Drive & Listen: Virtually Wandering Through Cities

While some of you are probably jetting around the world right now (maybe thanks to one of our deals), for many people Christmas often means staying at home or visiting relatives. If wanderlust hits you during that time, you might enjoy this tool. Drive & Listen is a 100% free website with lots of POV videos of walks, bike rides, car drives, and more. All of this is available for 875 (!) cities in 222 countries worldwide. On top of that, you can choose from several local radio stations to make the virtual immersion complete.

Show drivenlisten.com

POV Car Drives

The first mode gave the website its name. You “drive” through a city of your choice by car. Unfortunately, you can’t actually steer the car. These are pre-recorded videos that are simply played back. It’s also not possible to select a specific spot in the city. Each time, it just starts from some random point.

So if you want to see a specific location from street level or decide the route yourself, tools like Google Street View are a better fit. This is more about getting a general feeling for what it’s like to drive through the city. Are the streets mostly empty, or is there traffic everywhere? Do people drive politely, or is there wild speeding and constant lane-changing? Do pedestrians keep jumping into the road, or is everything very orderly? What kind of cars are around: big SUVs, old beaters, or motorcycles buzzing past you everywhere?

Driving through a city in Pakistan that one’s never heard of, with Radio Pakistan running in the background

POV Walks

In walk mode, the concept is basically the same as in car mode. However, on foot you often reach places a car can’t, like a beach, for example.

Stroll along the Red Sea

POV Bike Rides

Again, a very similar concept. Essentially something in between a car and a pedestrian perspective.

Bike through Tokyo at night, without fear of being run over

Vlogs

Now we come to the first mode that takes a different approach. Instead of moving through cities in first person, you watch a vlog by someone else. In other words, you follow another person as they explore the city and talk about what they’re experiencing along the way.

These vloggers take us on a jetski tour in Fiji

Drone Footage

The website also features a lot of drone footage showing cities from above. Unfortunately, here too, it’s not possible to choose a specific clip. It always just plays some random recording.

A mall in Kosovo from above.

Food Exploration

Eating out is part of every trip, and you can do that virtually here as well. In this mode, you’ll find videos about specific restaurants as well as regional dishes and how they’re prepared. Sadly, even in 2025 it’s still not possible to taste the food through the screen. That feature will probably take a few more years.

Let’s see what and how they eat in some random city in Iraq

Cinematic Mode

If you’re not too keen on sitting in front of a screen watching someone crawl through side streets at a snail’s pace, you can opt for Cinematic mode. This features professional footage of the city, with clean cuts and a focus on presenting the city’s highlights as impressively as possible.

Instead of walking through some random side street, this mode only has highlights, such as Lille’s old town with that beautiful tower

Other Modes

The site also offers a few additional modes, though these are only available for a limited number of cities. One example is time-lapse mode, where you watch the city’s highlights while people on screen scurry back and forth like little ants and the sun races across the sky.

At least you can still visit Russia virtually

In very few cities, there’s also a window mode. This is probably the most boring of all modes. You simply look out of a window, and hardly anything happens.

The view from a window in Cordoba, showing… nothing. Not really that exciting.

Even rarer is train mode. Of course, the city needs to have a railway system to begin with, but even then the mode is only occasionally available. Still, it’s not uninteresting: you’re basically sitting with the train driver and watching the train roll along the tracks.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Lille, I’m now virtually driving a train through the French countryside

Conclusion

Drive & Listen is a really nice and extensive tool for doing a bit of virtual travelling and getting an authentic feel for how it is to move around a city. Very different from polished documentaries that teleport you from one highlight to the next. Of course, it can never replace a real trip, but for a short journey from the couch, it’s perfectly fine.

Where the tool can be especially helpful: it gives you a very good impression of a city’s infrastructure. If you’re still unsure during travel planning whether you want to visit City X, a look at Drive & Listen can give you clues about whether the city is actually quite nice beyond the tourist hotspots. Or maybe more chaotic or dirtier than you expected. Or you might discover that a destination is more beautiful than anticipated and add it to your travel list. All in all, it’s a pretty enjoyable tool that might let you indulge a bit in wanderlust over the holidays.