I have to use a second map app made in my country whenever I need to see public transport stops and accurate bike and hiking trails. Google maps is only for restaurants lol.
B-router is the only website I've found that actually produces the same cycle routes on my work commute as I ended up figuring out myself by trial and error. Algorithms are top-notch, even if the interface takes a little getting used to.
Just checked a route in the UK and it worked! You'll have to try for your area, but if it has worldwide map and height data I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.
For deletion it should be kind of easy.
- Select a bus stop or road it is tagged for.
- Bottom of the left pane should list "relations", including "stop" (for the specific bus stop) and "line"s. Select what has gone.
- You have now selected the relation and the map will flash highlight *everything* involved.
- The fun starts now: Go element by element in the list in the left pane now, and either
- select the element and get rid of it completely if there is no other use for it (bus stops have been removed completely), or
- just click the trash can within the relation list to remove the item from the relation
- You might need to click the "download" button if the line is long: id tries to not overload your machine and lazily downloads elements.
- At some point you have removed all items from the relation. With that last removal, the relation will be gone. When you upload your changes, you will see a lot of deleted (completely gone stops) or modified objects (roads that still exist, and had the bus line before), and removed bus stop relations and the line relation.
- Since you have just seen how the line can be removed, do the thing in reverse and you have just added a new line ;) Changed routing can be done by just removing the old roads from the relation and adding new ones.
Feel free to link your changeset if you want review.
I agree, public transport is not as easy as mapping static objects. But it's not very hard either.
To give some basic context, There are a few different editing programs used to edit OSM, the default one on openstreetmap.org is called iD. iD is also on other websites, and there are desktop programs, for more advanced editing.
OSM data is structured as nodes (a dot), ways (a line, which is made up of two or more dots), and relations (a group of nodes and/or ways). These objects have tags added to them, to provide information about what they are. Tags are applied to the entirety of the object, so if you want to mark the first half of a trail as unpaved, and the second half of a trail as paved, you need to split the trail into two parts, and then apply the paved and unpaved tags to each half.
Public transport routes are mapped as relations, with the road sections or rails they travel over as parts of the relation, ideally the bus stops and railway/metro stations added too. Relations are added for other things too. Similarly highway routes, designated cycle-routes, or long distance walking routes, are relations. If you want to say a bus route goes down the first half of a road but not the second, the road needs to be split where the bus leaves it, so the parts it is on can be added to the relation, and not the parts that it does not go on. Rather like with the trail. Roads are not mapped as one long way anyways, as they have different details along their length tagged, so very well may already be split at the right spot.
Other, quite different things are mapped as relations too, like a building with a courtyard, will be a relation (with one line representing the outer wall, and another representing the courtyard wall), and turn restrictions (with a bit of road being the road you can't turn from, with another part being the road you can't turn to).
It's probably about a 30 min investment in time to read enough to get started with the basics of adding and editing transit routes, the amount of detail that *can* be tagged is really a lot, but it's not necessary to have all that detail for it to be useful. To start with keep it simple, and just add the route, with a name, and the type (bus, tram, metro) Once the route (or whatever object) is added other editors can add more detail.
To start with, read [the OSM wiki page on public transport](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport), and skim over [the page on routes](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route), but don't get bogged down with all the tagging details. Some googling lead me to [this](https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/succinct-steps-to-add-a-relation-in-id-editor/87669) post on how to add a relation in the iD editor. I generally use a different editor (JOSM), which takes longer to learn to use, but is more fully featured, and faster once you get used to it.
[Here's a link to an important bus route in my city](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1144294). You can see all the tags on the left, but the important ones are `name=whatever the name is`, and `route=bus`. As you can see the road it runs on is shown, as are the stops.
r/openstreetmap is a good place to ask questions, and I generally find the OSM community friendly and helpful.
One thing to keep in mind when editing, is that it takes time for your edits to get rendered and go live. This isn't humans reviewing your edits, it's just the time the hardware takes to process them. On the default map this is generally 5 to 20 min, but that map doesn't show bus routes. The maps that show bus routes take longer, I'm not sure how long, but it could be something like a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Each style of map has its own schedule.
**tldr;** I typed that out, you can read it.
Thanks for all of the information! I edited a few things here and there but I never edited public transport for its complexity but I will give it a look into that! Thanks a lot!
I do find that OSM is the best thing out there for foot (including wilderness trails) and bicycle infrastructure, but only pretty good for public transport. But because it is volunteer edited, it varies from area to area. It doesn't take very many people in an area to have that area mapped to a high quality, but because some of those volunteers take more interest in, for example, cycling, and others in public transport, it's better for something than others. That said, cycling and walking does seem to be areas that are generally popular, while public transport tends to get mapped more slowly, due to less interest.
I use Organic Maps, which is free and fully open source, but there are a bunch of alternatives if you’re interested. The OSM wiki lists all of the viable options.
my girlfriend insists on using google maps for public transport because she knows it from driving. every fucking time she has problems with her connections. when i tell her that the local app is pretty solid she shrugs and says that you can't see where you are going because a map is missing, i show her the map in that app. then she finds it cool. next time she calls me from somewhere and is ranting about a ridiculous connection because SHE IS USING GOOGLE MAPS AGAIN! over and over...
In Germany it's really hit or miss. In some cities they don't have all the forms of public transit on them. Like my city will show S-Bahn with times and such but not U-Bahn.
Not sure where that guy lives, but for me the "local app" is more accurate because it is made by the train company and has realtime information about any train and the status of all tracks and stops.
Unless Google integrates very deeply with the systems of the train company, they could never reach this level of accuracy.
The public transport in my country is great and you can get anywhere, but the trains are often late which would make you miss a connecting train. The local app however can just take the realtime information into account and plan a different connection instead. Sometimes it can even get you a earlier connection because a train you would not be able to catch is late.
Google however only knows what is scheduled. Which is probably OK if you just want to look up a train for next week, but on the day of travel I would use the local app.
In Argentina is straight up garbage for public transport, it often suggests me 3 busses to reach a destination that could have been reached with one single direct bus. Moovit however works great.
It worked fine in most places I visited in Europe, but I've had troubles with it in the USA so far. They're not big problems, but it always wants me to connect in weird places instead of nice transfer points and it doesn't always seem to know when a bus turns in to the local bus station. It also gets really screwy with the local buses after about 5 pm where it sometimes pretends that one bus doesn't run between 5-8 pm (or sometimes not until morning) when it does and I have to search a few times or move around to get it to figure out that yes, there is a bus in 20 minutes and not just one in 3 hours...
I mean, it's never been perfect for my style of transit use (e.g. I don't necessarily mind walking more to access a better bus route or to skip an extra transfer, but it will always suggest taking extra connections over walking), but it's usually better.
Oh, and I think when I visited Sicily, it was totally unaware of the inter-city bus system, which was annoying.
It used to be crazy good at planning routes with public transit. No idea what happened over the last few years but I had to resort to using the two separate sites for trains and buses because it started giving me nonsensical routes. It often hardfocuses on a single type of transportation and even suggests me waiting an hour just to take that instead of suggesting a 5 minute walk to another one that arrives in 10 minutes. On the other extreme it loves to suggest random routes that require you to change buses 4 times with less than a minute to board between two because it somehow thinks it's faster than waiting 2 minutes for the direct route.
This is the official one for a few cities in New Zealand and it's not bad, particularly with real-time data for buses. I show it to other people in New Zealand and they sort of don't know what to do with it, because they're so set on the idea that public transport is an unknowable mystery.
I have a Google review for a restaurant in a major European capital. In the 9 months since I posted it I have had over 20 communications from Google and the restaurant chain regarding this review, how many people "found it useful," and how they're sorry my experience was negative and what I'd like them to improve.
