More than a feeling: symbolic meanings of transport modes in popular music

Abstract

This study explores how transport modes are emotionally and symbolically represented in popular music, a cultural form that reflects collective values and shapes mobility meanings often invisible to conventional travel surveys. Analyzing 27,017 Billboard Hot 100 songs (1958–2025) through a hybrid NLP pipeline combining transformer-based affect classification and LLM coding across 18 symbolic dimensions, we find that emotional differences between modes are modest, while symbolic distinctions are pronounced: cars align with status and self-presentation, trains with escape and nostalgia, and less frequent modes with selfexpression. Active modes remain underrepresented and symbolically marginal. As widely circulated cultural texts, lyrics help reproduce shared meanings around mobility. Our findings suggest mobility cultures are driven more by symbolic meaning than emotional association, with implications for sustainable transport promotion.