Most of us haven’t done much traveling in the past year, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. So, it’s been a while since we’ve had the pleasant experience of driving, or riding, in a car through another city, taking in the sights and the sounds. If you miss that experience, check out “Drive & Listen,” an app that creates a virtual facsimile in 53 cities around the world.
For each city, viewers can opt to listen to their choice of a couple different local radio stations, with or without the accompaniment of street noise. Those are the “Listen” components of “Drive & Listen.”
The app was created by Erkam Seker, a Turkish graduate student studying in Munich. Seker was homesick for Istanbul, which lead to the creation of this app last spring.
“I was missing riding around my city, even the traffic and the fuss of daily life, so I found myself watching videos of Istanbul,” Seker said in an interview with Lonely Planet. “It was so fun to see my city, but I thought why not listen to some radio in the background to get the whole riding in cars experience?”
He soon realized, however, that beyond a cure for homesickness, there was also an opportunity to sate people’s currently stymied wanderlust. The videos are dashcam footage uploaded to YouTube, and the list of cities has grown to include New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Amsterdam and many more.
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