Here’s why pop culture features so little public transportation

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Not to mention the danger.

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Not as many as you’d think, except for NYC.

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It’s totally popping a wheelie before the front end even clears the edge! It’s like when E.T. was on that bicycle.

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Yeah, but even 25% is hardly just poor people…

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Good point. I was not a fan of the TV show ER, but over family member’s heads I thought they had scenes where people were using the El to commute to/from work.

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The Defenders did too, if we want to be a tad bit more current (though no less badass):

Of course, it was a one-off; where they had no other choice, but still…

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Coincidentally, the new Jessica Jones trailer dropped today.

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You know I’m all the way here for it.

JJ is still my favorite offering from Netflix’s MCU thus far, followed closely by Luke Cage.

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I’m pretty sure it’s because of the crazy lady up front who smells of acute cat excrement.

Paterson is the sequel to Garden State, right? With the main character still in New Jersey and still quiet, and looking about the same even though it’s about 10 years later? I guess things didn’t work out with the quirky girlfriend, but he found a quirky wife.

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My guess is non-incendiary explosive device with just the right amount of force to pop that nose up to an angle that would clear the gap?

That was actually a municipal Santa Monica Big Blue Bus. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority supplies most of the public transit in the city of Los Angeles.

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It really does come down to cost, but also environment control. As stated before, a scene in a car was much easer to film on a sound stage, and require no extras. Guerilla filming was mentioned, but bigger productions will avoid that like the plague. A subway can be faked for a sitcom, with one side open for the cameras, but that’s not as easy to do on a bus.

There is one other cliché that I have noticed: when you see someone riding public transportation, it is often used as a way to buttress the fact that the characters are struggling, poor, or otherwise forced to use the bus, the subway, the El, and so on. See such series as Shameless for good examples. Writers fall back on tried and true a lot of the time.

So yeah, it’s understandable that even the scriptwriters will fall into the habit of avoiding scenes set on buses, and leave subways for scenes set on platforms. Think of how often you see characters jumping turnstiles, or the suspense cliché of being alone on a dark platform and then seeing some shadowy figure looking at you.

Special-effects building destruction even predates CGI; Elwood Blues’ transient hotel got blown to smithereens, but in real life that place stayed right where it was until it was eventually torn down by conventional means in the 1990s.

When I first started working in downtown Chicago in 1989, the view down Van Buren St. looked almost exactly like it did in the movie. When I first got off the train at LaSalle St. Station and looked east, the Peter Gunn theme started running through my head. By 2004, when my job moved closer to home, pretty much nothing was left from that era.

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I read about the Atlanta fire in “Gone With the Wind”. They destroyed the set of another movie. Now the costs of making movies renders these kind of stuff impossible.

In my country, only a single studio, in the case of a studio on a TV station, can afford to build scenic cities to run soap operas and other productions.

I also like to see old movies and try to see the changes in my city. Nowadays, you can barely recognize the neighborhoods, just a few tourist attractions or the beaches portrayed in those old movies.

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It is strange to see, based in this article, that the public transport system in your country is as bad as in my country, or that the people who live there prefer not to use this type of transportation.

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I found an article, with pictures about it. I saw this movie with my brother a long, long time ago. It was very crazy and we loved the bus. I wish we could take this bus every time we visited our relatives in countryside, even though we knew that the bus would probably destroy the entire town by passing through it.

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But sometimes it is supposedly shown (often using the Baltimore Subway as a stand in). A classic example is in the Kevin Costner film “No Way Out”. Which is particularly amusing because he uses a “Georgetown” station which of course doesn’t exist.

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Well we know WMATA doesn’t have a subway stop in georgedown…But perhaps Baltimore’s MTA does.

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More likely it looks like a wheelie because of the smaller ramp at the end of the freeway that falls down after the front wheels clear it.

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