The starter pack meme format has been applied to cities before — it's a genre, not an argument — but the Bay Area version circulating on r/bayarea this week hit some kind of regional nerve, earning hundreds of comments that mostly functioned as addenda. Too many Teslas. Too many Priuses camping the express lane. The helicopter over the foothills that everyone googles and then someone explains is just PG&E doing line inspections, which it always is, and yet we all google it every time.

What makes the thread interesting isn't the meme itself but the corrections people felt compelled to file. One commenter pushed back on the framing that Bay Area transit riders need incentivizing with free fares: "Avoiding traffic alone is usually enough of an enticement." Someone else noted, with a regional pride that was almost proprietary, that Houston actually built its downtown stadium rail link over twenty years ago, and SFGate should know better. Another just wrote "the help does not live in Gilroy or Salinas" and then specified EPA, San Jose, Redwood City — the actual geography of who makes the region run and where they sleep, offered as a correction to some unspoken assumption.

That last one wasn't a joke, exactly, or wasn't only a joke. It was the kind of observation that gets 27 upvotes instead of 242 because it's landing slightly differently than the Tesla bit.

The meme will be screen-grabbed and reposted. Someone in the replies will add the Caltrain bike car. Someone else will argue about whether In-N-Out counts. The Prius will still be in the left lane tomorrow.