About Taxi Swiper

An indie driving game built on real city streets from OpenStreetMap.

Our Story

Taxi Swiper started with a simple idea: what if you could drive through your own city in a game, on the actual streets you walk every day? Not an approximation or a fictional map, but the real road network — every intersection, bridge, and dead end rendered exactly as it exists in the real world.

The project was born in Prague, Czech Republic, where the first map was painstakingly built from OpenStreetMap data. Every street in the game corresponds to a real road. The bridges crossing the Vltava river are in the right places. The one-way streets match reality. It's a game, but it's also a surprisingly accurate miniature of the city.

From that initial Prague prototype, Taxi Swiper grew into a full game with 8 distinct vehicles, 3 cities, multiple game modes, a progression system, and a competitive leaderboard. What began as a weekend experiment became a fully featured driving game that thousands of players enjoy.

The Developer

Taxi Swiper is developed by Jaroslav Knapek, an independent game developer based in the Czech Republic. The entire game — from the rendering engine to the road network parser to the UI — is built from scratch using vanilla JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas. No game engine, no framework, just raw code running directly in your browser.

The game is designed to be lightweight, fast, and accessible. It runs on any device with a modern browser, works offline as a Progressive Web App (PWA), and requires no downloads or installations. This philosophy of simplicity and accessibility drives every technical decision in the project.

Technology

Taxi Swiper is built with a focused technology stack:

The Game

At its core, Taxi Swiper is a game about exploration and progression. You start with nothing — a scooter and a single city — and gradually build your way up through 8 unique vehicles, each offering a fundamentally different way to play:

Three cities — Prague, Rome, and Paris — offer different driving experiences. Prague's winding streets contrast with Rome's dense historic center and Paris's wide boulevards. Each city is a faithful rendition of the real place, offering hours of exploration.

Our Mission

We believe games should be accessible to everyone. Taxi Swiper is free to play, runs in any browser, needs no downloads, and works offline after the first load. There are no ads interrupting gameplay, no pay-to-win mechanics, and no paywalls blocking content. Every vehicle, map, and feature can be unlocked through normal play.

We also believe in the power of real-world data. By using OpenStreetMap — the largest collaborative mapping project in the world — Taxi Swiper connects virtual gameplay to real geography. Players learn their city's street layout while having fun, and they experience cities they may never visit in person.

Open Source Map Data

Taxi Swiper's city maps are built from OpenStreetMap data, available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). We are grateful to the global community of OpenStreetMap contributors who make this incredible resource available. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Contact

Have questions, feedback, or partnership inquiries? We'd love to hear from you.

Based in Prague, Czech Republic.