ELLAN VANNIN
How to drive the bus.
Choose a real route and a direction. A short shift covers a few stops; the whole route can take an hour, just like the real thing. Your bus starts at the first stop with people waiting: press E to open the doors, let everyone on, press E again and pull away.
Stopping at a stop.
Stop when someone is waiting at the stop or a passenger rings the bell (“Bell: next stop …”). Pull in alongside the yellow BUS STOP box, close to the kerb, with the front of the bus by the flag. Then open the doors: people get off first, then the queue gets on. The doors and the accelerator are linked, so the bus will not move until the doors are shut. At timing points, wait until the bus is due before leaving.
Your score.
Punctuality compares your arrival at each stop with the real timetable. Comfort drops with harsh braking, sharp acceleration and taking bends too fast. Safety drops for speeding (30 mph in towns; 40 or 60 mph elsewhere), hitting kerbs, wandering over the centre line and opening the doors away from a stop. Passengers counts everyone you picked up and dropped at the right stop. Your best score for each route is saved in this browser.
On a phone, use the steering arrows, the Brake and Go pedals and the Doors button. Assisted steering follows the bends for you; you still have to pull in to the kerb at each stop.
The real routes.
Every route on the menu is a real Bus Vannin route, with its stops in timetable order and the scheduled times of a real journey. The bus follows the mapped roads between the stops: we find the shortest drive along the road network from each stop to the next, without turning round in the road. A handful of stops the map cannot reach in order are left out. Speed limits are a game simplification: 30 mph where there are buildings along the road, 60 mph on the main A roads and 40 mph elsewhere. Many real island roads have no limit at all.
This is a game. It is not an official Bus Vannin product and is not connected with Isle of Man Transport. The bus and its livery are our own design. Do not use it to plan a journey: check the live bus times and timetables instead.
Maps, data, graphics and credits
Roads, streets and buildings: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Streets via OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles (street data notes). Building heights and roof shapes are estimates from the map.
Routes, stops and times: Traveline National Dataset (via bustimes.org) and Bus Vannin, as used for the Manx Wire bus pages. Stop positions: Isle of Man Transport stop list. The driving lines are built from these and the mapped roads (route data notes).
Terrain: Mapzen/Tilezen; SRTM/GMTED2010 courtesy of USGS; EU-funded Copernicus EU-DEM; NOAA ETOPO1 (terrain attribution). Elevation is resampled and smoothed along the roads. Landscape colour: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-2 data (2025).
Photographic skies, asphalt, stone, roof, grass and tree scans: Poly Haven, CC0 (sky and tree sources, stone and ground sources, asphalt source). The skies were not photographed on the island.
Graphics: three.js (MIT licence), postprocessing (Zlib licence) and N8AO (ISC licence); library notices. The bus, people, stops and sounds are original to this game.
