The U-Bahn That Loves You Back

Berlin’s BVG—the city’s public transit authority, the whole network of buses and trams and underground trains that holds the place together—has a peculiar relationship with its riders. It’s unreliable in ways that feel personal, the kind of lateness that makes you wonder if the train is specifically avoiding you. And yet there’s something weirdly intimate about it: the U-Bahn at four in the morning after a night that went sideways, everyone sitting in their own silence. The S-Bahn rattling through February cold. It knows where you’ve been.

The BVG leaned into this the previous year when they partnered with Adidas on a limited sneaker that somehow became a genuine cultural moment—a transit authority running a sneaker drop, which was either brilliant or a sign that Berlin had fully lost the plot, probably both. It sold out. People queued. The city embraced the absurdity completely.

Now they’ve recorded a cover of My Way—yes, the Sinatra standard—with German rapper Cro, starring actual BVG employees. Bus drivers. Ticket inspectors. Platform staff. It sounds like it shouldn’t work at all. It kind of works. There’s something genuinely disarming about transit workers earnestly performing a song about living without regret, and Cro’s presence keeps the whole thing from tipping fully into corporate sincerity. The tagline is "Love is never finished"—either quietly beautiful or the most transit-authority thing ever said about love, and I genuinely can’t decide which.

The reason this campaign lands when so many like it don’t is that the BVG isn’t pretending to be something it isn’t. It’s simply acknowledging the role it already fills: it takes you to work in the morning, carries you to the Tinder date you weren’t sure about, ferries you to the club afterward when you need to forget how that date went. Present at every inflection point, indifferent and reliable in equal measure. That’s not nothing. That’s actually most of a relationship.