traffic at traffic lights on the route

Google Maps has been, since its creation in 2005, one of Google’s most important projects. Map all land routes on the planet It was an almost impossible mission, but in the company it seems they didn’t think the same thing. In Europe and other countries, this application has become the de facto one used during any trip, although Google wants Maps to be much more than a GPS navigation application.

This application, in addition to guiding us with real-time traffic on the roads of our city or knowing the best way to get to another destination, also serves as a kind of Yellow Pages. Any self-respecting business should be featured in this app, being a fairly common way to search for phone numbers, web addresses, postal addresses, etc.

However, it’s not perfect. Google Maps has some bugs, such as the speed of upd ating on roads when there is construction that changes certain lanes, when a street changes the direction of traffic, etc. Additionally, some features could be added to provide a better experience, some of which are already present in competing apps.

traffic cameras

Traffic, as in many other areas, has been computerized at high speed for decades. There are more and more radars, but there are also more and more surveillance cameras in cities, for example to control access to Low Emission Zones (ZBE) which many municipalities must have.

There are many web portals and some apps, like Bing Maps, that provide access to traffic cameras that are only used to detect traffic jams on major roads, and it would be very convenient to integrate them into the Google Maps app itself. -even. . . This way traffic could be seen in real time.

This would be a great complement to the colored routes the app already has, which give an idea whether there’s a lot of traffic or not, but take a few minutes to update, just long enough to make a bad decision about how arrive somewhere. . With cameras, this would not be the case, since they are seen almost live.

Traffic lights on the route

In one of the summer 2021 updates, Google included traffic lights in many places in Google Maps. In this way it was possible to know whether or not there were many traffic lights on a street, being able to choose one route or another.

What Google Maps doesn’t yet do is show the number of traffic lights on the different routes it offers to get to a location. This is something that Petal Maps, Huawei’s navigation app, recently included, which lets you choose which route is best if the number of traffic lights is essential.

Immersive view

One of the most notable features added to Google Maps in recent years is the immersive view. This function allows you to view cities in 3D with a background that changes in real time and displays the city weather. It is very similar to Apple’s FlyOver.

The problem is that the diffusion of this function is very limited, and it is not that it is not present in cities and small towns, it is that there are cities of several hundred thousand people. inhabitants in many countries which have not yet activated it. It is true that it is more aesthetic than functional, but Google still has the means to speed up this implementation. For example, using the same technology you have in Google Earth.

Weather details

Google has a pretty decent weather app, and its results are even integrated into Google when asking about the weather in the search engine. That’s why it was surreal that this same information wasn’t used in Google Maps. Knowing the weather in certain places is important if you are going there.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that Google would add a new button with the weather of a location when searching on Google Maps. This was something that had been around on iOS for a while but hadn’t yet made the jump to Android. The problem is that this function does not extend to all users, or at least not at the speed that would be desirable.

car chargers

Electric cars are becoming more and more popular in Europe and Google already includes many electric stations on its maps. You can see the company that operates it, the charging stations, the electricity, etc. But they lack an essential function, that of being able to know if they are busy or not.

Unlike at gas stations, the companies operating these chargers know which positions are occupied at all times and show this in their applications. If Google could show the free stations in an area, it would be much more convenient to use this app as an app to find where to charge the car.

Best Road Symbols

The last improvements that could be implemented in Google Maps are those related to road signage. Apple Maps showed how roads, crosswalks, parking lots and other features can be displayed in certain cities and, in truth, they are much more dramatic and accurate than Google’s.

Google could create a mixed layer between the satellite view and the simplified view, which would bring the quality closer to what Apple offers. This would also be viable just using the aerial imagery you already have, but with much more clarity since it is a vector map and not images.

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