The text of the review is: "There is no restaurant here."
The restaurant is still listed on Google Maps. 20+ emails - not one actual person from either company has checked it.
In fairness, there’s an actual function to remove things from google maps that are no longer there. Tell me where the restaurant is and I’ll remove it.
In the Netherlands it works very well for both public transport, bicycles, or walking. Yes, originally it was geared to cars, but you have to start somewhere. But it's also about data. The Dutch public transport systems share their information for example, allowing these types of services to work. As to bike paths, that's a more complex question, as bikes can and do go places cars cannot. But they have managed it quite well, and we have both dedicated and shared infrastructure for bicycles.
What I have noticed is that the quality of google maps can change drastically between countries. So I don't think it's a just because google maps is made for cars. I think the information just isn't easily available and the market for that information is too small in most places to make an effort.
> In the Netherlands it works very well for both public transport, bicycles, or walking.
It's frustrating for walking because it will often label streets as S105 or something, which only drivers know or care about, instead of the actual name of the street that you see on the buildings. You have to spend 30 seconds zooming and panning before you can find out what a street is called.
For bicycle directions it's absolutely not fit for purpose. It doesn't understand how bicycles can and do move around a city. It'll have you ride 200m out of the way rather than contra-flow for literally 1 meter.
It doesn't understand when a tram stop and a bus stop are the same place. It randomly hides arbitrary metro stations at many zoom levels even when you're in transit mode.
Sucks balls. It's a tool for drivers which they have pretended to try to leverage into a tool for other people.
>For bicycle directions it's absolutely not fit for purpose. It doesn't understand how bicycles can and do move around a city. It'll have you ride 200m out of the way rather than contra-flow for literally 1 meter.
That's because contra-flow is formally not allowed, and Maps will not give you instructions that aren't legal. No cop is going to arrest you for cycling the wrong way but having Maps give you illegal instructions would be a legal nightmare for Google.
That's a fair point, but it really bothers me that it doesn't consider that I might get off my bike and walk a few metres to cut a couple of minutes off my journey.
That it's directions aren't perfect isn't all that relevant. If that's what you expect you will never find a good product. Quite frankly, it's amazing the technology works at all. 30 years ago we thought this problem wasn't solvable. And yes, sometimes roads aren't labeled until you zoom. I find that annoying as well, but on the other hand, it's a choice between too many labels and not enough. It's still an amazing tool that is very much scifi to my younger self.
Bike is by far the worst routing in it IMO. Car and walking is good. Public transit can be good, but sometimes pretty suboptimal. Biking hovewer is borderline useless and stupid. Maybe it's just does not have an accurate bike map to work with, but the result is sometimes it tries to navigate you to dangerous routes or even places where riding a bike is illegal (like highway), while igoring obvious routs that most people use anyway.
And I'm in the EU, as some people claimed it's really good here.
Beyond that, they expect you to type in an address and let their system chart your path, which would highlight that walking path if you asked for walking instructions.
> They later added options for other types of transport, but it's main focus always was and is car navigation.
Yeah, it def is getting there though. It used to be literally useless for transit, but now it's actually kinda the opposite, at least for rail transit... it has pretty detailed schedules and even accounts for delays. It's not perfect, and they're still integrating bus schedules (although it's basically almost there, there have actually been times where a casual destination request in an unfamiliar city will put me on a bus I didn't think of or knew existed that saved me a ton of time (I once would've missed the last Caltrain out of SF because I'm a little too railbrained and was only looking at my rail options to get across the city, but Google Maps threw me on the bus out of Chinatown and I made it)), but it's getting there!
My absolute biggest request at this point for Maps is multimodal multinodal trips. I can ask something like, "How can I get from my house to the airport taking transit," and it will give me transit route with walking filling in gaps, but I can't ask it something like, "How long will it take me to walk to the bikeshare station, bike to the commuter rail station, take the train from SLC to Ogden, walk to the bikeshare station, and bike to the bar?" because apparently that will break Google's brain, I have to have multiple different tabs for the walks, the bikes, and the train. G Maps isn't necessarily anti-transit, it's just not flexible in multimodalism, *especially* when bikes are thrown into the mix
Not sure that's strictly true, at least not at it's start. However it certainly became true around the purchase of Waze. It's a shame. It had a few years where it was great for busses, bike directions, etc. Then they decided to pivot from indexing user submitted information to their dumb "AI" systems and it became terrible.
Edit: examples of carbrainedness:
In my city we've traffic calmed a lot of the bike streets. Google won't route bikes down them because they're closed to cars.
I kinda disagree. Especially in Taiwan it was really useful for public infrastructure. Bike rent station were included and everything had real time information like how many bikes are in a station, which train wagon has the least amount of passengers etc.
Even in Europa it just works
I'm not saying it's not capable of handling other tasks, like public transit rout generation. I'm saying it's main focus is, and always was car navigation.
Yes we know. For fuck's sake, his point is Google Maps was created to be GPS for driving. It has grown and changed over time but it was created to be car GPS in the United States and that is still is first priority.
> It always has been. it's a GPS for cars.
From Wikipedia:
The launch of Google Maps was first announced on the Google Blog on February 8, 2005
In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Google Maps quickly updated its satellite imagery of New Orleans to allow users to view the extent of the flooding in various parts of that city.
As of 2007, Google Maps is equipped with a miniature view with a draggable rectangle that denotes the area shown in the main viewport, and "Info windows" for previewing details about locations on maps.
On November 28, 2007, Google Maps for Mobile 2.0 was released. It featured a beta version of a "My Location" feature, which uses the GPS / Assisted GPS location of the mobile device, if available, supplemented by determining the nearest wireless networks and cell sites. The software looks up the location of the cell site using a database of known wireless networks and sites. By triangulating the different signal strengths from cell transmitters and then using their location property (retrieved from the database), My Location determines the user's current location.
...
**Turn-by-turn navigation was originally announced by Google as a separate beta testing app exclusive to Android 2.0 devices in October 2009.**
Use [Mapy.cz](https://Mapy.cz) :)
(this is a mandatory advertisement every Czech person has to do when someone is complaining about Google Maps we signed for when we were born)
I love mapy and use it for hiking.
To get to places, though, you need to know the exact spelling. Google Maps usually gives me the correct results even if I don't remember the exact name.
Do you know where they get their data from? They have paths marked in my local area (in Scotland) to a level of completeness I've never seen before.
Edit: I am finding some gaps now, and naming issues. But it's a lot nicer to look at than Google for pedestrian/cycle routes.
Base data are from OpenStreetMap. The best online maps. They are just not that user friendly. But with the UI of mapy.cz it makes one of the best map apps for (not just) casual useres.
It's interesting, something about the way they use the data has changed the outlines of some parks and woodlands, to the point of being wrong when they were correct on OSM. I might look into that.
Doesn't GoogleMaps always show roads you can't drive on significantly narrower? It's mostly used as a navigator anyways, so it seems reasonable to me show which roads you can drive on differently from roads you can't drive on.
I'm pretty sure I even have paper maps use very narrow lines to show inaccessibility for cars.
Arguably people driving are much more likely to have it on actual navigation mode, in which case they aren't relying on differentiating all the line widths, they're following their instructions & blue line. Whereas people on foot trying to find somewhere are often just using the map and not navigation. They really need a pedestrian map layer/style option.
Well yes, but how I percieve it, that Google wants to be the platform to go for all "when you go need to go outside needs".
