08-05-2025
Meet the artist behind San Francisco's moving street map
From up high, Muni is a thing of beauty.
State of play: Just ask self-described transit nerd Brian Greenlees, a civil engineering college student from Illinois who spends his spare time visualizing and animating the world's most complex transportation systems.
How it works: He overlays real-time data from Google maps and official timetables with satellite imagery to create one-of-a-kind visuals that display a city's fast-moving network of transit lines.
What they're saying:"After discovering the live tracking map software that many transit systems use, it felt like I had discovered a new dimension," he told Axios. "I was able to understand and appreciate the massive scale of a system composed of so many moving parts."
"Seeing the positions of trains and buses feels like discovering the gears inside a machine. It fulfills a sense of curiosity," he added.
Zoom in: Greenlees said he particularly likes Muni because the city continues to use historic streetcars and cable cars in its fleet.
Between the lines: When he first started making videos on Instagram in November of last year, each one took Greenlees about a month as he manually animated each route frame by frame.
He's since learned to automate the process, though each animation still takes a few days to complete.
Now, Greenlees has made more than a dozen animations that have each generated millions of views, featuring cities from all over the world like Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Paris.
The bottom line: "I want people to see what I see in public transit systems. I think that they're not just vital to public function but have some hidden aesthetic value," Greenlees said.
