Aerial Tramway Emoji

🚡 is the Aerial Tramway: a large cable car shuttling back and forth between two stations. Unicode added it to the catalogue in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010), inherited from Japanese carrier sets. Most phones render it as a boxy cabin hanging from a diagonal wire above a mountain silhouette.

For most of its existence, 🚡 has been the emoji nobody reaches for. In July 2018 a Twitter bot called @LeastUsedEmoji, built on Emojitracker data, crowned it Twitter's least-used emoji, it held that position for 73 days and counting. BuzzFeed profiled it. Slate wrote an opinion piece. Transit-nerd Facebook group NUMTOT (229k members) started spamming it in a grassroots campaign.

Then in May 2025, YouTuber John Casterline posted a video titled 'The Aerial Tramway Is The Least Used Emoji.' It hit 1.8 million views in a day. Teens started spamming 🚡 in YouTube Shorts comment sections as an ironic replacement for 😂 and 🤣. Bots picked it up from their training data and started spamming it too. By March 2026 a Saturday Night Live Weekend Update segment was calling it 'the number one least used emoji', by which point, ironically, it wasn't. The joke made it popular.

Until 2025, 🚡 was a quiet transit-nerd signal. After Casterline's video it became a laughing emoji replacement on YouTube Shorts: the 🚡🚡🚡 comment spam meant roughly 'this is funny' or 'I'm here for the bit.' The meme survives in lower-intensity form on TikTok and YouTube today.

Outside the meme, 🚡 still serves its original purpose: ski lifts, mountain cable cars, urban gondola commutes. Roosevelt Island residents use it for the NYC tram. La Paz commuters use it for Mi Teleférico. Palm Springs tourists use it for the rotating tram up Mt. San Jacinto. For anyone outside those niches, 🚡 is the emoji that Sophisticated Internet People use ironically, and the rest of us forget exists.

🚡 was one of the ~722 emojis encoded in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, inherited from Japanese mobile carriers DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank. Japanese ski culture needed a specific pictogram for the cabin-shuttle-style tramway separate from the gondola and the suspension railway. When Unicode consolidated the carriers' sets, all three icons came along. English keyboards suddenly had three emojis for things most English speakers would just call 'a cable car.'

The name 'Aerial Tramway' is the Unicode committee's choice, not a phrase anyone says at dinner. The more common English terms are 'cable car' (in general use), 'gondola' (especially at ski resorts), and 'ropeway' (in engineering and in countries where cableways do real transit work). The gap between the official name and common usage is a big reason 🚡 spent a decade as one of the least-typed emojis on Twitter.

1. 2010Encoded in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F6A1.↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 in Unicode's first unified emoji recommendation.
3. 2018The @LeastUsedEmoji Twitter bot identifies 🚡 as Twitter's least used, holding the spot for at least 11 weeks.↗
4. 2025John Casterline's YouTube video ('The Aerial Tramway Is The Least Used Emoji') hits 1.8M views in a day; YouTube Shorts spam trend begins.↗
5. 2026Saturday Night Live Weekend Update features 🚡 as 'the number one least used emoji,' cementing its meme status.↗

• •🚡 was Twitter's least-used emoji for 73 straight days in 2018, a record tracked by the @LeastUsedEmoji bot.
• •The Roosevelt Island Tramway, opened May 17, 1976, was the first commuter aerial tramway in the U.S. It was supposed to be temporary until the F train extension; the subway finally opened in 1989 and the tram is still running.
• •Wings of Tatev in Armenia holds the Guinness record for the longest non-stop reversible aerial tramway: 5,752 metres. It opened in 2010, the same year 🚡 entered Unicode.
• •La Paz's Mi Teleférico is the world's largest urban cable car system, 10 lines, 33 km, carrying passengers across dramatic canyon topography. Some commutes dropped from an hour to 10 minutes.
• •The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway uses the world's largest rotating cabin. It climbs 5,873 vertical feet from desert floor to alpine forest in about 10 minutes.
• •John Casterline's May 2025 video 'The Aerial Tramway Is The Least Used Emoji' crossed 1.8 million views within 24 hours of posting.
• •The SNL Weekend Update segment on 🚡 aired in March 2026, roughly 16 years after the emoji was encoded, still referring to it as 'the least used.'
• •Aerial tramways differ from gondolas: they use fixed grips and shuttle large cabins back and forth, while gondolas attach to a continuously circulating cable.

• •BuzzFeed News (July 2018): 'The Aerial Tramway Is The Least Used Emoji On Twitter. Meet The People Trying To Change That.'
• •Slate (July 2018): contrarian take arguing we should let 🚡 stay unpopular.
• •Know Your Meme entry documenting the 2025 Casterline-led YouTube Shorts spam trend.
• •Daily Dot coverage of the 2025 meme spillover into TikTok.
• •Distractify explainer on why 🚡 kept popping up in places it didn't belong.
• •SNL's March 2026 Weekend Update segment naming 🚡 the 'number one least used emoji', which ironically made it popular again.