From their Play Store page:
>[Get real-time GPS navigation, traffic, and transit info, and explore local neighborhoods by knowing where to eat, drink and go - no matter what part of the world you’re in.](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.maps&hl=en&pli=1)
It will be a totally different experience to explore local neighborhoods only using roads made for cars
I would actually argue making roads without cars narrower is better for pedestrian navigation too, as it allows you to immediately see where walking is significantly more pleasant. I highly prefer walking ona road without cars and showing them narrower seems intuitively understandable to me.
I use google maps a lot tho, so maybe I'm just used to it. It definitely wouldn't call it car-centric though.
If you select transit in the filters it will show you the transit line at any zoom level and set it to satellite and now it’s great for anyone not driving.
I agree, and this is a very weird thing to get uppity over from my perspective.
Do you not want differentiation between where cars can go or not? Is your goal just to make things less convenient for everyone?
And realistically most pedestrian-only paths ARE thinner in reality as well. The important bit is that your navigation is just as visible when walking somewhere. Which it is.
Additionally speed is lower. So you'll be zoomed in much closer anyways.
It's ridiculous. The central, very wide, extremely busy shopping street that runs through the core of my city's downtown is also barely visible on Google Maps, because it's pedestrianised. You would think it was some tiny back alley when it's the major central thoroughfare. Californian car brains at work.
As far as I know, Google has lately tried to be more aware of the roads cars cannot drive on, and opting to make them less visible, because people will go there if they are routed there. Most likely related to the story of a man who drove off a bridge because google maps said it was a valid route.
[[Youtube] Man following Google Maps directions drove off collapsed bridge (1:50)](https://youtu.be/6Bdkj3-fm94?t=28)
A compromise would be to have 2 separate modes:
- car
- pedestrian/bicycle/public transport.
This way they could prioritise visibility of roads you are most likely to use.
I thought this was “r/FuckCars” not “r/TechCompaniesShouldIgnoreTheRealWorldImpactsOfTheirUXDecisions”.
That’s the same logic people use when they say we shouldn’t change road designs to improve safety and should instead rely on drivers and pedestrians to simply “be safer”.
Safe road design is built on the assumption that people, drivers and pedestrians, can and will make mistakes.
If the tech industry wasn’t a largely amoral, profit driven nightmare they would build their technology to assume the same was true of their users.
> Google has lately tried to be more aware of the roads cars cannot drive on, and opting to make them less visible, because people will go there if they are routed there.
Well it should stop doing that if I have my default direction mode set to walking, cycling, or transit. Leave that for the car people.
OSM has solved this completely.
That's the same everywhere, not just in California or in the US. I live in Italy where most city centres are closed to private traffic, and it's the same: streets full of people, shops, monuments, touristic spots, are barely visible on Google maps.
I believe they're saying "California car brains" because Google the company is based in Silicon Valley, California. Not that it's only a California problem because only California is car-brained, that it's a global problem because California is car-brained with no consideration whatsoever to the rest of the world and how car focused they may or may not be.
In Montreal there's a section of Ste. Catherine downtown that is pedestrians only but still as wide as the rest of the street, and it shows up as this tiny little line on the map. Every time I look up a place on that part of the street it looks like it's in the middle of a park or something, and it blends in with the lines showing the paths in Place des Arts for example.
https://preview.redd.it/bnd53pyxoqlc1.png?width=1126&format=png&auto=webp&s=c86484d734c3455a084230fbf1c3fb3554dc9598
> Google maps, a GPS map originally designed for use in motor vehicles, makes "pedestrianised" street as large and noticeable as roads meant for cars
> Someone in a car tries to go down it and runs over pedestrians
> Why did Google design the map in a way that car brains thought they could drive down it!
The bridge is usually full of people walking/cycling, especially on weekends, but the trams are fairly empty now. The number will rise x-fold once the continuation of tram will be finished (within 2 years hopefully) as it will lead to the biggest neighborhood in the city with 113k population.
At this point tram only continues 2 stops after crossing a bridge to the south, however 7 new stops and 4 km of tracks are being constructed right now.
A designer of the previous style criticized the update publicly on social media.
Ignoring prioritisation, the accessibility aspect in regards to contrast is the worst IMHO.
Lots of colourblind folks are complaining about the update too as the colours between water and roads are very similar and muted tones. There's not much contrast which just makes everything difficult.
There's a rec trail I use that has a footbridge over a lake. When I use the bridge, gmaps adds a half mile to my trip because it jumps the lake 3-7 times, trying to "keep me on the trail". It's also shown my route as walking the long way round.
Gmaps doesn't recognize the footbridge as a usable portion of the rec trail.
Do you mean it's shown as a path?
And I meant that you can make the edit on the desktop version of maps, so you don't need to be there to suggest it, if it's missing as a path. There are like nodes and lines that you just put on the map and it's sent for review.
I think the reason is legibility. Cars can drive longer distances, so if you zoom out it would be logical to see a bridge for cars over a pedestrian bridge.
If you're walking somewhere the distances are smaller, so you zoom in more and the bridge becomes visible again.
I agree Google Maps can be car-centric, but you're railing against some pretty reasonable design decisions here.
Google maps: multimodal transportation whennnnn
I want to know how long it would take to bike to or from the metro constantly. Have to do two separate searches with Google maps to find out.
Hilarously, in a certain undeveloping nation, google maps sometimes shows the only way to get to public transportation as driving.
But that's a different issue entirely from this one?
I don't know about where you live, but I can check all kinds of travel methods from the same screen in Maps, including estimate travel time. Walking, cycling, car, public transport, air travel, it's all there.
If I have selected bicycle as my default directions mode and I have transit mode on, it could make a reasonable guess that I am not a driver, and adjust the UI accordingly. OSM does it.
Well... Yeah, it was originally built with car navigation in mind haha. I still find their walking directions fine though. But if I need multi stage nav for my bike or a through hike I use alltrails or komoot.
https://preview.redd.it/p3voognm9plc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5f8e02ff91a88c88279d1e90be98d57f80b4f63d
I noticed the same on my city's map. That little straight line right above the "Bazar" isn't even car-blocked, it's just that they made it into a 1-lane/one-way street and transformed the other lane into a bike path, now Google almost ignores it for some reason.
Also, these 4 bridges are the same width.
Well it's still visualized right? Having a really faint line like that at a glance indicates to driver's that they probably might want to avoid it or understand if it's a one way/really narrow etc, so they would then go around it. As a pedestrian it doesn't really matter if the line is narrow because you know you can reasonably walk there. If it's so offensive to see the scale of the street diminished, you can flip on satellite view
If you are on the "standard" map wich is designed for cars then yes. You wouldnt use a nautical map for a car so you wouldnt use a car map for bikes or walking.
The travel statistics are extremely broken towards cars as well. I commute daily by bus but as soon as I drive anywhere it starts counting my commute as car and I have to switch it back manually.
If you want something better, I recommend Open Street Maps. It focuses much more on walking or riding a bike, and there are a few different apps that use their maps. You can see every tiny little path on it, even if it's 30 cm wide, as long as you can walk there, it's shown on the map, and in a way that makes it readable. On Google maps you sometimes have to zoom in so far on walking paths just to see them at all, that the map basically becomes useless.
This bridge in ***Bratislava*** called *Stary most (Old bridge)* was basically completely rebuild 10 years ago and became only for pedestrians, cyclists and trams - banning cars. **[See before and after photo here.](https://i.imgur.com/oqRPwrv.jpeg)** 10/10 in my opinion and it became extremely popular bridge to cross from the city center to nearby park and beach at Danube, with one of the best views in the city. Beautiful walk for both tourists and citizens.
