Cameron Crowe's Singles perfectly captured what dating was like in the pre-Tinder, pre-cell-phone, pre-internet early '90s. Today the film looks quaint, revealing a bygone time when single minglers met at bars/cafes/concerts, garage-door openers were presented as signifiers of relationship commitment, faulty answering machines accidentally destroyed messages by eating tape, and Matt Dillon could play a more amusing side character than Kevin Dillon.

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Anachronisms aside, one thing presented in the movie as wishful fiction actually became a reality. Protagonist Steve Dunne works for Seattle Transit and is trying to push through a project called the Supertrain (not this Supertrain) intended to get cars off of the roads and whisk commuters along on rails. 

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In real life, Seattle's Sound Transit launched their South Line commuter rail service in 2000, linking Seattle with Tacoma and beyond; in 2003 the North Line debuted, traveling as far as Everett.

If Steve Dunne were a real person, perhaps he'd have made the modern-day GIF below, which reveals the physical space taken up by different commuting options:

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In reality the images were created for a poster produced by Seattle's nonprofit International Sustainability Institute, then transformed into a GIF highlighted by the Washington Post.

If you want to learn more about the ISI's community-building and sustainability efforts, click here. And if you want to learn what it was like to try to randomly meet some girl/guy at a bar and chat them up, without anyone staring into their phones or scouting online profiles, go watch Singles.