of thing to be interesting to observe, and it helps me articulate why I feel passionately about transit as more than just a way to get to work. I literally ride twice as often on Saturday as I do on Friday, even though I know for a fact that service is worse. It was so bad in Portland, that if I planned a party I would purposefully choose Friday so we could actually take the 70 to the bar³.

It’s just one example, but if I hold true to the idea that we need to imagine a better world before we can create a better world, I think there can be value in anecdotes. For transit, it’s probably too much to ask everyone to be as wonky and passionate as me, but I’m hopeful that highlighting the ability to find joy in using transit for the everyday helps people realize that it’s an actual thing that they at least could do.

Other trends of note:

• As of 4/6/26, my total recorded trips on TriMet fell below my total trips on King County Metro and Sound Transit. It only took 6 months of living in Seattle full-time to top 2.5 years in Portland.
• I managed 35 rides on Amtrak Cascades (that’s 2.1% of all trips). I recently rode down to Portland again and am finally back to being excited about riding Amtrak instead of being sort of sick of it. Those super commute days took a toll. Amtrak Cascades was also my highest distance route, with close to 6,000 total miles ridden.
• My number five most-ridden agency (After TriMet, King County Metro, Sound Transit, and Amtrak respectively) was the CTA. This is despite the fact that I only took two trips to Chicago, one of which was for a single day. But when you’re in Chicago, you simply have to ride some trains.
• I’m on pace for a big year of riding. How big? Well in the words of Rowdy Gaines, not only will it be the biggest year of riding in history it’ll blow away the biggest year of riding in history.

Happy Memories

If I had to pick a favorite trip on transit in my book, it would be the one where Olivia and I rode the 15 from 20th and Belmont to 69th and Yamhill to get married on Mount Tabor. It’s really not a very close competition, but there are a lot of great memories recorded in my transit book. Some of my other favorites:

• 3/17/26: Metro Rapid Ride H. I intercepted a specific bus to pick up Olivia’s lost phone. I called Metro about it and told them I was tracking which bus it was on the Pantograph app and they said “oh you don’t even need my help!”
• 1/21/26: Metro Route 14. Nathan Vass (of the View from Nathan’s Bus fame) was my driver. I told him I really liked his books, and he was (believably) grateful and gave me a little honk after I got off the bus.
• 1/8/26: Metro Route 150. Olivia and I took our new-to-us cedar chest home via transit. It was a lot of fun to sit on a cedar chest on a bus going on I5, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to everyone.
• 8/4/25: Sound Transit Route 554. My first ever Sound Transit Express ride, and my first time crossing a floating bridge on a bus. The seats were so comfy, and it was incredible being able to get from Seattle to Lain and Erin’s place in Issaquah without a car.
• 5/17/25: Madison Metro C. I rode the bus to Sarah’s wedding pictures. It felt good to wear my best suit on the bus.
• 2/7/25: TriMet Route 70. Packed a late Friday night #70 with friends to go to the Bear Paw for karaoke.
• 9/12/24: Amtrak Empire Builder. Rode the train from Portland to Glacier National Park. So many good things about that trip (which you can read at your leisure here), but one of the coolest things about this was waking up on the train and having Mark and Shelby be on board (the two branches of the Empire Builder start in Portland and Seattle before joining in Spokane in wee hours of the morning).
• 7/29/24: Zurich Tram Route 8. Everything about our Europe trip was great, but after spending some time swimming in the Zürichsee, the ride back to Jovan and Flavie’s place on the tram really stuck out.
• 3/25/24: CATS 99X. For spring break 2024, I rode a local transit bus to Woodburn to walk around. The seats were so comfy, and it was my first experience with the small scrappy transit operator that provides a fairly good lifeline service. The tacos in Woodburn were also excellent.
• 12/21/23: CTA Orange Line. After a grueling 8 hour late Amtrak trip from Flagstaff, I ran out of Union Station only to find the #151 to my hotel (where I was desperate to reunite with Olivia) had left early. I made my way to the Quincy stop, and lost any sense of dejection from the sheer vibes of the L late at night. I know wooden platforms and ancient stations have accessibility problems, but I can’t help but love them.

There were many more I couldn’t list here. Indeed, I’ve really done a lot of things on public transportation since 2023, and the 1,670 trips recorded each have some distant memory to convey. Even something as mundane as my pair of trips on February 1st, 2025 to and from Milwaukie on the Orange Line have a vague memory – I think it was for a rainy Friends of Trees event Olivia and I biked to.

The Meaning of it All

I suppose this base idea that I’ve touched on here – recording what you’re doing for no one other than yourself – is part of why I enjoy writing in general. As much as I enjoy hearing that people like the things I write on this blog, it really is a personal outlet of creativity more than anything else. Now that I’ve been doing this for long enough, it’s also nice to have points of reference for what was important to me at different moments in my life. My life has changed a lot since I first decided to start writing here, so it’s nice to have my own younger self providing perspectives that I may not hold any more.

I’m not sure I fully have the words to encapsulate how writing makes me feel in general, but I’ve recently decided to consider myself some sort of artist. Maybe it’s all the John Berger I’ve read lately, or maybe it’s a reaction to a former version of myself who was too arrogant to admit that the quest for objectivity is paved with subjective opinions about what questions to ask, but I feel it’s important to be someone with a specific view about the world that can be conveyed in words. In some sense, continuing this blog even after I’ve found gainful employment in the broad field that is the subject of most of the posts is also relevant. I love my job, but it doesn’t offer me the ability to fully express my thoughts on every facet of the political and social issues facing modern cities.

How is all this related to a little transit book? Well I think that one one hand, the meaning of the transit book is obvious – it’s a ledger in which I can record my little data about the world to make a spiritually satisfying chart and map to match – it also takes on the role of a diary; a physical representation of my life. I have some desire to both know myself in all phases of my past, and to be remembered in one way or another. I’m not so arrogant as to believe that any of this – my blog, my transit book, or any future creative endeavors – will leave any kind of permanent body of work of note. But I always find myself with something to say about things that are happening, and even if no one listens to them I still desire to say them.

And this feeling is why art is the only word that feels relevant. I have something to say about the world, and I am compelled to express it. This feeling is present was present in my gas book (hence the yearly summaries I did on Instagram when I still used it) and it’s present in my transit book (hence the yearly story maps). Maybe this isn’t a new observation, but I just filled out the rest of a diary that was gifted to me by a dear friend who I don’t get to talk to as much as I’d like to. I’ve got every right to feel sappy and pensive about the world as a result.

Thanks for reading – ’til next time.

Footnotes

1. Yes, even in 2023 my friends correctly surmised this was a good thing to bring me 🙂 ↩︎
2. In so many ways, I feel like I could have been a great accountant. But sadly, I just don’t quite have the concentration for it. ↩︎
3. The 70 does have an exceptionally bad Saturday schedule, but the trend holds for a lot of agencies. Commuter-oriented service aimed at luring (suburban) drivers is one of the last things to go, even if people who rely on the bus may need longer span of service and coverage to be able to make that trip at all. ↩︎