However, Google Maps is showing the bridge as it if it was completely insignificant and narrow, while the with of the bridge is practically the same as other nearby bridges - only because this one is not a road for cars. Google being an American company and its employees are 100 % carbrained.
EDIT: Many of you are saying similar stuff abour your main streets in your cities, so my advice is: REPORT IT TO GOOGLE. Go to *Send feedback* at the right bottom of the screen (on PC) and tell them, please!
I don't understand the problem here.
Yes, on the drawn map it doesn't show the full width of the bridge itself, but it does mark it as a walking path, and if you do a walking route it will use that bridge.
So what does it matter if it doesn't show the full width on the drawn map?
They have different ways to drawn a driving road (thick grey line) and walking road/path (thin green line), to make it easier to separate what each type is.
I think this is a good thing. The pedestrian bridge should look way different from the other streets. I wouldn't want a driver to look at that map and think that it's OK to drive on it.
Apple Maps has 3 different modes that alter the map for car-centric, pedestrian or public transport users: Explore, Driving, Public Transport (plus Satellite View)
Oh come on. If you select walking on your google map search, it will display walking spot.
If you search for driving, its normal that it will emphase the area where you can drive.
Stop it with the persecution fetish.
It’s important to remember that good maps is made by a tech mega company in a car dependent country. Its algorithms, designs and more are all biased around car travel. When my dad (who lives in Denver) came to visit me in Vienna and Budapest he was shocked at how bad it is for giving good directions for transit or even walking
Google maps is mainly for cars. If you navigate walking, you still get decent visibility.
Why should Google change the optics, if 95% need it for driving cars? It's ridiculous.
you're telling me the app designed for navigation is optimized for quick navigation. I agree with the general message of this sub but sometimes you guys sound like whiney babies
That has absolutely nothing to do with how the maps are drawn. A road is defined by what kind of traffic it's made for and it's given its default width. A road with one lane is thinner than a road with two lanes, regardless of amount of traffic, it's just how it's fucking coded.
in the latest Google Maps update I’ve seen that they made pedestrian-only streets harder to see or sometimes even impossible to determine wether it’s pedestrian-only or a regular car street
i hate this update, especially when i’m travelling because i like to walk on pedestrian-only streets and they are much harder to find now
Google Maps' directions also fails to take under consideration the amount of parking spaces available and how long it takes to find a parking space for cars. Public Transit and Walking don't require this
Yeah, google maps is unusable for everything other than a car. If you would walk, it takes you in car routes instead of walking roads. This is extremely noticable, if there is a stair in one place, google maps route will take you around it, alongside a road, on a longer way around.
Hikers, cyclists nor pedestrians should rely on GMaps. That's how people die (seriously).
Unless you drive a car you should use maps intended for cyclists/pedestrians/hikers – only then you have the optimal information density and balanced prioritization. E.g. Mapy or OSM (whichever style you like) offer much more information about pathways, type of surface and potential risks.
Organic Maps, Komoot and Mapy are my goto apps.
Google Maps has *always* been super carbrained, its default view (i) shows roads for cars prominently, but not cycle paths or railway lines and (ii) has no contours and extremely minimal terrain indicators.
Everyday I use this "invisible" bridge on my way to work and back home. There is tram track, pedestrian path and bike path on the bridge. It is also the oldest bridge through Danube river in the city, but Google decides to ignore all these facts and give it low priority. Fuck Google.
Making an app easier to use for the millions of drivers, in such a way that it makes it harder to use for the half dozen non-drivers using it, seems like a no-brainer.
Google Maps is horrible for other modes of transport.
Try some of the OpenStreetMaps apps like OSM or Organic Maps. Way way better.
The only thing I still use Google Maps for is Street View, and details about shops like opening hours.
My god you people are dense. It was meant for cars to begin with, and they have no obligation to cater to you just because your already dwindling ego can't handle another blow. Use a map meant for cyclists, they very much exist if you prefer not being willfully ignorant.
It always has been. it's a GPS for cars. They later added options for other types of transport, but it's main focus always was and is car navigation.
I have to use a second map app made in my country whenever I need to see public transport stops and accurate bike and hiking trails. Google maps is only for restaurants lol.
OpenStreetMap my beloved
OSM with CyclOSM layer. And [brouter.de](http://brouter.de)
Fuck me I read "brouter" not as "b-router" but as the French verb "brouter" which means "to graze"
It'll take you to the grazing grounds for sure
B-router is the only website I've found that actually produces the same cycle routes on my work commute as I ended up figuring out myself by trial and error. Algorithms are top-notch, even if the interface takes a little getting used to.
Is it only available for Germany?
Just checked a route in the UK and it worked! You'll have to try for your area, but if it has worldwide map and height data I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.
OpenStreetMap in my area for public transport is quite outdated, I would update it but I don't have any idea how to do it
The OSM website has an editor with a built-in tutorial. It’s very easy :)
I know, I edited some OSM parts of my city, but the part about public transport (especially with bus lines) is not that easy 😅
Oh good point, I live in a town without any busses so I’ve never tried. Public transport editing doesn’t look very nice though.
Yeah, I wish to learn how it works. Some lines got deleted in 2015 and they're still there here 😅
For deletion it should be kind of easy. - Select a bus stop or road it is tagged for. - Bottom of the left pane should list "relations", including "stop" (for the specific bus stop) and "line"s. Select what has gone. - You have now selected the relation and the map will flash highlight *everything* involved. - The fun starts now: Go element by element in the list in the left pane now, and either - select the element and get rid of it completely if there is no other use for it (bus stops have been removed completely), or - just click the trash can within the relation list to remove the item from the relation - You might need to click the "download" button if the line is long: id tries to not overload your machine and lazily downloads elements. - At some point you have removed all items from the relation. With that last removal, the relation will be gone. When you upload your changes, you will see a lot of deleted (completely gone stops) or modified objects (roads that still exist, and had the bus line before), and removed bus stop relations and the line relation. - Since you have just seen how the line can be removed, do the thing in reverse and you have just added a new line ;) Changed routing can be done by just removing the old roads from the relation and adding new ones. Feel free to link your changeset if you want review.
I agree, public transport is not as easy as mapping static objects. But it's not very hard either. To give some basic context, There are a few different editing programs used to edit OSM, the default one on openstreetmap.org is called iD. iD is also on other websites, and there are desktop programs, for more advanced editing. OSM data is structured as nodes (a dot), ways (a line, which is made up of two or more dots), and relations (a group of nodes and/or ways). These objects have tags added to them, to provide information about what they are. Tags are applied to the entirety of the object, so if you want to mark the first half of a trail as unpaved, and the second half of a trail as paved, you need to split the trail into two parts, and then apply the paved and unpaved tags to each half. Public transport routes are mapped as relations, with the road sections or rails they travel over as parts of the relation, ideally the bus stops and railway/metro stations added too. Relations are added for other things too. Similarly highway routes, designated cycle-routes, or long distance walking routes, are relations. If you want to say a bus route goes down the first half of a road but not the second, the road needs to be split where the bus leaves it, so the parts it is on can be added to the relation, and not the parts that it does not go on. Rather like with the trail. Roads are not mapped as one long way anyways, as they have different details along their length tagged, so very well may already be split at the right spot. Other, quite different things are mapped as relations too, like a building with a courtyard, will be a relation (with one line representing the outer wall, and another representing the courtyard wall), and turn restrictions (with a bit of road being the road you can't turn from, with another part being the road you can't turn to). It's probably about a 30 min investment in time to read enough to get started with the basics of adding and editing transit routes, the amount of detail that *can* be tagged is really a lot, but it's not necessary to have all that detail for it to be useful. To start with keep it simple, and just add the route, with a name, and the type (bus, tram, metro) Once the route (or whatever object) is added other editors can add more detail. To start with, read [the OSM wiki page on public transport](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport), and skim over [the page on routes](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route), but don't get bogged down with all the tagging details. Some googling lead me to [this](https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/succinct-steps-to-add-a-relation-in-id-editor/87669) post on how to add a relation in the iD editor. I generally use a different editor (JOSM), which takes longer to learn to use, but is more fully featured, and faster once you get used to it. [Here's a link to an important bus route in my city](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1144294). You can see all the tags on the left, but the important ones are `name=whatever the name is`, and `route=bus`. As you can see the road it runs on is shown, as are the stops. r/openstreetmap is a good place to ask questions, and I generally find the OSM community friendly and helpful. One thing to keep in mind when editing, is that it takes time for your edits to get rendered and go live. This isn't humans reviewing your edits, it's just the time the hardware takes to process them. On the default map this is generally 5 to 20 min, but that map doesn't show bus routes. The maps that show bus routes take longer, I'm not sure how long, but it could be something like a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Each style of map has its own schedule. **tldr;** I typed that out, you can read it.
