Race across a real Japanese city
The map is real. The streets are real. The traffic lights, the one-way signs and the underground passages are real too. Pick Shibuya, Shinjuku, Osaka, Nagoya or Fukuoka, choose to walk, cycle or drive, and race two rivals from one real landmark to another. A race takes about 90 seconds.
Your vehicle changes how you win
Every signal on the map comes from the traffic lights recorded in OpenStreetMap. Catch a red and you wait. Pedestrians wait the least, cars the most.
One-way streets are taken from the real data and only apply to the car, which sees them drawn in red with arrows. If the street in front of you runs the other way, you have to go around. Walking and cycling ignore them.
Japanese cities hide huge underground malls and station passageways, and they are in the road data too. On foot you can cut straight through them instead of going around the main road above.
Races run between real stations, department stores, parks and theatres — Shibuya Station to SHIBUYA109, for example. Pick a route yourself or let the game surprise you. Routes where one vehicle would obviously win are filtered out.
Five city centres
Hills and back alleys. Knowing the side streets pays off.
The largest underground network of the five. Walking is strong here.
A tight grid with constant turns — a test of your tracing.
Wide avenues and a lot of signals. Cars feel every red light.
Streets above, shopping arcades below. Route choice decides it.
How it was built
The road network for each city centre was pulled from OpenStreetMap and turned into a graph of intersections and street segments, keeping the traffic signals, the one-way directions, the tunnels and the pedestrian-only paths. Your racer and both rivals follow the shortest route the same way a navigation app would; tapping the map sets a waypoint and the route is recalculated around it. The base map tiles come from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan.
Speeds, signal cycles and congestion are simplified game values, not measurements — a race is about 90 seconds, not a real commute. Across 120 simulated races the three vehicles win roughly as often as each other.
CITY TRACE is a side project of MACHI., a Japanese site that collects public statistics for all 1,850 municipalities in Japan — population, childcare, disaster shelters, hazard maps and more.
Base map: Geospatial Information Authority of Japan. Roads, traffic signals and landmarks: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).