Signal and Span

Run the city's traffic. Fix the jams. Keep the city growing.

Signal & Span is a traffic management game, not a city builder. The city grows by itself, and you can't zone or place buildings. Your job is to keep it moving. Every commuter is simulated and plans their own route across a live road network. They react to congestion, crashes, tolls and transit as conditions change. Watch the morning rush build at the bridges, find the bottleneck, and redesign how the city gets around before it grinds to a halt.

How it plays

Each day runs from early morning through the evening rush. Traffic builds toward an 8:00 peak, eases at midday, and returns around 5:00. Commuters drive between homes, offices, shops and industry. Short commutes raise your approval rating, and high approval makes the city grow faster. More residents means more traffic. Let the network fall behind and commutes stretch, trips fail, approval drops, and neighborhoods start to empty out.

Build the network

Lay streets, then widen busy routes into avenues and expressways. Intersections are where queues form. Traffic signals handle heavy cross traffic, and roundabouts keep lighter flows moving but jam under heavy load. Drivers won't block an intersection they can't clear, and they reroute when a road backs up. Crashes happen on overloaded roads and shut down lanes until crews clear them.

Plan transit

Four transit types, each with its own tradeoffs:

• Buses are cheap and quick to set up, but they share the road and get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
• Light rail runs in its own lane at a steady speed, but takes road space away from cars.
• Monorail runs on elevated beams in straight lines between stations, above the traffic.
• Metro tunnels under anything, including rivers. It's the fastest and most expensive option.

Riders walk up to about five blocks to a stop and can transfer once between lines. Each rider compares the trip with driving before choosing. You can extend any line from either end, and add or remove vehicles to change how often it runs. Crowded lines mean longer waits, so service levels matter.

Watch the city

You only see live congestion where you've installed monitoring. Traffic sensors report load and speed on nearby roads. Cameras also spot crashes, so crews arrive faster. A traffic operations center makes every monitored signal adapt to traffic in real time. Switch between map views for live traffic, transit walking coverage and monitoring coverage. Tap any road or block to inspect it. An operations log flags crashes, slowdowns, suspended lines and daily results.

Run the budget

Revenue comes from city taxes, transit fares, road tolls and airport fees. Set each rate yourself. Higher taxes and fares cost approval, and drivers route around toll points when they can. Every road, line and sensor costs upkeep. When you need to build faster than revenue allows, borrow and repay in daily installments. A regional airport is expensive, but it brings travelers, fees and growth, along with a lot of new traffic to handle.

Five cities, rising difficulty

Meet every goal in a city to unlock the next one. Each city starts with less money, charges more interest on loans, adds more traffic and has more crashes.

• Harlow Falls: a river town with two bridges and a crowded downtown.
• Cedar Junction: a river splits jobs from housing, and the region wants an airport.
• Port Velden: a harbor city boxed in by the sea and a river, where roads alone won't keep up.
• Ashgrove: two rivers carve the city into three, money is tight and crashes are common.
• Kestrel Bay: a coastline and the heaviest demand of all five cities.

Features

• Every car and bus is simulated individually, with route planning that responds to congestion.
• Rush hours, daily results, city growth and approval ratings.
• Roads, intersections, tolls, sensors, cameras and an operations center.
• Bus, light rail, monorail and metro lines that you can extend.
• Taxes, fares, tolls, loans and an airport.
• Five hand-designed cities with goals, grants and rising difficulty.
• A guided tutorial for new players.
• A live soundtrack of city traffic that rises with congestion. Horns start when roads back up.
• Autosave at the end of every game day.
• Plays in your browser on desktop or mobile, with zoom and pan.

Controls

On a computer, click to use a tool and drag to build roads. Scroll to zoom. Drag with Inspect selected, or right-click and drag, to move around the map. On a phone or tablet, tap to place, drag one finger to build roads, pinch to zoom and drag with two fingers to pan. Press Space to pause and Escape to cancel.