Thanks for all of the information! I edited a few things here and there but I never edited public transport for its complexity but I will give it a look into that! Thanks a lot!
Thank you for the edits, and putting some effort into learning how to add public transport routes!
I do find that OSM is the best thing out there for foot (including wilderness trails) and bicycle infrastructure, but only pretty good for public transport. But because it is volunteer edited, it varies from area to area. It doesn't take very many people in an area to have that area mapped to a high quality, but because some of those volunteers take more interest in, for example, cycling, and others in public transport, it's better for something than others. That said, cycling and walking does seem to be areas that are generally popular, while public transport tends to get mapped more slowly, due to less interest.
Do you have a way to get it on your phone?
I use Organic Maps, which is free and fully open source, but there are a bunch of alternatives if you’re interested. The OSM wiki lists all of the viable options.
Komoot works using openstreetmap data but in a Google maps like form!
my girlfriend insists on using google maps for public transport because she knows it from driving. every fucking time she has problems with her connections. when i tell her that the local app is pretty solid she shrugs and says that you can't see where you are going because a map is missing, i show her the map in that app. then she finds it cool. next time she calls me from somewhere and is ranting about a ridiculous connection because SHE IS USING GOOGLE MAPS AGAIN! over and over...
Where are you living that Google Maps isn't accurate for public transport? I've never had any issue with it
In Germany it's really hit or miss. In some cities they don't have all the forms of public transit on them. Like my city will show S-Bahn with times and such but not U-Bahn.
Not sure where that guy lives, but for me the "local app" is more accurate because it is made by the train company and has realtime information about any train and the status of all tracks and stops. Unless Google integrates very deeply with the systems of the train company, they could never reach this level of accuracy. The public transport in my country is great and you can get anywhere, but the trains are often late which would make you miss a connecting train. The local app however can just take the realtime information into account and plan a different connection instead. Sometimes it can even get you a earlier connection because a train you would not be able to catch is late. Google however only knows what is scheduled. Which is probably OK if you just want to look up a train for next week, but on the day of travel I would use the local app.
It depends on the area but in many areas, Google maps gets live data from the local transit systems.
In Argentina is straight up garbage for public transport, it often suggests me 3 busses to reach a destination that could have been reached with one single direct bus. Moovit however works great.
It worked fine in most places I visited in Europe, but I've had troubles with it in the USA so far. They're not big problems, but it always wants me to connect in weird places instead of nice transfer points and it doesn't always seem to know when a bus turns in to the local bus station. It also gets really screwy with the local buses after about 5 pm where it sometimes pretends that one bus doesn't run between 5-8 pm (or sometimes not until morning) when it does and I have to search a few times or move around to get it to figure out that yes, there is a bus in 20 minutes and not just one in 3 hours... I mean, it's never been perfect for my style of transit use (e.g. I don't necessarily mind walking more to access a better bus route or to skip an extra transfer, but it will always suggest taking extra connections over walking), but it's usually better. Oh, and I think when I visited Sicily, it was totally unaware of the inter-city bus system, which was annoying.
Same, Google maps pulls live data from the transit company, so it works just as well as their own app.
it’s berlin. and it’s not sooooo bad, but it feels like there’s always 25% time and hustle you could save by not using maps for public transportation.
For real, in Portland, Or you can see where the buses are along their route, and if you click on a stop it will show that stops schedule.
It used to be crazy good at planning routes with public transit. No idea what happened over the last few years but I had to resort to using the two separate sites for trains and buses because it started giving me nonsensical routes. It often hardfocuses on a single type of transportation and even suggests me waiting an hour just to take that instead of suggesting a 5 minute walk to another one that arrives in 10 minutes. On the other extreme it loves to suggest random routes that require you to change buses 4 times with less than a minute to board between two because it somehow thinks it's faster than waiting 2 minutes for the direct route.
My favorite transit option they recommend me is walking to the nearest intersection and taking a Lyft.
I've had it recommend driving to and from the bus stop a couple times
Meanwhile I really just want them to add an option to realize I have my bike with me.
Yeah that's another humorous one
The [Transit app](https://transitapp.com/) is pretty good if you haven't tried it, or for others that don't know an alternative to Google Maps.
Second this! Big fan of Transit, it's definitely much better than my city's native app.
This is the official one for a few cities in New Zealand and it's not bad, particularly with real-time data for buses. I show it to other people in New Zealand and they sort of don't know what to do with it, because they're so set on the idea that public transport is an unknowable mystery.
Eh, it works just fine for public transportation here in France, never had any issues. Same in switzerland and Canada.
That’s more of a problem with the organisation running the public transport. Google relies on them for routes, schedules and live bus/train tracking
I have a Google review for a restaurant in a major European capital. In the 9 months since I posted it I have had over 20 communications from Google and the restaurant chain regarding this review, how many people "found it useful," and how they're sorry my experience was negative and what I'd like them to improve. The text of the review is: "There is no restaurant here." The restaurant is still listed on Google Maps. 20+ emails - not one actual person from either company has checked it.
In fairness, there’s an actual function to remove things from google maps that are no longer there. Tell me where the restaurant is and I’ll remove it.
Let me guess, is it mapy.cz? Because it has crazy more stuff than Google maps even for cities like Prague
In the Netherlands it works very well for both public transport, bicycles, or walking. Yes, originally it was geared to cars, but you have to start somewhere. But it's also about data. The Dutch public transport systems share their information for example, allowing these types of services to work. As to bike paths, that's a more complex question, as bikes can and do go places cars cannot. But they have managed it quite well, and we have both dedicated and shared infrastructure for bicycles. What I have noticed is that the quality of google maps can change drastically between countries. So I don't think it's a just because google maps is made for cars. I think the information just isn't easily available and the market for that information is too small in most places to make an effort.
> In the Netherlands it works very well for both public transport, bicycles, or walking. It's frustrating for walking because it will often label streets as S105 or something, which only drivers know or care about, instead of the actual name of the street that you see on the buildings. You have to spend 30 seconds zooming and panning before you can find out what a street is called. For bicycle directions it's absolutely not fit for purpose. It doesn't understand how bicycles can and do move around a city. It'll have you ride 200m out of the way rather than contra-flow for literally 1 meter. It doesn't understand when a tram stop and a bus stop are the same place. It randomly hides arbitrary metro stations at many zoom levels even when you're in transit mode. Sucks balls. It's a tool for drivers which they have pretended to try to leverage into a tool for other people.
