"The blood cells keeping cities alive" CEE student animates mass transit

“When I was very young, I would take the train a lot to Chicago. I lived in the suburbs. I became a freshman in high school, and I didn't really have a way of getting to school in the morning, so I took the Pace Suburban Bus every morning, and then I'd take it back home in the afternoon. Something about that clicked for me.”

- Brian Greenlees

That’s how Brian Greenlees describes the beginnings of his enthusiastic interest in mass transit. Greenlees is a sophomore majoring in civil engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

As he describes it, he has “synthesized my long-held interest in art and transportation into short-form, visual representations of rapid transit systems around the world.” His Instagram posts are fascinating and hypnotic. They’ve garnered him over 30,000 followers, and in the case of the animation of London Underground trains below, more than 85,000 likes.

“I began making transit-oriented motion graphics in November of last year as a way of expressing my existing interest in transportation networks,” he says. “I would ride the NYC Subway and wonder about the number of trains it took to carry millions of people across the city. I wanted to illustrate a complex system that has remained mostly hidden away in tunnels beneath Manhattan for decades in a way that anyone could enjoy.”

When speaking of his experience as a student at Illinois, Greenlees says, “This was one of the best schools that I applied to, and certainly the best I got into. I was initially attracted to apply because of the impression I got during my visit. I did a college visit a few years ago, and I felt this place just really attracted me.”

Describing his studies in civil engineering, he refers to the CEE 190 Project-Based Introduction to CEE class. “That introduced me to feasibility studies in the context of civil engineering. There's a semester long-team project where we write a report on the feasibility of a solution to a Civil Engineering related issue on campus. For example, in my group, we looked into the feasibility of building a bridge over Kirby Avenue between the two stadiums. It was nice to learn from mistakes. You had lots of opportunities to figure out what you're doing wrong in terms of writing these reports.” In the fall 2025 semester, Greenlees is taking CEE 201 Systems Engineering & Economics. “You figure out how to optimize certain situations, with linear systems of equations,” he says.

Greenlees bicycles on campus, but he pays close attention to the local transit system, CUMTD. “I'm mapping all the buses in New York City right now, and one thing that I noticed while mapping them and visualizing them is how slow the buses move. Here, for example, you could get from Round Barn Road to campus in fifteen minutes. However, if I were to travel the same distance in New York, it would take over half an hour. That’s interesting. Seeing these systems operate as a whole can identify weaknesses that schedules or maps can’t do alone. In the case of the London Underground, it’s apparent that the District Line (green) runs more slowly compared to the other lines. With my Chicago animation, anyone can see that the South Side lacks the volume of trains seen by the West and North Sides.”

He has applied his classroom experiences of learning from mistakes to his hobby.

Greenlees says, “I didn’t invent the spatial visualization of transit vehicles, but I like to think that I translated it into short-form content. Although I am deeply grateful that I have a platform where I can share my work with a wide audience, sitting down with a project where I can make my own creative decisions and learn a thing or two along the way is what keeps me going.

For each transit system I animate, I reference Google Maps (or timetables/schedules if available) to determine the service patterns of each train line. I use Adobe After Effects to program the movements of the trains/buses along their routes and manually arrange each trip based on the schedules.”

From Japan to Champaign-Urbana, visualizing transit systems allows Greenlees to express his interest in art and enthusiasm for public transit. “I learn something new from each project I complete, whether it’s finding new technology or shortcuts (such as After Effects), determining which time scale is too fast or too slow, figuring out which color hues look the most aesthetically pleasing, or even coming closer to understanding what makes great transit systems great.”

“I try to put public transit in a new perspective, one which demonstrates that mass transit systems are a great unifier: connecting one end of a city to the other, connecting thousands from their home to the rest of their lives. Trains and buses are the blood cells keeping cities alive and functioning; some have even pointed out that my animations remind them of blood pumping throughout the human body." - Brian Greenlees