A little change of perspective

Mini Germany 3D

Big cities, small journeys. Watch Germany’s public transport make its way through a world in miniature.

Trains weaving between buildings, ferries crossing the harbour, aircraft passing overhead, and everyday journeys seen from above. City by city, with the real lines, the real stops and the real timetable, drawn over a photorealistic model of the city.

Nothing here is made up: what runs on the map runs in reality too, on the same route and at the same time. A line that pauses for the weekend pauses here as well.

The map itself needs a browser with JavaScript and WebGL.

Cities

Berlin Tram, Subway, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Bremen Tram, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Cologne Tram, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Frankfurt Tram, Subway, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Hamburg Subway, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Hanover Tram, S-Bahn, Bus
Kiel Bus, Ships
Lübeck Bus, Ships
Munich Tram, Subway, S-Bahn, Bus
Rostock Tram, S-Bahn, Bus, Ships
Schwerin Tram, Bus
Stuttgart Subway, S-Bahn, Bus
Wilhelmshaven Bus, Ships

Moving to the timetable

The trains and buses follow their timetables, with reported delays taken into account. Their positions are calculated, rather than tracked by GPS. A train running three minutes late appears where it would have been three minutes earlier.

Ships and aircraft are the exception: their positions come from AIS and ADS-B transponders. When a ship or an aircraft sends an update, it moves on the map too – and the last five days of both are kept, so a clock set back replays the harbour and the sky as they were.

Larger cities show a selection of lines to keep things running smoothly, such as the Metro buses in Berlin and Munich.

Made possible by open data & 3D

Routes, stops, lighting, buoys and lighthouses: OpenStreetMap. Timetables: gtfs.de / DELFI. Terrain: the states’ open 1 m elevation models via Mapterhorn. City models: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and CesiumJS. Flat map: Mapbox. Weather: Open-Meteo. Ships: aisstream.io. Aircraft: adsb.fi. Webcams: Windy. You’ll find the licences in the credits at the bottom of the map.