If he didn’t have a YouTube channel, Miles Taylor would still spend his free time going from one end of Massachusetts Avenue to the other using only buses, figuring out the cheapest route from Boston to the smallest town in Massachusetts or journeying from Mexico to Canada using only local transit.
It’s a good thing, then, that Taylor, 26, does have a YouTube channel: Miles in Transit, where he regularly posts lengthy videos of himself and a cast of equally obsessed friends using public transportation in ways the average commuter would never imagine. With 94,000 subscribers and nearly 17 million views, his following isn’t the largest, but Taylor has succeeded at carving a niche for extreme uses of transit — riding all 45 of Los Angeles’s bus systems, circumnavigating Taiwan via train and visiting the least used Amtrak stations in each state — simply because he likes it.
“My internet presence has often always been just doing what I would be doing for fun anyway,” said Taylor, who lives in Cambridge and works full-time as a bus service planner for the MBTA. “This is a hobby, but I’m also producing something valuable, or hopefully valuable, about it.”
Taylor makes most of his over 350 videos with nothing but a handheld camera and a friend to accompany him on whatever travel-related quest they’ve decided to conquer on a given day. He tries to publish a video every Wednesday, some as short as seven minutes. others as long as three hours. He’s spent countless hours producing an editing style that features fast cuts, home-drawn graphics and a large catalog of inside jokes and running gags he’s accumulated over a decade online.
“I have never seen someone who knows how to keep a video, even a video that could be an hour long, feeling like you’re never bored,” Taylor’s friend and collaborator Jeremy Zorek said.
Taylor’s introduction to public transit was the MBTA. Growing up in Cambridge, he rode the T and the bus frequently to get from place to place and to this day does not drive a car because he finds it “wasteful.” His online presence began when he was in middle school at Rindge Avenue Upper School, posting and drawing comic strips on the school’s blog, RAUCTalk, but his content wasn’t transit-specific.
Taylor was inspired to start his own blog when he was 12 years old by another blog, “(T)he Adventure” (pronounced “The ‘T’ Adventure”). It was run by a North Shore resident whose goal was to rate and review every T station.
“I wasn’t allowed to get an email until I was 13, so I would obsessively read all of his posts over and over again,” Taylor said. He started hand writing his own posts in notebooks to tide himself over. “The day I turned 13, I got an email, and I think the day after was the first post.”
On his blog, Miles on the MBTA, Taylor rated and reviewed every station on each T line, commuter rail line, every bus route and hundreds of routes on transit systems across New England. He published his first entry in 2013, and the first video on his YouTube channel followed later that year; grainy footage of a leaky 76 bus with no commentary.
Speed record and quick cuts
It wasn’t until Taylor began high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School that he developed more sophisticated video editing and filming skills through an afterschool media arts program and Cambridge’s summer youth employment program. He worked for Cambridge Community Television and made a video about reclaiming his speed record for riding the entire T system.
The video, titled “The Fastest T Rider Alive (Director’s Cut),” was published on Taylor’s YouTube channel in 2016. It features the first of Taylor’s many running gags and bits: Every time Taylor jaywalks in a video, he notes how much he would be fined for each instance. He would have incurred $310.50 in fines in that video. As of the publication of this article, he would owe a total of $28,691.59.
“He was always very enthusiastic about transit, and always approaching his video and media work with a fun sense of humor,” said Ross Matthei, one of Taylor’s instructors for both the afterschool program and CCTV. “I don’t know his YouTube content, but I imagine it’s entertaining.”
After moving to Philadelphia for college, Taylor started a new blog, Miles on SEPTA, to rank Philadelphia’s metro transit stations. But after the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to move back to Cambridge, he began posting videos more often and made a heavy transition to YouTube content in 2021. The channel had 500 subscribers then and has only grown since.
“We always approach it the same way and see what interests us,” said transit enthusiast Nathan Muz, Taylor’s friend and collaborator from the start. Muz, 25, and Taylor met in high school band and immediately connected over a shared love of transit. “It gets a lot more views now, and that was sort of surreal to see, because it was really just for fun in high school.”
Two coasts, 10 buses, 100 hours
In his most popular video, Taylor and his girlfriend, Aleena Parenti, took a free Greyhound trip from Boston to Seattle in 2022, which required 10 buses and over 100 hours. Before meeting Taylor, Parenti didn’t have an interest in public transportation because she hadn’t grown up around it, and her family did not travel frequently. The Greyhound trip was the first cross-country road trip she had ever taken, and it was one of many trips she and Taylor have taken to feature on the channel.
Taylor live-tweeted the entirety of the trip, and at multiple stops they met followers across the country who shared their support, provided them food and a few who helped drive them to their next Greyhound station. The video has over 800,000 views.
“As we got towards the end, someone from The Washington Post reached out, Boston Globe reached out, so then that was the first time I had ever been in any newspaper,” said Parenti, 22. “People were watching what we’re doing. People are following this.”
Taylor’s videos and enthusiasm for transit have garnered appearances in multiple news outlets; in Good Morning America for his Mexico to Canada trek; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after traversing Canada exclusively by bus; the San Francisco Chronicle for riding every city transit system in 24 hours. He and a group of collaborators that included Zorek, 24, rode every transportation mode, transit system and state that accepted the New York MetroCard to commemorate the end of the card’s service at the end of 2025. Part of that journey was covered in detail by The New York Times.
At this point in Taylor’s online career, every trip and vacation is an opportunity to pull out a camera and do something unorthodox. He has at least a year of unedited footage from various trips.
“If I was traveling and doing this and not filming a video, would I still find it fun?” Taylor asked himself. “I think I probably would, but I think I would also feel like I’m missing something.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in urban studies in 2022, Taylor fulfilled a childhood dream to work for the MBTA. He helped redesign the 109 bus route in 2024, which runs to and from Harvard Square and Linden. The route has doubled its ridership today, according to TransitMatters.
Online, Taylor has inspired several of his followers to take public transportation in creative ways that “push transit to its limits,” his channel’s tagline. Some have told him they want to become transit planners themselves. Taylor tries not to think too hard about any of it.
“Just think of the butterfly effect of that. All the work they’re going to do, all the positive changes they’re going to make,” he said. “Just because they started watching some idiot taking some very impractical routes.”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
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