Your first stop is the start of something bigger. Connect the city with buses, trams, metro and regional rail, choose how often they run, and see how your decisions change the way people travel.
4.8k+ players in the last 30 days
Play Takt in
Real city. Real demand. Real money. The city already has people going to work, school, shops and everywhere else. Most of them can already drive. Your network has to give them a better option.
Choose your map. Dark, light, satellite or local aerial imagery. Change the look whenever you want. Your demand, traffic and network stay exactly the same.
Some people cannot reach a stop. Some wait too long. Some face a bad transfer, a full train or a fare they do not want to pay. Takt shows you why they stayed away, so you know where the network is failing.
The takt is simply how often the line runs. Drag the columns for five parts of the day; their colours show when vehicles are quiet, busy or full. Save a timetable with a name and reuse it on other lines, across games and cities in the same browser.
Before you place anything, Takt shows what the next click builds and costs. Compare surface, elevated and tunnel options. Share another line’s track, or build parallel metro or railway track for separate capacity, choosing which stations your line serves.
Planned removals appear on the map at once. Remove a terminus, then extend the new end in another direction. Capital stays reserved until you finish the year to build the plan and calculate its exact result.
Places that still need transit show up as challenges on the map. Reach enough of their people and the city helps pay for your next project. Ignore them, or stop serving them, and that money goes away.
People do more than commute. They go to school, shop, visit clinics, go out at night and catch flights. Those places create trips at different times of day, so where you build and when you run the service both matter.
See daily boardings, vehicle crowding and the time vehicles spend at each station. Sort the station table to find the busiest stops. Clear controls keep naming, service and track choices together. The exact figures update when you finish the year.
Raise the fare and each trip earns more. Raise it too far and people stop riding. The daily result shows what passengers pay, what the service costs, and what the city has to make up.
Buses are cheap and flexible. Trams carry more but need better streets or their own track. Metros move huge numbers through dense areas. Regional rail is built for long distances and widely spaced stations. Pick the mode that fits the problem, because the expensive answer is not always the best one.
| Mode | Riders | Speed | Build cost | Walk reach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bus | 90 | 18–23 km/h | €0.4–2.5M / km | 500 m |
| Tram | 250 | 19–33 km/h | €9–85M / km | 600 m |
| Metro | 750 | 70 km/h | €32–120M / km | 800 m |
| Rail | 1,000 | 58–78 km/h | €22–95M / km | 1,500 m |
Where you build matters too. Street-running lines are cheaper. Dedicated, elevated and underground routes cost more, but they can be faster and avoid traffic. Building through dense areas or across water can get expensive very quickly.
See every stop and interchange. Hide the markers when you need a clearer view of the routes.
Show the names beside your stops, or hide them to make more room on the map.
See which streets lie within walking reach of your stops. Preview the extra residents and jobs a new stop could reach.
Find busy stops with coloured boarding circles. Larger circles mean more daily boardings; red means higher use.
Find where passengers change lines. Check walking, waiting and connection quality for each direction and service period in the completed result.
Highlight the stops that bring the most riders onto each line.
See each route and its track type. Hide individual lines or whole transport types in the line list; hidden services still run.
Follow services through shared routes and interchanges. Click a station's line badge to select the service, then click again to show only that line.
Find each section’s peak crowding in the last completed result. Amber means above 85%; red means above 100%.
Compare daily passenger numbers from your last completed year. Thicker sections carry more people; shared tracks combine their services.
Compare the minutes between departures for each service period. The colours show the timetable from your last completed year.
Find slow sections and tight curves. Grey near metro and railway stations marks normal acceleration and braking.
Check whether more trains fit on shared track. Read planned departures, the track limit and spare capacity, including hidden services.
Watch buses, trams and trains running on your lines.
Find trips around homes, workplaces and other destinations. Strong colour shows demand; streets fade as your network carries those trips.
See which neighbourhoods and towns need better transit, and what the city pays you to reach them.
