Prague Integrated Transport ·
Delayed All the Time.
On Time, Occasionally.
Prague public transport, played as a disco track. Every transport mode is an instrument,
traffic density sets the volume and delays detune the chords. The chorus isn't triggered
by the clock but by the data: whenever the surface-transport delay climbs past 68 % of that day's own
maximum, the city stops keeping up and the track lifts into the chorus. Five days, five moods —
pick one and hear the difference. Nothing is random.
space play/pause · ←→ ±30 minutes · click the chart to jump in time
24 hours of traffic
gold band = chorus (the delay rush) · hover for detail
What you're hearing
- Metro — kick drum and bassline. Average delay 9 s, the most reliable pulse in the city. No metro, no beat.
- Trams — hi-hats and funky sixteenth-note plucks.
- Buses — chord stabs on the off-beat, the backbone of the sound. The later they run, the more detuned the chord.
- Voice of the City — the lead. Its melody is the city-wide average delay quantised to the scale: the later Prague runs, the higher it sings. Always in tune.
- Trains — kicked out of the band. Averaging 111 s late on a typical weekday, they played so out of tune they broke the whole song. Still shown in the chart; never getting the mic back.
- Trolleybuses — claps on 2 & 4, cowbell in the rush.
- Ferry — a bell. On a typical Tuesday it rings three times all day; in summer the river gets a whole verse of its own.
Song structure
Each day sings in its own key, chosen by its average delay: calm days float in Lydian,
ordinary days groove in Dorian, and the worse the city runs, the darker the mode — all the way
down to Phrygian for the Meltdown. The groove swings, and everything melodic pumps around
the metro's kick drum. In the chorus a pad, an arpeggio and a tambourine join in, the chords
lift and change twice as fast — and right before it the beat cuts out for a two-beat break:
snare roll, riser, crash, drop. The day plays on a loop: at midnight it starts over,
because public transport does too.
Data: Prague Integrated Transport (PID) stop-time history, provided by
Golemio, the open-data platform of
Operator ICT / City of Prague. Source records cover 15 March to 8 September 2025; the five days
played here are aggregated into 5-minute windows per mode (event count, mean and 90th-percentile
arrival delay). No raw records are redistributed. Please credit Golemio when reusing this material.
A sonification companion to a master's thesis on delay cascades in Prague public transport.
Title and structure are a loving homage to the disco-revival tradition; the phrasing of the
title riffs on contemporary pop-album naming. No affiliation with, or endorsement by, any artist
or label — and no audio was sampled: every sound is synthesised in the browser from
public-transport data. Any resemblance to an actual banger is purely statistical.