Vice City, the fictional Florida metropolis at the centre of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), Vice City Stories (2006), and the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, is modelled directly on the real-world Miami metropolitan area (GTA Wiki, 2026). Its highway network is therefore best understood as a stylised reinterpretation of South Florida's actual road grid, anchored by three dominant arterials: a north-south interstate corridor analogous to Interstate 95 (I-95), an east-west causeway system mirroring the MacArthur Causeway, and a coastal beachfront boulevard paralleling Florida State Road A1A (SR A1A). Together these three classes of road form a triangular skeleton that defines mobility, gameplay traversal, and the visual identity of the city in every Vice City era depicted by Rockstar.
The real Interstate 95 in Florida runs 382 miles (615 km) from a partial interchange with US 1 in southern Miami north to the Georgia state line, making Florida's portion the longest of any state the Interstate traverses (Wikipedia, 2025a). Within Miami-Dade County, I-95 is locally designated the "North–South Expressway" and skirts immediately west of the downtown core, passing the Midtown Interchange where I-395 branches east toward Miami Beach and SR 836 branches west toward the airport (Wikipedia, 2025a). Vice City reproduces this layout with an elevated, multi-lane mainland freeway that bisects the western districts of the city — historically rendered as the "Vice City Highway" in the 3D Universe and as a far more elaborate, FDOT-style express-lane system in GTA VI. In gameplay terms, the I-95 analogue serves the same function as its real counterpart: it carries the bulk of through-traffic, provides rapid north-south traversal away from the congested coastal grid, and acts as a class divider between the inland, lower-income neighbourhoods (modelled on Liberty City, Little Haiti, and Overtown) and the wealthier bayfront strip. As Wikipedia (2025a) notes, The Miami News in 1956 controversially described I-95's construction as a "slum clearance program," and Rockstar leans into this history by routing its in-game freeway directly over demolished historic Black neighbourhoods — a satirical echo of the real Brooklyn neighbourhood severed by the Fuller Warren Bridge.
The MacArthur Causeway is the singular six-lane spine connecting Downtown Miami to South Beach across Biscayne Bay, carrying SR 836 and SR A1A for 3.5 miles (5.6 km), with a longest span of 0.4 miles and 68 feet (21 m) of vertical clearance (Wikipedia, 2025b). Originally opened on 17 February 1920 as the County Causeway and renamed in 1942 to honour General Douglas MacArthur, it was made directly accessible from I-395 only after 1970s freeway construction (Wikipedia, 2025b). Vice City's equivalent — variously rendered as a generic "causeway" in 2002 and as a screen-accurate twin-span bascule bridge in GTA VI marketing material — performs the identical structural role: it is the only direct vehicular link between the mainland (Vice City proper) and the barrier-island Beach district. The causeway passes a recreated Watson Island with its reclaimed-land equivalents of Palm, Hibiscus, and Star Islands, the latter hosting the celebrity mansions that have become a Vice City visual cliché. Crucially, the causeway is a chokepoint by design: in both the real and fictional cases, traffic incidents on this single corridor can functionally sever the beach from the city, a property Rockstar exploits for mission design and police pursuits.
Florida State Road A1A runs along the Atlantic barrier islands, threading directly through Miami Beach as Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive, before continuing north past Sunny Isles, Hallandale, and beyond (Wikipedia, 2025a; 2025b). In Vice City, this parallel coastal artery is reproduced as the iconic neon-lit beachfront boulevard — Ocean Drive in the 3D Universe and an expanded multi-name corridor in GTA VI — that hosts the Art Deco hotels, nightclubs, and palm-lined sidewalks central to the franchise's identity. The A1A analogue differs from I-95 in three critical ways: it is at-grade rather than elevated, it is signalised rather than free-flow, and it prioritises pedestrian and tourist movement over throughput. This functional dichotomy between the inland I-95 expressway and the coastal A1A boulevard — joined by the MacArthur Causeway crossbar — produces the characteristic Miami "ladder" road geometry that Vice City has copied since 2002, and which remains the dominant organising principle of the GTA VI map (GTA Wiki, 2026). Secondary A1A-style north-south coastal links, including analogues of the Julia Tuttle Causeway (I-195), Venetian Causeway, and Rickenbacker Causeway, fill out the bay-crossing network and connect outlying districts such as the Keys-inspired southern islands.
Vice City's highway network is not an invented system but a compressed, satirical cartography of Greater Miami. The I-95 analogue provides the regional spine and class boundary; the MacArthur Causeway analogue provides the singular chokepoint between mainland and beach; and the A1A parallels provide the touristic, neon-soaked surface along which the series' iconography unfolds. The fidelity of this reproduction has increased with each generation of hardware, and GTA VI appears poised to render the FDOT-maintained express-lane HOT system, the Golden Glades-style interchange, and the bascule causeways with unprecedented accuracy.
GTA Wiki (2026) Vice City. Available at: https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Vice_City (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) Interstate 95 in Florida. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_95_in_Florida (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) MacArthur Causeway. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Causeway (Accessed: 14 May 2026).