Home Ride is a driving game on this site, built out of real street-level photographs of Greater Accra. You pick a vehicle, pick a neighbourhood, and drive.

It is the closest thing to going home that a browser can manage.

What it actually is

Not a rendered city. The whole thing is stitched from 369,055 Mapillary street photos of the region — real roads, real junctions, real signage, the actual state of the tarmac. The view glides forward through each photograph and blends into the next, and at a junction you choose which way to go.

The whole Greater Accra Region is in it, not one neighbourhood: from Weija in the west across to Ada in the east and north to Dodowa. Of those photos, 162,816 sit on a road you can drive along and turn back out of.

The menu lists the 83 towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods with enough photographed road to be worth driving — Osu, Nima, Labone, Bukom, Madina, Adenta, East Legon, Teshie, Lapaz, Achimota, Ashaiman, the Tema communities.

— Drive it

The vehicles

Ten of them, and the list is the point:

a trotro, a taxi, a Royal okada, an aboboyaa, a Toyota Corolla, a Camry, a Mercedes C300, a BMW 5 Series, a Range Rover Sport and a Land Cruiser V8.

That is a fair census of what is actually on an Accra road, in roughly the order you meet it. You start with the trotro and the okada and unlock the rest by driving — eleven ranks from Learner to Accra Legend, which hands you a Ferrari you will never see on the Spintex road.

Jobs, and Ghanaian radio

Press J for work: rides and deliveries between real Accra businesses and houses, paying a fare in cedis. Press R for radio and it plays actual Ghanaian stations while you drive, with [ and ] to change station.

There are three daily goals, computed from the date so everybody gets the same ones — so much distance, so many coins, so many jobs, so much in fares.

Where the map is honest

This is the part worth reading if you know Accra, because the game is candid about its own gaps in a way most maps are not.

You can only drive where somebody has photographed the road, and only in the direction they drove it. The big map shows exactly that:

  • Green streets are drivable, with arrows for the direction
  • Red dashed streets are named roads with no usable photos — you cannot go there
  • Grey is photos on stubs that do not connect back, so turns onto them are blocked and you cannot get stranded
  • Gold is your route

Dansoman, Kasoa, Weija, Ada Foah and central Tema have no coverage within a kilometre of where OpenStreetMap puts them. Those roads are red. Nobody has driven them with a camera.

The drivable roads form 202 separate networks rather than one, because a road photographed in one direction is a one-way link you cannot come back along. The two biggest are central Accra — 47,788 photos, about 10km across — and the East Legon–Madina–Adenta side at 39,228 photos over 12 by 16km.

It is not a map, and not a route planner

Worth saying plainly, because it looks like both.

Home Ride is a photographic snapshot of whenever those streets were last driven with a camera, which in places is years ago. Junctions have been rebuilt since, roads have been paved and unpaved, and businesses have come and gone.

For where things actually are, use the map. For getting somewhere, use the real thing.

— The map of Greater Accra, district by district — Getting around Accra — The trotro guide — Ride-hailing and delivery apps

Practical

  • It needs a reasonable connection. Photos stream as you drive, in tiles of about 600m around you, and are dropped again once you are past them — so driving from Kasoa to Tema never loads more of Accra than it needs. But it is a lot more data than the rest of this site, which is built to load on almost nothing.
  • It wants a keyboard. W and S to drive, A and D to signal a turn, M for the map, J for jobs, C to swap between the chase camera and the driver’s seat. It works on a phone; it is better on a laptop.
  • Your progress is saved in the browser, so a driver name on one machine stays on that machine unless accounts are switched on.

Who made it

Home Ride is by the same hand as this site, and it is open: github.com/peratov/home-ride.

The street photographs are from Mapillary, contributed by people who drove those roads with a camera, and the road network is from OpenStreetMap. If a street near you is red, that is an invitation — anyone can photograph a road and upload it, and the game will pick it up the next time its data is rebuilt.

— Drive the streets of Accra — Accra and Ghana in numbers — Things to do in Accra