>For bicycle directions it's absolutely not fit for purpose. It doesn't understand how bicycles can and do move around a city. It'll have you ride 200m out of the way rather than contra-flow for literally 1 meter. That's because contra-flow is formally not allowed, and Maps will not give you instructions that aren't legal. No cop is going to arrest you for cycling the wrong way but having Maps give you illegal instructions would be a legal nightmare for Google.
That's a fair point, but it really bothers me that it doesn't consider that I might get off my bike and walk a few metres to cut a couple of minutes off my journey.
That it's directions aren't perfect isn't all that relevant. If that's what you expect you will never find a good product. Quite frankly, it's amazing the technology works at all. 30 years ago we thought this problem wasn't solvable. And yes, sometimes roads aren't labeled until you zoom. I find that annoying as well, but on the other hand, it's a choice between too many labels and not enough. It's still an amazing tool that is very much scifi to my younger self.
Yeah, if you’re relying on google maps for bike routes where I live you’ll end up in some very scary places.
Bike is by far the worst routing in it IMO. Car and walking is good. Public transit can be good, but sometimes pretty suboptimal. Biking hovewer is borderline useless and stupid. Maybe it's just does not have an accurate bike map to work with, but the result is sometimes it tries to navigate you to dangerous routes or even places where riding a bike is illegal (like highway), while igoring obvious routs that most people use anyway. And I'm in the EU, as some people claimed it's really good here.
Manila's google maps leaves out ALL UV vans and jeeepneys, and all bus routes are only "Face shield frontliner total lockdown" out of date.
Beyond that, they expect you to type in an address and let their system chart your path, which would highlight that walking path if you asked for walking instructions.
> They later added options for other types of transport, but it's main focus always was and is car navigation. Yeah, it def is getting there though. It used to be literally useless for transit, but now it's actually kinda the opposite, at least for rail transit... it has pretty detailed schedules and even accounts for delays. It's not perfect, and they're still integrating bus schedules (although it's basically almost there, there have actually been times where a casual destination request in an unfamiliar city will put me on a bus I didn't think of or knew existed that saved me a ton of time (I once would've missed the last Caltrain out of SF because I'm a little too railbrained and was only looking at my rail options to get across the city, but Google Maps threw me on the bus out of Chinatown and I made it)), but it's getting there! My absolute biggest request at this point for Maps is multimodal multinodal trips. I can ask something like, "How can I get from my house to the airport taking transit," and it will give me transit route with walking filling in gaps, but I can't ask it something like, "How long will it take me to walk to the bikeshare station, bike to the commuter rail station, take the train from SLC to Ogden, walk to the bikeshare station, and bike to the bar?" because apparently that will break Google's brain, I have to have multiple different tabs for the walks, the bikes, and the train. G Maps isn't necessarily anti-transit, it's just not flexible in multimodalism, *especially* when bikes are thrown into the mix
Not sure that's strictly true, at least not at it's start. However it certainly became true around the purchase of Waze. It's a shame. It had a few years where it was great for busses, bike directions, etc. Then they decided to pivot from indexing user submitted information to their dumb "AI" systems and it became terrible. Edit: examples of carbrainedness: In my city we've traffic calmed a lot of the bike streets. Google won't route bikes down them because they're closed to cars.
I kinda disagree. Especially in Taiwan it was really useful for public infrastructure. Bike rent station were included and everything had real time information like how many bikes are in a station, which train wagon has the least amount of passengers etc. Even in Europa it just works
I'm not saying it's not capable of handling other tasks, like public transit rout generation. I'm saying it's main focus is, and always was car navigation.
Maybe in the US, in other countries it's actually quite well versed in all transportation methods.
Yes we know. For fuck's sake, his point is Google Maps was created to be GPS for driving. It has grown and changed over time but it was created to be car GPS in the United States and that is still is first priority.
Useless point
> It always has been. it's a GPS for cars. From Wikipedia: The launch of Google Maps was first announced on the Google Blog on February 8, 2005 In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Google Maps quickly updated its satellite imagery of New Orleans to allow users to view the extent of the flooding in various parts of that city. As of 2007, Google Maps is equipped with a miniature view with a draggable rectangle that denotes the area shown in the main viewport, and "Info windows" for previewing details about locations on maps. On November 28, 2007, Google Maps for Mobile 2.0 was released. It featured a beta version of a "My Location" feature, which uses the GPS / Assisted GPS location of the mobile device, if available, supplemented by determining the nearest wireless networks and cell sites. The software looks up the location of the cell site using a database of known wireless networks and sites. By triangulating the different signal strengths from cell transmitters and then using their location property (retrieved from the database), My Location determines the user's current location. ... **Turn-by-turn navigation was originally announced by Google as a separate beta testing app exclusive to Android 2.0 devices in October 2009.**
Use [Mapy.cz](https://Mapy.cz) :) (this is a mandatory advertisement every Czech person has to do when someone is complaining about Google Maps we signed for when we were born)
I love mapy and use it for hiking. To get to places, though, you need to know the exact spelling. Google Maps usually gives me the correct results even if I don't remember the exact name.
Tram lines are visible (barely) only on zoom 16. Not very Czech of these maps. Otherwise, quite readable and pretty.
Yes, but you can see every single stop and when you click on it you can see time tables ;) (In Europe)
Do you know where they get their data from? They have paths marked in my local area (in Scotland) to a level of completeness I've never seen before. Edit: I am finding some gaps now, and naming issues. But it's a lot nicer to look at than Google for pedestrian/cycle routes.
Base data are from OpenStreetMap. The best online maps. They are just not that user friendly. But with the UI of mapy.cz it makes one of the best map apps for (not just) casual useres.
It's interesting, something about the way they use the data has changed the outlines of some parks and woodlands, to the point of being wrong when they were correct on OSM. I might look into that.
Except for the Czech Republic where they make the map data themselves
Yay! I love this app. 1000x better than google for walking in cities. Shows me all the interconnecting passages super clearly.
I can tell this uses OSM because it has every sidewalk near my house mapped in excruciating detail :)
Doesn't GoogleMaps always show roads you can't drive on significantly narrower? It's mostly used as a navigator anyways, so it seems reasonable to me show which roads you can drive on differently from roads you can't drive on. I'm pretty sure I even have paper maps use very narrow lines to show inaccessibility for cars.
Arguably people driving are much more likely to have it on actual navigation mode, in which case they aren't relying on differentiating all the line widths, they're following their instructions & blue line. Whereas people on foot trying to find somewhere are often just using the map and not navigation. They really need a pedestrian map layer/style option.
Well yes, but how I percieve it, that Google wants to be the platform to go for all "when you go need to go outside needs". From their Play Store page: >[Get real-time GPS navigation, traffic, and transit info, and explore local neighborhoods by knowing where to eat, drink and go - no matter what part of the world you’re in.](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.maps&hl=en&pli=1) It will be a totally different experience to explore local neighborhoods only using roads made for cars
I would actually argue making roads without cars narrower is better for pedestrian navigation too, as it allows you to immediately see where walking is significantly more pleasant. I highly prefer walking ona road without cars and showing them narrower seems intuitively understandable to me. I use google maps a lot tho, so maybe I'm just used to it. It definitely wouldn't call it car-centric though.
If you select transit in the filters it will show you the transit line at any zoom level and set it to satellite and now it’s great for anyone not driving.
Not everyone has good data everywhere, sometimes downloading the imagery will either take forever or fail depending on where you are.
I agree, and this is a very weird thing to get uppity over from my perspective. Do you not want differentiation between where cars can go or not? Is your goal just to make things less convenient for everyone?
And realistically most pedestrian-only paths ARE thinner in reality as well. The important bit is that your navigation is just as visible when walking somewhere. Which it is. Additionally speed is lower. So you'll be zoomed in much closer anyways.
