The Real Cities You Can Drive in Proton Bus Simulator

Every bus needs a road. In Proton Bus Simulator, the road is a map mod — and the best ones rebuild real cities street by street. You can pull into a real São Paulo bus terminal, or run an actual Curitiba bus line, all from your phone or PC.

We have driven a lot of these maps. This guide covers the real cities you can drive in Proton Bus Simulator, how to tell a real map from a convincing fake, and how to get one running. If the bus is the actor, the map is the stage — and the stage is half the show.

A map mod is the city, not the bus

Most mods on this site are buses. A map mod is a different thing: it is the whole world the bus drives through — the streets, the bus stops, the traffic, and the route itself.

This is rarer than it sounds. Proton Bus Simulator is one of very few mobile games that lets players build entire maps, a feature its developer added in 2020 (we tell that story in the story of Proton Bus Simulator). It is a big part of why the game feels bottomless.

And the map changes everything about the drive. The bus is the same; the job is not. A tight downtown grid punishes a long articulated bus. A dedicated bus lane lets you carry speed. A steep hill makes you lean on the engine brake. Swap the map and you have a new game with the same steering wheel.

Real city or invented? How to tell

Not every map is a real place. Some rebuild an actual city; others invent a convincing one from scratch. Both can be great — but it helps to know which is which before you download.

The giveaway is the name and the description. A real-city map names a real place and real routes: Projeto SP maps São Paulo's Zona Sul, and the Curitiba map recreates real bus lines 302 and 306. A fictional map invents its own town — Zernik is an openly fictional Polish city, and the Zurbagan trolleybus map is named after a city that only exists in Russian novels.

São Paulo, corridor by corridor: the Projeto SP map

If you want the full big-city grind, start with Projeto SP. It rebuilds São Paulo's Zona Sul — the dense southern zone around Brooklin and Santo Amaro — with the tight streets, dedicated bus corridors and metro-station areas of a real paulistano route.

São Paulo runs one of the largest bus networks on Earth: thousands of lines and millions of riders every single day. Projeto SP bottles that pressure. It is a hard-difficulty map, and it drives like it — narrow lanes, heavy traffic, and corridors that demand real precision.

Bring the right bus. The map is built around SPTrans-style city buses, so a Brazilian body like the Caio Millennium on a Mercedes-Benz chassis feels right at home. Drive it and you feel why São Paulo leans on big buses: only a high-capacity machine keeps a crowded corridor moving.

Driving the city that invented Bus Rapid Transit: Curitiba

Curitiba is the city that invented Bus Rapid Transit back in 1974 — and now you can drive it. The Curitiba BRT Demo recreates two real routes from the city's own network — lines 302 and 306 through the Centenário corridor — across 44 bus stops, with a working depot to park at when your shift ends.

It is the perfect map for a BRT lesson. Curitiba's whole idea was to give buses their own lane and let them run like a train. Drive the map and you live that idea: hold your speed in the busway, then dock cleanly at each stop so passengers can step straight on.

Fittingly, the map even models pedestrians and a suburban train moving in the background, so the corridor feels alive around you.

Beyond Brazil: real maps from the post-Soviet world

Brazil dominates the map scene, but it is not the only real-world option. The post-Soviet modding community is strong, and it has rebuilt some genuinely real places.

Borisov City recreates Barysaw, a real industrial city in Belarus, with the boxy Eastern-European streetscape those maps do so well. Suzdal goes somewhere completely different: a small, ancient town on Russia's Golden Ring, an open-air-museum kind of place full of old churches and quiet streets. Driving a city bus past that scenery is a world away from a São Paulo corridor.

These maps also show the fictional side of the hobby. Right next to real Barysaw and Suzdal sit invented towns like Zernik and Zurbagan — built from imagination, but modelled on how real post-Soviet cities look and feel.

How the map changes the way you drive

Here is the part players miss until they feel it: the map is a driving challenge, not just scenery. Four things on a map decide how your shift goes.

• The road geometry. Tight corners and narrow lanes force an articulated bus to swing wide; its rear section scrubs across the line if you turn in too early.
• The corridors. A dedicated bus lane lets you carry speed a mixed-traffic street never would — the whole point of a BRT map.
• The hills. A long downgrade is where you learn to lean on the engine brake instead of cooking your service brakes.
• The traffic and stops. Dense AI traffic and busy stops set your rhythm — brake early, dock straight, load, pull out, repeat.

That is why the same bus feels like a different vehicle on two maps. The stage writes the script.

How to install a map mod

Installing a map is as easy as installing a bus.

1. Download the map's .zip file.
2. Extract it into Proton Bus Simulator's maps folder — a file manager is all you need, no special tools.
3. Launch the game, open the map list, and pick your new city.

It works the same on Android and Windows. From there, pick a bus that fits the place, and drive. Start with our Brazilian bus mods for the São Paulo and Curitiba maps above.