It’s hard to get through holiday parties without a seasonal sweater, “ugly” or otherwise. Shoppers can find red and green warmers emblazoned with reindeer, snowflakes, sloths, Darth Vader, their favorite macrobrew, urinating Santas, and the visages of various Will Ferrell characters. But for a subset of nerds, the past few years have brought increasing options for a new collectible conversation piece: the transit agency holiday sweater.

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) wasn’t the first agency to offer holiday apparel when it ordered five sweaters decorated with a BART train and some reindeer for a one-off sweepstakes in 2021. But it was the first agency to see the idea take off. After the GM sported a sweater in a video interview “about BART’s new air filters, of all things,” recalls spokesperson Michelle Robertson, riders took notice and demanded to know where they could get one. The following week, BART opened orders for a few hundred, which sold out in under an hour. “So the moral of the story, Robertson says, “was we gotta do holiday sweaters, and we gotta do it big.”

The next year, BART followed with a now-ubiquitous antlered train front, quickly selling out its 800 sweaters. In 2023, BART’s creative services team combined the reindeer train with light-up lines forming a wearable transit map, plus a train horn that sounded at the push of a button—3,500 sweaters sold that year. A real attention getter, the sweater reached far beyond transit-geek circles on social media, and other transit agencies—including neighboring Muni in San Francisco, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Portland’s TriMet—jumped in on the idea.

Maritza Collazo, part of TriMet’s marketing and communications team, says the agency was inspired to launch a holiday sweater after seeing BART and others do it, and because TriMet has heard a demand for more merch. “We have a passionate ridership here in Portland,” Collazo says.

TriMet’s first holiday sweater, in 2024, stood out from the Christmas crowd with its blue, orange, and white design, reflecting the real color schemes of the bus and MAX train it depicted, with seasonality coming from snowmen, gingerbread shapes, and prancing reindeer. A few recognizable downtown buildings featured, too. The agency sold nearly 500, and the handful left over from last year sold out this fall. The 2025 sweater had even more local flair, incorporating Mount Hood, the multimodal Tilikum Crossing, and the ’70s-era sector symbols that designated geographic clusters of routes for decades before they were phased out in the early ’00s: a beaver for most of Southeast, a salmon for North, raindrops in Northeast. As of press time, the agency is down its last 20 or so still for sale. 

It was important that the sweater “feel like Portland,” Collazo says. She credits Jonathan Hendryx, who’s worked at TriMet for more than a decade and has “an amazing historical knowledge” of the agency, with bringing the 2025 design together. “We’ve seen sweaters where there’s not really a connection to the city,” Collazo says.

A few transit agency holiday sweaters seem to throw buses into a basic snowflake wrapping-paper pattern and call it a day. Or they toss the transit images into a blender of holiday motifs: Atlanta’s MARTA has sold a crazy-quilt multicolor sweater showing buses, trains, snowflakes, rainbow hearts, menorahs, Kwanzaa Unity Cups, and two embracing polar bears who are also wearing MARTA sweaters. Another Atlanta sweater featured llamas.

The light-up 2024 sweater for the Chicago Transit Authority (which works with the vendor Transit Gifts, as do Atlanta and DC) shows some of the city’s famous buildings on front and back, plus a reindeer pulling both Santa’s sleigh and an “el” train. This year’s has even bigger buildings and adds the lyrics “Oh what fun it is to ride” in blocky letters.

New York’s MTA sweater this year has no train or bus imagery at all, instead taking the form of a giant yellow and blue MetroCard with a black bar across it to symbolize the magnetic strip of the soon-to-be-retired swipeable transit pass.

The Toronto Transit Commission is selling a Christmas sweater for the first time this year; aside from the requisite CN Tower silhouette the whole thing looks a bit like the label on a bottle of supermarket-brand beer. (The matching toque is awfully cute.) Boston’s 2025 offering has some distinctive buildings but ends its design at the underarm seam, leaving the back blank except for a small logo for its train system, known as the T.

Vancouver, British Columbia’s TransLink started selling a holiday sweater in 2021 at the suggestion of a vendor, but the first run had some printing issues, resulting in what one Vancouver writer called “unfortunately placed snowflakes.” Its 2023 sweater was more inspired, with bus, train, light rail, and ferry icons reflecting the city’s many modes.

After nearly jumping the holiday sweater shark with 2023’s wild light-up number, BART has followed with mellower takes. Its 2024 design, also available for dogs and in sweater vest form, focused on the tried-and-true reindeer train, and Robertson describes the 2025 sweater as a “more demure look…. You can really wear it anytime, not just to an ugly holiday sweater party.” It comes in a choice of three solid colors with the understated wide stripe of a Euro ski sweater holding buses and trains within. The Seattle area’s Sound Transit sweater is even subtler, requiring a second look to catch that its oversize snowflakes are made from bus and train fronts.

Robertson says more than a dozen agencies have reached out to BART with questions about sweater logistics and fulfillment. “Our no. 1 piece of advice to other agencies is to do a presale,” she says, to gauge interest and lock in orders, generating buzz while making sure the agency isn’t stuck with a lot of unsold product come January. TriMet’s presale this year opened in October, with sweaters arriving around Black Friday. Collazo says they might aim for an earlier start in the future.

A presale also ensures that the sweaters essentially pay for themselves, a major consideration when transit agencies across the country are contending with budget shortfalls and service cuts. “No service funds were diverted,” Collazo says, noting that TriMet’s marketing department has its own budget. She added that injecting a dose of fun and community connection has value, too.

Robertson would agree. “Our holiday sweaters have been a boon for BART, both financially and in terms of generating hype and excitement around our transit service,” she says. The agency saw a profit of $63,000 from its 2024 holiday merchandise sales, which went toward operating costs. While it’s harder to measure success toward the other goal, “to celebrate public transit and its role in the region,” Robertson says she’s been stopped in the street and asked where she got her BART merch, and turnout’s been good for SweaterFest, an annual gathering that includes a group photo of attendees in transit merch. “These sweaters have been a great tool for building hype, building excitement, and getting people talking about transit and all the different ways it impacts their lives.”

And if they give people something to wear to the inevitable ugly holiday sweater party, that certainly doesn’t hurt—especially if they can ride the bus there.