Why I Do What I Do: The Educational Benefits of Making Transit Content
Trying to explain something is a great way to find your blind spots.
“The best way to learn is to teach” is something I really believe. During my later high school and early university years I taught math and some basic coding, and later on in university I worked as a Teaching Assistant for introductory computer science classes and it was a joy, but it also taught me a lot — about identifying bugs in code, and also about students’ understanding of different CS concepts.
At the same time, while I don’t want my YouTube or Substack articles to come off as pretentious (I’ve learned lots of interesting things from viewers and readers), I do like to think they are educational, and while I have a lot of reasons I create content (and I mean content in the non-contemporary way, not just memes designed to get likes on Twitter or whatever) one of the biggest reasons is because it helps me learn more about transportation and cities, and those are things I love.
As you can probably tell, this article will be a bit meta, but I think being meta is one of the most interesting things about creation, and honestly, some of the best transit discussions I’ve ever had have been about the way people talk about or understand transit systems and their perceived flaws and strengths. That’s something which flows quite naturally from some of the stuff I’ll discuss.
Now, I don’t entirely make videos or articles for my own personal learning obviously (I might make a series of posts talking about reasons I DO make stuff), but it has had a serious impact on it. So, in this post I want to explain some reasons why, from the obvious to the nuanced.
The first point relates to what I discussed at the top — making so many videos talking about various transit systems has really helped me find my blind spots. It becomes pretty obvious what you don’t know when you try to explain elements of a system, like “is it narrow gauge or was I remembering wrong” or “does this system have cross-platform interchanges”. I’ve frequently searched for (and found, in many cases) track diagrams that have been particularly useful for learning about metro systems and their operations. Of course, people will also often comment if you missed something they think is important or if they think they have an insightful relationship they think is worth highlighting. Comments can also force you to reassess your views if others disagree and provide strong evidence, and inversely they can also teach you what things people have strong emotional attachments to — even if they can’t provide a detailed explanation of why.
Another thing I’ve found really helpful is the fact that creation has frequently been a motivation to do the type of in-depth research that isn’t always causally inspired — “Okay, so I’m making a video about looping rail lines, I really need to look into the Ringbahn and make sure I understand how it operates”. And of course, thanks to the heavily interlinked nature of the internet, the more you browse the more interesting things you learn and stumble upon.
This also allows you to identify global patterns and trends, which is probably one of my favourite things. If you grow up riding a subway in North America, you probably have the perception that all subways use third rail or even that third rail is the de facto form of electrification in tunnels, a conclusion you’re less likely to come to if you grow up in Europe or Asia. Of course, it’s also interesting to see the type of infrastructure that different cities build: from a focus on metro or suburban rail, to the topology of stations, to network topology, it’s fascinating to see the different ways problems are approached and solved.
These discussions of different approaches and trends get more interesting when you add the human element of other transit interlocutors. One of the most interesting issues is people’s assessment of positive and negative elements of their city and transit system. It’s amazing when you get global feedback at scale how, for example, people from literally every corner of the world (including corners with objectively good transit) will still think their system is somehow uniquely bad; others will talk about a “very unique” element of their system like driverless trains that are actually quite common these days. Other issues get into matters of statistics and data: it’s amazing hearing someone say a relatively quiet train line is “unbearably loud” when you know it can’t come close to competing with something like the London Underground. These local biases are very interesting, because while the idea that “foreigners or outsiders” cannot understand a city or transit system that is not their own is common, the idea that a local would lack perspective about how legitimately good or run of the mill their system is never comes up. Other problems crop up when you compare different levels of understanding and analysis: for example, when the MAUP or other broad geographical problems come up. An example of this is quickly googling a stat for a system, but not checking what jurisdiction it applies to, and then over or underrating a transit system based on whether it’s being assessed with or without its surrounding suburban sprawl.
Coming back to comments, they are also a super useful tool that really doesn’t exist when you write an academic essay for example, especially at the scale you receive them when creating content. And one thing I find super interesting about them is how they teach you a lot about people’s perception of what you are saying, as opposed to necessarily always reacting to what you think you are getting across. Ever since I began creating with a following of even just a few hundred people, I qualify things way more now, because when you make a video and 1000 passionate people watch it — they can and will poke holes! Now, unfortunately, readers on the internet are not always generous with what one says, and that’s not always unfair — it can be hard to gauge the knowledge of someone over the web. To be quite fair, this goes both ways, it can be really hard to create content when you don’t have a consistent idea of the knowledge held by your viewers or whether they might be slightly more or less generous with you. Personally ,this had led to people joking about me making counter factual-esque comments about things like New York being silly for having built so many three track lines (they are way less useful than quad track, probably not much smaller or less expensive, and many were built through little surrounding development) and my belief that they should have made them quad track, or my suggestion that systems like BART and WMATA would probably better if the trains were smaller and agencies couldn’t afford to provide capacity via humongous but infrequent trains. It’s just far too easy to make “well obviously bigger is better!”-type rebuttals unless you provide all of your arguments together in a cohesive bundle (and that won’t even necessarily save you!).
Probably the most useful but hardest to explain thing that creating explainers in particular has provided me with is a way of testing different organizing methods for knowledge. Something like a metro or suburban rail network is very complex, and repeatedly trying to explain how one works (sometimes finding flaws in your explanation before you’re complete that are impossible to remove) and then having people assess them is really valuable in thinking about one’s own understanding at various levels of fidelity. I’ve been reading of lot of Fei-Ling Tseng’s Substack where she talks about note taking and knowledge organization so that’s probably why I’ve felt so inclined!
Now, I know this has been a little more introspective than my typical post, but I hope I’ve let you in on some of the ways I see the things I make and what they’ve taught me — we will be back to the more regular transit related content next week!