IMI Policy Labs · Game
DC Courier
You’re a bike courier delivering goods across some of DC's most iconic neighborhoods. Avoid the double-parked delivery trucks, right hooks, and the doors.
Click the game and press any key to ride.
On a phone, open it full screen rather than playing it here — at this width the end-of-run report is too small to read. It will ask you to turn the phone sideways.
How to play
| ← →or A D | Steer |
|---|---|
| ↑ ↓or W S | Speed up, slow down. Hold ↓ to stop. |
| Spaceor Q E | Throw a delivery |
| P | Pause |
| M | Sound on and off |
| R | Restart |
On a touchscreen hold either half of the lower screen to steer, throw with the button at bottom right, brake at bottom left. The bike pedals itself either way — you steer, brake, and aim.
The goal
Land deliveries on the yellow stoop mats (+100), or to residents waving from apartment doorways, who catch them mid-air (+150). Wrong house costs 20 points, a broken window 40. You start with eight deliveries and carry twelve at most; stacked bundles at the curb restock you when you ride over them.
You can’t lose. There's no game over if you decide to cruise instead of delivering items.
What to try first
Start with a morning ride through Northeast DC: 25 blocks through NoMa, H Street, and Capitol Hill. The first three blocks are deliberately quiet - you're only sharing the road with autonomous vehicles. Once traffic starts, try to stay in the green lane, and pay attention to what keeps forcing you out of it — that’s what this game is all about.
Then try Mount Pleasant, which has no bike lane at all, and where double-parked vans mean crossing the double-yellow line into oncoming traffic. Don't forget to feed the squirrels!
A sunset ride through Georgetown immerses you in the hustle and bustle of M Street, followed by the iconic narrow cobblestone neighborhoods - the adventure ends with pizza deliveries for hungry students.
What’s real and what’s simplified
The three routes are inspired by real neighborhoods. Northeast runs south from NoMa along H Street to Capitol Hill, with the Washington Monument on the horizon, and finish at the Capitol. Mount Pleasant runs north up the commercial strip, turns west into tree-lined streets, and drops into Rock Creek Park &mdash. You'll navigate one travel lane in each direction with double-yellow lines, parking down both curbs, and no bike lanes, representing the real-life street as it exists. Georgetown runs west up M Street, where four lanes narrow into two, then onto cobbled residential blocks and up to a college full of hungry students, where the last three blocks carry no motor traffic at all. Block counts and distances are compressed for playability.
The hazards will be familiar to any cyclist: dooring, right hooks, close passes, lane drifts, rolled stops, blocked lanes, forced merges, lane drops, and oncoming traffic. Each is a real-life riding hazard rather than abstract coding. The game tags every incident by which of them it was and which kind of vehicle was responsible.
What’s simplified, and what matters most about it:
- Most drivers behave. Only a small minority of vehicles are given a mistake — around 2% make a right hook, 2% drift into the lane, 3% pass too close, 4% of parked cars open a door. Ordinary drivers are never labelled or flagged in play. That’s a deliberate design rule.
- But the rate you encounter hazards is not realistic. Compressing a rider’s experience into a few minutes means you meet more incidents per minute than a DC cyclist might in the real world.
- Buses are well-behaved by design. They brake for you, signal, and never stop in the bike lane — this a deliberate counterpoint to the assumption that a big vehicle is automatically the dangerous one, because bus drivers are highly-trained and knowledgeable.
- Autonomous vehicles share the roads. They make up about 15% of moving traffic, which is far more than DC could expect for many years to come. AVs are overly-cautious compared to the human drivers: they stop early at crossings and drive conservatively, so you may need to go around them. They will yield to you as you approach.
References
Six real sources appear in the game’s end-of-run report. Each was verified against the primary document, and each is cited in-game with its scope caveat attached.
- DDOT, Spring 2016 High Crash Intersection Site Visits — Summary and Next Steps (published January 2017), p. 17. Dooring accounted for 31% of bike crashes in a review of sixteen crash reports at 14th Street & Columbia Road NW, 2013–2015. One intersection, not citywide.
- DDOT, DDOT Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety (departmental education page). Describes the right hook as one of the most common bicycle crashes. Qualitative; no statistic attached.
- District of Columbia Municipal Regulations, Title 18 § 2202.10 (Overtaking and Passing). Requires at least three feet when passing a bicycle. Cross-referenced against the Washington Area Bicyclist Association's Pocket Guide to DC Bike Laws (rev. 2025).
- DCist, "D.C. Rolled Out More Bike Lane Enforcement Officers, But The Pandemic Slowed Ticketing" (22 December 2020), citing DPW data. 961 bike-lane parking tickets April–September 2020, down from 1,392 the year before; fine raised from $65 to $150. Pandemic-affected period; no more recent public count located.
- NHTSA, Distracted Driving in 2024, Research Note DOT HS 813 790 (April 2026). Distraction involved in 12% of 6,180,241 police-reported crashes; 75 bicyclists killed in distraction-affected crashes. National, not DC-specific, and NHTSA notes distraction is likely underreported.
- Arhin, Gatiba, Anderson & Ribbisso (Howard University Transportation Research Center), "Predicting STOP-Sign Compliance at All-Way Stop Intersections in Close Proximity to Signalized Intersections," International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, vol. 8, no. 7 (July 2019), pp. 1021–1026. Mean full-stop compliance 69.84% across 57 DC intersections, 13,956 vehicles observed. Sites chosen near signalized intersections, observed off-peak.