simulatorThe Simulator is, admittedly, weird, which means people often have questions about it. If you have questions, you might find the answers here.
If you're wondering how to use the Simulator, see the Help page.
Some roads are full of facts, figures and historical detail. Others are sillier or more sarcastic. All roads have totally different descriptions in each direction, and some have entirely different personalities (or even different authors) depending on which way you're going.
Yes! Like its parent site Roads.org.uk, the Simulator doesn't carry advertising of any kind and is completely free to use. But there are costs associated with running the Simulator, and if you're able to make a contribution to support it, I'd be incredibly grateful.
To support the Simulator you can Buy Me a Coffee.
This is version 4 of the Simulator. From 2004 to 2010, version 3 was online. The "classic" routes available here are the ones that were written in that era, presented with their original graphics. They're quite out of date now but some people still like to journey through them.
The Simulator started life in 2001 with a visit to TrippyDrive '71 at Kurumi.com. TrippyDrive is a Java application that creates mock-ups of American freeway signs, and uses them to let you drive around an imaginary version of the road network in Connecticut where all the state's unbuilt freeways have been brought to life. I thought it was ingenious and, in a world before Google Streetview, wanted to make something similar for the UK that would let you virtually tour the motorway network.
Version 1 of the “Motorway Simulator” was created in 2001, and was a Windows application that let you choose from six motorways to drive in a single direction.
It was replaced in 2002 by version 2, which made it possible to download and add new routes.
In 2004 it became a web application, now just called the Simulator, with an expanded set of signs, support for A-roads, two-way routes and buttons to switch from one route to another.
Version 3 didn't get updated as often as it was meant to, and started to get out of date. It was taken offline in 2010 so I could focus on other things. But I kept getting emails about it. No matter how many years went by, people still remembered it, and asked me about it, and wanted to know when it was coming back.
It turns out that it wasn't just a substitute for being able to see photos of real road signs on Streetview. It had a life of its own, perhaps because it was a completely unique way of seeing, and learning about, the road network. In the end I gave in. Version 4 launched in 2025 with a vastly expanded set of road signs that are surprisingly realistic in appearance and a number of other bells and whistles.
Version 4 took about two and a half years to make, from start to finish, though in reality for most of that time I was doing other things and only occasionally found time to work on the Simulator.
The perl code for version 3 was ported to php in spring 2022, and the routes and sign images from version 3 were imported to the new system. Work then began to make all the new sign templates, which are much more complex than the old ones. That happened in fits and starts over the next two years. This version has a new administration interface, with a visual sign editor, which means that building the routes was actually the quickest part of the job.
The aim is to eventually cover most of the UK's trunk road network.
When the Simulator was launched, it came with the M1, M23, M25, A1, A23 and A720, with the aim of providing some long, interesting routes that cover different parts of the country, and enabling interesting journeys to be taken straight away. That basic network is then used as a starting point for other roads to be added, with the intention of reaching out to every region of the UK.
All new routes must join an existing Simulator route, so you can drive from one place to another.
Yes! There's a long wishlist of new routes to add, prioritising major trunk routes towards parts of the country that haven't yet been covered. When a skeleton network has been formed, the gaps will start being filled with other routes linking them.
Not yet, but the Simulator's administration interface was made with the intention that other people will eventually be given access to write and update routes. It will need new software modules writing to handle user administration and to allow new routes to be written and tested offline before that can happen.
If you're interested in writing for the Simulator when the time comes, get in touch.
Not yet, but this is pencilled in for the future. The intention is to let you generate and customise your own signs, using the Simulator's sign engine, and then screenshot or save them to use elsewhere.
The Simulator isn't intended to show you every single sign you'll see on a road, nor is it capable of accurately showing every sign precisely as it appears in real life. As you travel along a road, you're being given a tour of the route and the places it goes, and just like a tour guide, the Simulator will highlight the things that are of most interest.
Generally speaking, each junction or other significant place on a road will be represented by one sign. Sometimes a second sign might be added if there's something particularly interesting to talk about.
The point is not to obsessively document every sign on the road - Google Streetview does that. Instead the Simulator gives you a sense of taking a journey.
There are limitations to what the Simulator can do - there are only so many sign templates and they aren't as flexible as the options available to designers in the real world. That means that, as you travel a simulated road, some of the signs will be very close copies of what you'd see in real life, but others have to be adapted for reasons of space. Some have to have a different type of sign substituted altogether. But wherever this is done you will still get the sense of what is happening on the road.
The Simulator is written in php and the routes you can drive are stored in a database. When you click “continue” the Simulator pulls the next location out of the database.
Road signs are stored as a template number and one or more blocks of text for each part of the sign, with formatting codes within the text marking up features like coloured patches, panels and symbols.
The Simulator's sign engine loads the template layout and adds the text, symbols and other features. Most of the templates are flexible, which means the sign will change shape and sometimes the symbols (like roundabout diagrams) will expand or shift to accommodate the sign's contents.
There are more than 130 sign templates, which include 62 types of motorway sign and 39 A-road signs.
However, most templates allow customisation - not just destinations and road numbers on direction signs, but also coloured patches, panels, symbols, text alignment, layout options, spacing, and other things that provide many of the same options available to the designers of real road signs. Even some non-direction signs can be customised - for example, there are several different-coloured backing boards and optional supplementary plates for warning signs.
In some places you'll see electronic variable message signs, most notably on Smart Motorways where the individual lane signals appear on gantry signs. Sometimes you'll just see blank signals but other times you'll see them lit up with speed limits or other warnings.
Most of the time the signals are randomly generated when the Simulator loads the page, so if you press “refresh” you'll probably get something different. That means they aren't related to the narrative text or to the rest of the sign and, just like driving a road for real, they'll be different every time you travel along the route.
For overhead Smart Motorway signals, the random signal generator gives you a 50-50 chance of seeing the signals lit up, and a whole series of different combinations of signal if they're illuminated. Other types might always show a signal and will never be blank.
Occasionally you'll see a signal with a written message that actually is specific to the route you're on and is always the same - for example, on the M25 clockwise, you'll see an MS3 signal reminding you to pay the Dart Charge toll, since there's a signal on the M25 in that location that spends most of its time doing just that.p
Since April 2012 the old Motorway Services sign has been replaced, in England and Northern Ireland, with a new sign that shows a grid of brand logos instead of the old generic symbols for fuel, restaurants and cafes. The Simulator can show you these signs, but it never uses real brand names.
The reason is simply that all the brands you will see on those signs are trademarked, and those trademarks are, in many cases, fiercely protected by large multinational corporations who have teams of very well-paid lawyers. The Simulator does not have teams of very well-paid lawyers.
As a result, the Simulator has its own brands that you will get to know as you travel around the country. There are eight fictional operators of motorway services, whose logos will appear across the top of the sign, and another 20 franchise brands providing fuel, food and refreshment (plus four generic symbols for a hotel, cafe, restaurant and fuel).
Some people say that some of the fictional names, logos and colour schemes remind them of real companies who operate at UK motorway service areas, but any similarity to actual companies, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Each sign may only contain one operator and a maximum of six franchisees, so you'll need to clock up some serious miles to find all 28 logos.