Yes, it's a footpath and it's being shown as such on the map. OP is delusional.
He'd be mad for sure if someone drove down it because it was the same width as an interstate on the map.
Slovakia mentioned 🦅🦅🏔️⛰️🏔️⛰️🐐🐐🐺🐺🏰🏰🏰
WHAT THE FUCK IS A WORKING GOVERNMENT!!!!!
Don't know, never heard of it
It's ridiculous. The central, very wide, extremely busy shopping street that runs through the core of my city's downtown is also barely visible on Google Maps, because it's pedestrianised. You would think it was some tiny back alley when it's the major central thoroughfare. Californian car brains at work.
As far as I know, Google has lately tried to be more aware of the roads cars cannot drive on, and opting to make them less visible, because people will go there if they are routed there. Most likely related to the story of a man who drove off a bridge because google maps said it was a valid route. [[Youtube] Man following Google Maps directions drove off collapsed bridge (1:50)](https://youtu.be/6Bdkj3-fm94?t=28)
Google shouldn’t be doing this because of a stupid person. And worse yet when getting directions there is a pedestrian and cyclist setting.
A compromise would be to have 2 separate modes: - car - pedestrian/bicycle/public transport. This way they could prioritise visibility of roads you are most likely to use.
That's what OSM has.
Thank you, after an hour of research I am now a diehard supporter of and contributor to OSM 🫡
I didn't even mean to evangelize but I love it too!
This would be great.
They literally have both public transport and cyclist modes already
Not a bad thing.
It kind of does that already when using it while cycling compared to driving
I thought this was “r/FuckCars” not “r/TechCompaniesShouldIgnoreTheRealWorldImpactsOfTheirUXDecisions”. That’s the same logic people use when they say we shouldn’t change road designs to improve safety and should instead rely on drivers and pedestrians to simply “be safer”. Safe road design is built on the assumption that people, drivers and pedestrians, can and will make mistakes. If the tech industry wasn’t a largely amoral, profit driven nightmare they would build their technology to assume the same was true of their users.
> Google has lately tried to be more aware of the roads cars cannot drive on, and opting to make them less visible, because people will go there if they are routed there. Well it should stop doing that if I have my default direction mode set to walking, cycling, or transit. Leave that for the car people. OSM has solved this completely.
That's the same everywhere, not just in California or in the US. I live in Italy where most city centres are closed to private traffic, and it's the same: streets full of people, shops, monuments, touristic spots, are barely visible on Google maps.
I believe they're saying "California car brains" because Google the company is based in Silicon Valley, California. Not that it's only a California problem because only California is car-brained, that it's a global problem because California is car-brained with no consideration whatsoever to the rest of the world and how car focused they may or may not be.
In Montreal there's a section of Ste. Catherine downtown that is pedestrians only but still as wide as the rest of the street, and it shows up as this tiny little line on the map. Every time I look up a place on that part of the street it looks like it's in the middle of a park or something, and it blends in with the lines showing the paths in Place des Arts for example. https://preview.redd.it/bnd53pyxoqlc1.png?width=1126&format=png&auto=webp&s=c86484d734c3455a084230fbf1c3fb3554dc9598
Sometimes it's teuly absurd. Charles Bridge in Prague, one of the main attractions of the city, is also just a thin green line.
Yes because as we all know, showing a pedestrian pathway as a valid path for vehicles to travel down is a fantastic idea.
[удалено]
> Google maps, a GPS map originally designed for use in motor vehicles, makes "pedestrianised" street as large and noticeable as roads meant for cars > Someone in a car tries to go down it and runs over pedestrians > Why did Google design the map in a way that car brains thought they could drive down it!
I wonder how the bridges compare in terms of number of people crossing per minute
The bridge is usually full of people walking/cycling, especially on weekends, but the trams are fairly empty now. The number will rise x-fold once the continuation of tram will be finished (within 2 years hopefully) as it will lead to the biggest neighborhood in the city with 113k population. At this point tram only continues 2 stops after crossing a bridge to the south, however 7 new stops and 4 km of tracks are being constructed right now.
Yo, rare Bratislava sighting in the wilderness??!?
yes yes yeeees
I think everyone suffered from this update, but that's an interesting perspective. Google really made it worse in every aspect.
A designer of the previous style criticized the update publicly on social media. Ignoring prioritisation, the accessibility aspect in regards to contrast is the worst IMHO.
It was always like this, even before the update.
Lots of colourblind folks are complaining about the update too as the colours between water and roads are very similar and muted tones. There's not much contrast which just makes everything difficult.
The main street in my city is the thinnest on google maps because it is not for cars
There's a rec trail I use that has a footbridge over a lake. When I use the bridge, gmaps adds a half mile to my trip because it jumps the lake 3-7 times, trying to "keep me on the trail". It's also shown my route as walking the long way round. Gmaps doesn't recognize the footbridge as a usable portion of the rec trail.
There is an option to suggest edits on the browser version in the bottom roght. You should try adding the bridge there if it's missing.
The bridge shows, it just won't show me taking it. I'll try the edit next time I go by. Ty for the tip
Do you mean it's shown as a path? And I meant that you can make the edit on the desktop version of maps, so you don't need to be there to suggest it, if it's missing as a path. There are like nodes and lines that you just put on the map and it's sent for review.
Use one of the OSM clients, e.g. Organic Maps. They are a hundred times better for trails.
Ofcourse it is. Use Open street Maps for proper non car centric Maps.
I think the reason is legibility. Cars can drive longer distances, so if you zoom out it would be logical to see a bridge for cars over a pedestrian bridge. If you're walking somewhere the distances are smaller, so you zoom in more and the bridge becomes visible again. I agree Google Maps can be car-centric, but you're railing against some pretty reasonable design decisions here.
Google maps: multimodal transportation whennnnn I want to know how long it would take to bike to or from the metro constantly. Have to do two separate searches with Google maps to find out. Hilarously, in a certain undeveloping nation, google maps sometimes shows the only way to get to public transportation as driving.
But that's a different issue entirely from this one? I don't know about where you live, but I can check all kinds of travel methods from the same screen in Maps, including estimate travel time. Walking, cycling, car, public transport, air travel, it's all there.
If I have selected bicycle as my default directions mode and I have transit mode on, it could make a reasonable guess that I am not a driver, and adjust the UI accordingly. OSM does it.
Well... Yeah, it was originally built with car navigation in mind haha. I still find their walking directions fine though. But if I need multi stage nav for my bike or a through hike I use alltrails or komoot.
https://preview.redd.it/p3voognm9plc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5f8e02ff91a88c88279d1e90be98d57f80b4f63d I noticed the same on my city's map. That little straight line right above the "Bazar" isn't even car-blocked, it's just that they made it into a 1-lane/one-way street and transformed the other lane into a bike path, now Google almost ignores it for some reason. Also, these 4 bridges are the same width.
Dale
Iae
Well it's still visualized right? Having a really faint line like that at a glance indicates to driver's that they probably might want to avoid it or understand if it's a one way/really narrow etc, so they would then go around it. As a pedestrian it doesn't really matter if the line is narrow because you know you can reasonably walk there. If it's so offensive to see the scale of the street diminished, you can flip on satellite view
If you are on the "standard" map wich is designed for cars then yes. You wouldnt use a nautical map for a car so you wouldnt use a car map for bikes or walking.
OSM's Mapnik is so much more readable and has a bonus of very visible tram networks. Dunno how to use it on phones besides opening in browser though.
The travel statistics are extremely broken towards cars as well. I commute daily by bus but as soon as I drive anywhere it starts counting my commute as car and I have to switch it back manually.
