| Control | Crossings | Crashes | Still waiting | Stopped / arrival |
|---|
HOW TRAFFIC COP WORKS
Spot the rule breakers.
Drivers in this intersection mostly follow the rules, but not all of them. Click a car as soon as it breaks one. A good ticket is worth 100 points, 150 if you are quick, and tickets in a row multiply: the second is worth double, the third and after triple. A wrong ticket costs 50 points and breaks the streak; so does letting one get away.
Each round has a set number of rule breakers, and there is no last round: a quiet two-way stop, then four-way stops, traffic lights with turn lanes and a roundabout, then the busiest crossings again with more traffic, bolder drivers, rule breakers closer together. The shift ends when three get away in a row. The HUD counts your misses left; a ticket resets it to three.
Every driver has its own personality, attention and judgment, so some mistakes are their own. Rolling stops, forgotten blinkers, wrong-lane turns, red-light runs, speeding, tailgating and pulling out in front of someone all count. A speeder trails light; a tailgater sits on a bumper.
How to play Traffic Cop
Traffic Cop is a free browser game about watching an intersection the way a real officer would. Cars arrive, stop, yield, turn and go. Most drivers follow the rules, but every round a set number of them break one, and the rest of the time it is up to you to tell the difference. Click a driver the moment it breaks a rule and the ticket is written. Nothing to install, and it works with a mouse or a trackpad.
What counts as a violation
- Running a stop sign. No full stop at the line. A driver that only slows down has rolled the stop. A driver that creeps through at walking pace is not a rule breaker; nobody could call that a roll.
- Running a red light. Going on red, or turning right on red without stopping first. Entering on yellow is legal, and so is a driver that could no longer stop when the light changed.
- Speeding. Well over the posted speed. A speeder trails light behind it, so you can spot one without speed labels.
- Tailgating. Riding right on the bumper of the car ahead at speed.
- Failing to yield. Pulling out or turning in front of someone and making them brake hard, or cutting off a car in the roundabout.
- Turning without a signal, from the wrong lane, or all the way around. Missing blinkers, a turn from a straight-ahead lane, and illegal U-turns.
Scoring
| What happened | Points |
|---|---|
| Ticket for a real rule breaker | +100 |
| Written within 2.5 seconds of the violation | +150 |
| Second good ticket in a row | ×2 |
| Third good ticket in a row, and every one after | ×3 |
| A wrong ticket, or a breaker that gets away | Streak reset |
| Every breaker in a round caught, no wrong tickets | +200 bonus |
| Ticket for a driver who did nothing wrong | −50 |
| Three breakers get away in a row | Shift over |
A click on a car that is still short of the intersection waits a moment for the violation, so you can call a runner just before it runs. A rule breaker you miss is named as it drives off, with a red banner and a sound, so you always see what you should have caught. Your best shift saves on this device, and the top shifts go on a public board by first name.
Rounds that never end
Round one is a quiet two-way stop with three rule breakers. From there the ladder climbs through a busier two-way stop, a four-way stop, timed lights, lights with a left-turn lane, detected lights with two turn lanes and a roundabout. After that the busiest crossings come around again on each lap with more traffic, bolder drivers, more breakers packed closer together and less time to write each ticket. There is no final round. The shift ends the moment three breakers get away in a row, and the score is whatever you earned before that.
The intersection sandbox
The same intersection is a traffic simulator you can run yourself in the Traffic Playground. Choose a two-way stop, a four-way stop, timed lights, detected lights or a roundabout, add turn lanes, set the traffic on each street, the share of trucks, the drivers' aggression and the weather, then watch every driver think: click a car to read why it is waiting, braking or going. The comparison runs the same three minutes of traffic through all five controls and reports crossings, crashes and stopped time side by side. Every driver has its own attention, judgment and habits, so some of the mistakes you ticket in Traffic Cop are ones the drivers made on their own.