Find the schools, clinics, shops, bars and airports that bring people across the city.
See the car trips from your last completed year. This shows city journeys, without through traffic or freight.
| Real network | Takt predicts | Published ridership | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| U-Bahn + S-Bahn, rail-only run | 2,920,623 | ~2,900,000 | 101% |
| All Berlin, 345 lines | 4,588,528 | ~4,300,000 | 107% |
These are daily boardings. A journey with a transfer can board more than one line. The full network includes buses and trains competing for the same trips. The rail-only run includes U-Bahn and S-Bahn services without buses.
Berlin is used to having transit everywhere. This time, it starts with nothing. Rebuild the city from the first bus stop up, find the corridors that deserve the big investments, and see whether your Berlin works better than the real one.
Plan around the canals and build trams along mapped corridors such as Leidsestraat and Utrechtsestraat. City requests follow official districts. Connect surrounding towns to unlock their local requests. Includes detailed Dutch aerial imagery.
Hong Kong fits homes and jobs between steep hills and water. The harbour divides its busiest districts, while the new towns reach far north. Build the crossings and feeder lines that make one network from all of them.
New
Manhattan draws commuters from across the boroughs and the New Jersey shore. Connect neighbourhoods, choose your river crossings, and build a network that reaches beyond the island.
WarsawSoonAcross the VistulaWarsaw is split by the Vistula. People and jobs sit on both sides, so sooner or later your network has to cross it. Start cheap, find the routes that work, then decide where the big crossing is worth the money.
IstanbulSoonAcross the BosphorusIstanbul is huge, and the Bosphorus splits it in two. You start with enough money to think big, but every crossing is expensive. Build the right links between the two sides without spending the whole budget on one idea.
Los AngelesSoonLong distances · Fast roadsIn Los Angeles, the car is winning before you build anything. Distances are long and the freeways are fast. Find the corridors where transit can actually compete, because an expensive line is useless if nobody chooses it.
Upvote a city's comment or suggest a missing city in our Reddit post.
Play a city free in your browser during beta. No install. No account.
Play Takt in
Quick answers about the game as it works today.
Takt is a transit planning game played on real cities. Start with nothing, build bus, tram, metro and regional rail lines, and decide how often they run. Then see who uses your network, who keeps driving, and whether you can afford it.
Pick a city, press + to start a line, and plan directly on the map. Add the work to the current year, then finish the year when you are ready. Takt builds the plan and calculates its exact result. The guide explains buses, trams, metro, rail and the rest with pictures.
Yes. Turn on Sandbox mode in the Dashboard, under Capital & funding. You can keep building when the construction budget runs out. Costs still count, and construction times and the passenger simulation still apply. You can switch it on or off in an existing game.
Open Saved games, enter a name and choose Save new. Each saved game has separate Save and Load buttons. Loading asks for confirmation and keeps your current game under Recovery copies. Saving over a game also keeps its previous version there. Download a .takt file to keep a copy outside the browser.
Yes. Berlin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and New York are free to play during beta. Berlin and Amsterdam will stay free. Later cities will be available individually or in packs. All cities play by the same rules. You only pay for more places to play.
It uses the real city as its starting point. Streets, homes, jobs and places come from map and census data. Takt compares your service with driving, walking and cycling. Trips and travel choices are estimates. The Berlin comparison above shows a check against published ridership.
Right now. Berlin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and New York are open in your browser, free during beta and without an account. Takt is still in beta, so expect a few rough edges while I keep building it.
As many as I can make. Berlin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and New York are open now. Warsaw, Istanbul and Los Angeles are coming next, with more cities after that. Tell me which city you want and I’ll use the requests to help choose what comes next.
I’m David Karpik, an independent developer in Germany. I build Takt, the model behind it and the cities you play on. I also built Clickport, an analytics product, dark and dense like Takt, and countless other web projects since 2005.
What changed in the game, by date. A player gets each change on the next page load.
Berlin
Amsterdam
Hong Kong
New York