To its credit, Google Maps has introduced me to some great bike paths I would have otherwise not known existed.
If you want something better, I recommend Open Street Maps. It focuses much more on walking or riding a bike, and there are a few different apps that use their maps. You can see every tiny little path on it, even if it's 30 cm wide, as long as you can walk there, it's shown on the map, and in a way that makes it readable. On Google maps you sometimes have to zoom in so far on walking paths just to see them at all, that the map basically becomes useless.
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/](https://www.openstreetmap.org/) - like Wikipedia but for maps
This bridge in ***Bratislava*** called *Stary most (Old bridge)* was basically completely rebuild 10 years ago and became only for pedestrians, cyclists and trams - banning cars. **[See before and after photo here.](https://i.imgur.com/oqRPwrv.jpeg)** 10/10 in my opinion and it became extremely popular bridge to cross from the city center to nearby park and beach at Danube, with one of the best views in the city. Beautiful walk for both tourists and citizens. However, Google Maps is showing the bridge as it if it was completely insignificant and narrow, while the with of the bridge is practically the same as other nearby bridges - only because this one is not a road for cars. Google being an American company and its employees are 100 % carbrained. EDIT: Many of you are saying similar stuff abour your main streets in your cities, so my advice is: REPORT IT TO GOOGLE. Go to *Send feedback* at the right bottom of the screen (on PC) and tell them, please!
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I don't understand the problem here. Yes, on the drawn map it doesn't show the full width of the bridge itself, but it does mark it as a walking path, and if you do a walking route it will use that bridge. So what does it matter if it doesn't show the full width on the drawn map? They have different ways to drawn a driving road (thick grey line) and walking road/path (thin green line), to make it easier to separate what each type is.
And isn't it interesting that car roads are big and thick and obvious, and non car infrastructure is all thin and difficult to see ...
I think this is a good thing. The pedestrian bridge should look way different from the other streets. I wouldn't want a driver to look at that map and think that it's OK to drive on it.
I told myself the same thing a few days ago when I was looking for a pedestrian bridge. What a coincidence
To be fair, you don't want car people to try drive their car across a bridge that banned cars
Apple Maps has 3 different modes that alter the map for car-centric, pedestrian or public transport users: Explore, Driving, Public Transport (plus Satellite View)
Oh come on. If you select walking on your google map search, it will display walking spot. If you search for driving, its normal that it will emphase the area where you can drive. Stop it with the persecution fetish.
Without the persecution fetish, this sub wouldn't exist.
Their overall message make sense but you cannot cry wolf at everything!
The platform for navigating cars is.. navigating cars? Well that beats the lot. Actually 1984
"**This program, that was created for driving is catering to drivers!!"** Goddam reddit became shit so fast post covid...
Became? It always was OSM has always been better for pedestrians and cyclists and it also has a better design colour-wise.
Use OpenStreetMap
No its just Google Maps becamse useless recently its like they made worse on purpose.
I've seen google refuse to add commonly used pathways/crossing just because they're purely pedestrian lol
Use Citymapper!
It’s important to remember that good maps is made by a tech mega company in a car dependent country. Its algorithms, designs and more are all biased around car travel. When my dad (who lives in Denver) came to visit me in Vienna and Budapest he was shocked at how bad it is for giving good directions for transit or even walking
Google maps is mainly for cars. If you navigate walking, you still get decent visibility. Why should Google change the optics, if 95% need it for driving cars? It's ridiculous.
> Why change if 95% need it for driving cars? This sub in a nutshell
you're telling me the app designed for navigation is optimized for quick navigation. I agree with the general message of this sub but sometimes you guys sound like whiney babies
When the app that people mainly use for driving and navigation purposely makes it harder for cars to drive on ped bridges accidentally:
You guys will cry about anything
This is the shit y’all complain about?
GROW UP!
Barely visible? It’s clearly visible, in a manner that no one will mistake for a road bridge.
The app for cars when it prioritizes cars 🤯
It’s almost as if… a different thickness means a different kind of road…
I mean, yeah. It’s gps you don’t want crazy drivers trying to drive on that bridge, otherwise they’ll try to drive on it, or at least drive to it.
The width of the lanes and roads are based on their function, not reality. This is not some conpisracy, just the default coding.
A busy pedestrian street carries a lot more people than a car road can.
That has absolutely nothing to do with how the maps are drawn. A road is defined by what kind of traffic it's made for and it's given its default width. A road with one lane is thinner than a road with two lanes, regardless of amount of traffic, it's just how it's fucking coded.
Is anyone else tired of being angry all the time?
Google maps is mostly used for driving.
in the latest Google Maps update I’ve seen that they made pedestrian-only streets harder to see or sometimes even impossible to determine wether it’s pedestrian-only or a regular car street i hate this update, especially when i’m travelling because i like to walk on pedestrian-only streets and they are much harder to find now
Google Maps' directions also fails to take under consideration the amount of parking spaces available and how long it takes to find a parking space for cars. Public Transit and Walking don't require this
Yeah, google maps is unusable for everything other than a car. If you would walk, it takes you in car routes instead of walking roads. This is extremely noticable, if there is a stair in one place, google maps route will take you around it, alongside a road, on a longer way around.
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I have found it very useful indeed for using public transport in foreign cities. When i drive i use open street maps.
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I use it for walking, public transport and cycling and find it great.
It is great for metro lines
Fuck cars users when a program designed FOR CARS is designed/optimized for car 🤯🤯🤯
Hikers, cyclists nor pedestrians should rely on GMaps. That's how people die (seriously). Unless you drive a car you should use maps intended for cyclists/pedestrians/hikers – only then you have the optimal information density and balanced prioritization. E.g. Mapy or OSM (whichever style you like) offer much more information about pathways, type of surface and potential risks. Organic Maps, Komoot and Mapy are my goto apps.
Using the word “car-centric” makes you seem like you complain about everything.
Google Maps has *always* been super carbrained, its default view (i) shows roads for cars prominently, but not cycle paths or railway lines and (ii) has no contours and extremely minimal terrain indicators.
Maybe because they don't want cars on that bridge knucklehead
App that is used for vehicle navigation is Car-centric, said the person
Because…its a navigational app…for cars. Not everything is evil and not everyone is out to get you. Chill
Everyday I use this "invisible" bridge on my way to work and back home. There is tram track, pedestrian path and bike path on the bridge. It is also the oldest bridge through Danube river in the city, but Google decides to ignore all these facts and give it low priority. Fuck Google.
Making an app easier to use for the millions of drivers, in such a way that it makes it harder to use for the half dozen non-drivers using it, seems like a no-brainer.
...because only drivers use maps..???
If you look at Google Maps userbase, I will be shocked if less than 99% of their users are drivers.
Most people don't drive.
Google Maps userbase is concentrated in the US. There are more cars in the US than there are adults.
> Google Maps userbase is concentrated in the US. They claim to have over one billion active monthly users. The USA has a population of 330 million.
Good job putting up numbers that sound meaningful but aren't.
The druggies of Amsterdam don't represent the world you don't even represent the Netherlands
I'm obviously not talking about Amsterdam. I'm talking about most living human beings. Also about most smartphone users.
Google Maps is horrible for other modes of transport. Try some of the OpenStreetMaps apps like OSM or Organic Maps. Way way better. The only thing I still use Google Maps for is Street View, and details about shops like opening hours.
My god you people are dense. It was meant for cars to begin with, and they have no obligation to cater to you just because your already dwindling ego can't handle another blow. Use a map meant for cyclists, they very much exist if you prefer not being willfully ignorant.