PicoBlog

As usual my, Wednesday article will not be directly public transit-related, but this one isn’t too far off!

This is Part 1 of what I imagine will be a running series on digital maps and how they can better help represent & aid navigation in our cities! Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss future editions.

I grew up on Google Maps. I can still remember the first thing I looked for when I found out you could use Maps and Earth to see satellite imagery — the giant spaceship-themed movie theatre in my hometown.

Over my life, I have spent an ungodly amount of time using Google Maps; sometimes to navigate, sometimes to plan trips, sometimes to measure distances, but more often than not just to explore. Even today, when I take calls, I often find myself scrolling around maps while talking, looking at different map details, street names, businesses, and unique-looking finds on satellite imagery.

For the longest time, Google Maps felt like the most incredible innovation it could help you get around almost anywhere, and with street view and later 3D flyover view (which is less nice but, more extensive than Apple’s alternative) you could get an incredibly good sense for a place without actually needing to be there.

But nearly 20 years has gone by, and a lot of the wonder is gone.

3D views of cities are now roughly 10 years old, and new features have slowed to a trickle in recent years. What’s more is that long standing problems with maps have collected without fixes — it’s easy to not notice some of these things if you regularly use maps, but they really make the experience worse. What’s even worse than that was getting my degree in Computer Science and learning how to write software and so understanding pretty well what the map could, and couldn’t be doing.

Of course, most of all, as someone who is passionate not just about cities but also public transport, Google Maps feels like it’s completely missing so many things that could make it the resource for learning about cities and using public transport. In some cases, the user experience in the public transport view is just laughably bad, and has been for years upon years — all while alternatives with better design but inherently far less reach have sprung up.

To be clear, this is not meant to be dunking on the Maps team or product — it’s one I love. I am just sad to see it in a place where it doesn’t excite me like it used to.

One of the biggest problems with today’s Maps when you first open it is the fact that everything is just this white-grey-tan hybrid. To be sure, Google Maps has always had this look, but the colour palette and visual design clearly needs a major overhaul — there’s just too much here that reminds me of maps over a decade ago. Googleis currently testing a new colour scheme as well as design changes for maps, but they feel derivative of Apple, taking white-grey-tan and making it white-blue-grey — it’s just not the level of overhaul that is needed visually.

Now, I could write a book on features that Google Maps has, how they work, and how they could work — but in this article I’ll just highlight a few things that remain shockingly bad that I experienced when I was living in Toronto (often it takes a while to figure out what works and doesn’t in any given city).

Indoor mapping is potentially one of the coolest applications imaginable for software mapping, because getting around big buildings can often be hard even with a map kiosk, but I don’t think I have basically ever used it in Google Maps. For one, the UI is bad — changing levels is not intuitive, but the map also just doesn’t feel complete or do a good job reflecting the building: It’s just a slightly more accurate cloud of pins. When you are in suburban places (like Mountain View!), points on each business are fine from a resolution perspective, but with small business units and lots of malls & food courts finding something in an urban centre on maps can be a huge challenge. Things like detailed street and building layouts (you can see the former in the top left of the image below) might be able to help, but they end up being inconsistent and cluttering up the map.

Diving into public transport, the difference between the Apple Maps view of Toronto and Google Maps is night and day.

Apple Maps provides lines on the map for basically all routes regardless of transit agency — surfacing more minor ones only as you zoom in. Lines look clean and feature labels, and stations even have low-quality maps showing the location of entrances. Stops are surfaced using clean dots that don’t clutter the map. You can even easily see the ferry to the Toronto island airport and streetcar loops easily, while major interchange stations (while not perfect) are highlighted much more clearly compared to Google Maps.

Google Maps on the other hand is a total mess. For one, look at the horrible appearance of the streetcar lines that are conflicting with one another and have gaps and dislocations in some places. You can also see that the subway lines, which should be running parallel close together north of the University of Toronto are oddly separated.

Looking at stations, they almost all use the horrible blue letter M (this icon has been around for a long time) that clutters the map, and at a major station like Union this is combined with other icons. While I like that GO’s logo can be seen at their stations (this is a recent change) it looks totally incongruent with the other icons. Worse still, the whole area around Union is cluttered with ad-pushed businesses, creating a mess. I don’t care if you want to put ads on the map, but this just makes using the map a pain — I do not need to know the location of two Tim Hortons a few blocks apart.

Of course, the best part of this map is that despite GO’s logo appearing several times you can’t see any of GO’s routes on the map — even though several run an all-day service. Even the relatively new UP Express Airport train doesn’t appear (and its logo is nowhere to be found). While I understand that a lot of the transit view in Google Maps depends on transit agencies, Google is the tech company whose product looks bad and who has the resources to either fix the data themselves or create better systems so that it’s easier for agencies to do this (or even community members).

Some of the places where thoughtful (and sometimes context-dependent) design is clearly missing is when you look at a bus or streetcar routes. Often stop icons do not appear (even when they are at the centre of your screen — where is the westbound Queen and Spadina stop?). When stops do appear you notice that the maps team doesn’t seem to appreciate that virtually all bus and many tram stops are unidirectional and so sometimes you have to click around to find the one going in the direction you’d like — something which could be fixed by something as simple as an arrow (or something much better).

Zooming out, you of course will be left wondering: Do none of Toronto’s suburbs have transit? Because only the TTC system is shown on the “visual” part of the transit layer. It’s things like these that feel like way more of a loss for Google than the transit systems (though for example not showing the train from the airport to downtown is a definite loss for Metrolinx). It’s a mapping app obviously failing to show you a map that represents reality and Apple shows that they could be doing much better.

Before closing out, I wanted to point out a few other things that I think clearly could be much much better. (And remember, if Google wants people floating around looking at Maps ads, they could make the map better!)

For one, look at how little detail there is for High Park — arguably the most famous urban park in the city. It seems pretty clear that even with some procedurally-generated stuff this could look a lot better. And at the same time, you can see some sloppiness from the transit layer — the text for High Park overlaps the line its attached to, the streetcar tops to the right of the park are overlapping, and the stops below the park are appearing in only one direction (on a line without any service!)

Something which you might appreciate if you ever walk, but which is not really represented at all on Google Maps’ car-centric map is how different roads might be more or less suitable for walking. On this map, Yonge Street and Mt. Pleasant road look similar, but Yonge St is a nice street while Mt. Pleasant road feels like a light highway with fast traffic and tiny sidewalks (more automatic labelling solutions to be found here).

And then there’s the Bike Map — while I like this in theory, it is so horribly congested that it isn’t particularly easy to use, especially because all of the bike routes actually end up looking pretty similar. Parks are also often covered in dark lines tracing every single path, which doesn’t look great and probably isn’t super functional. The map as it stands isn’t very good for journey planning or for trying to understand what network may or may not exist here.

Now, before you comment, I am aware alternatives to Google Maps exist — I mean that is obvious because I have talked about one of them in the article. The issue as I see it is multi-point: For one, a lot of people like grandma are already using Google Maps; migrating the world’s boomers over to a new platform is harder than Google reinvigorating maps. There’s also the fact that some products like Apple Maps are platform exclusive (a problem I might talk about if my “off-topic wednesdays” continue is how we could fix this) — wanna use Apple Maps? You need a Mac or an iPhone. While OpenStreetMaps is yet another excellent option, I just don’t find its as good for day-to-day use. Ultimately, I just want the Maps I once loved back.

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