 Huh. Google Maps on Android is no longer plotting walking paths when returning public transit directions. It's doing the following instead. (To generate this example, I requested public transit directions from Park Street Station to the Harvard Science Center.) 98 comments
And you'll notice, even on that example, the resolution is not fine enough that the cross streets are named. The only thing that makes these directions followable is that Kirkland ends at the Science Center; if Kirkland continued, the cross street you are to turn on to get to the Science Center is not named on the map. The other interesting change that just happened is now searching for public transit directions automatically includes solutions that involve ride hailing services. Apparently if the walk between a bus stop and a destination is sufficiently far – I don't know what the distance threshold is – instead of showing you that walk and including its duration in the time estimate, it just includes a ride hailing call, and the estimate of the duration of that ride hailing trip. This is an option one can turn off, but I don't know if it's possible to turn it off as a default, instead of as a trip by trip option. These changes are, in case it wasn't obvious, extremely not good. I'm guessing that whoever authorized these changes has never actually used public transit? Or perhaps never relied on it. This may come as a huge shock to the people at Google, but a very large percentage of those who use public transit do so not because it is convenient or nice, because it is often neither, but because they are poor. And they can't just be whipping out their wallets to hire an Uber or a Lyft. Furthermore, because this is America, an unfortunate lot of people stuck being poor wound up that way because they are disabled, and it matters a lot to them how long it takes to walk from a bus stop to a destination. Heretofore, Google Maps was a tool that allowed such people to find out what the walk would be between a public transit stop and their ultimate destination. @siderea Google maps has always been terrible for walking, which is a huge shame. Not surprised they decided to just give up. For anyone willing to download a new app I would recommend Transit and Cyclers depending on your needs. Both of them do an infinitely better job than Google maps. Here is perhaps a more telling example. I asked Google Maps to give me the directions by public transit from Park Street Station to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Locals will realize how incredibly bad this is:  @whitequark I don't know if you're local or not. I've just spent the last 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain or illustrate through Google Street view what the terrain is that that... lack of a set of directions... turn someone loose on. There is an abundance of perfectly safe pedestrian routes for that path. Also, there's something a lot like a highway on-ramp in the middle of it. That is not indicated on that map. @siderea nope, only been in the US briefly, so it's not obvious to me @whitequark There is no line of sight to the safe walking paths from the subway head house those directions have a pedestrian emerging from. As a consequence, tourists emerging from that head house en route to, e.g. the Harvard Museum of Natural History, sometimes think to get to their destination they have to somehow get across that thing that is like a highway on ramp... the hard way.  @whitequark @siderea Here's a Google Street View image of about where the dotted line in that screenshot crosses the street. And it's even worse because right here the road is coming out from a tunnel under a pedestrian plaza where you can cross with ease; but that is not at all apparent on the map, it just looks like road the whole way. @unlambda @whitequark @siderea I'd note the curved dotted line is *not* supposed to be your projected path. It's a :shrug: response that indicates you're on your own. No, it's not great in any measure. At least since we moved to WA three years ago, Google Maps has done that consistently for walking directions. It's been a PITA when we go into downtown Seattle and are going to park and walk because I have to fiddle with the options to get a walking path. @rivetgeek @whitequark @siderea But the confusing thing about it is that it's not just a single "shrug" dotted line; it's not a single segment, there's some kind of waypoint in between. And it's a regression; Google Maps is capable of generating plausible walking directions for this route, and I believe that it used to do so for transit directions (though it's been a while since I've used transit directions, moved out of the city several years back), but it now seems to just give the "shrug." @whitequark @siderea It's even more puzzling because Google Maps is perfectly capable of generating reasonable-ish walking directions for the same start point and destination if you ask for walking directions. I just have no idea what's going on with the dotted line in the transit directions; it's not even just a single "dotted line to your destination", it seems to have a waypoint that explicitly leads you astray. @whitequark @siderea I'll also note that the first time I tried to take this screenshot, Google Maps caused Firefox to bog down, and then crash. Now, who knows if that's a Firefox bug, or a graphics driver issue, but it's kind of funny when it happened, and it looks like the new Google Maps rendering may be a lot more demanding. @whitequark @siderea Oh, and for some more context, if you did try to roughly follow the dotted line, of course you wouldn't try to cross at the point pictured. You would naturally follow the path in the little island park up to the intersection, where there is technically a crossing. But this is the crossing; one of the most confusing intersections I have ever encountered. @whitequark All you have to do to get to the Harvard Museum of Natural History from that exit from the subway, is just stay on the sidewalk, and follow its curve around Harvard Yard. Easy peasy. That takes you to a pleasant courtyard that doesn't exist on that map, and which sits on top of the thing that is like a highway on ramp. There is no evidence that this thing exists on that map. @whitequark this all has the additional exacerbation that it's Harvard Goddamn University. I really can't overstate the extent of lost tourists, lost new students, lost parents, lost visiting scholars, wandering around this part of the world lost, on foot, and straying into traffic.  @siderea this sucks. Thanks for sharing. @siderea (but it could also just be we're on different a/b test branches ) @NireBryce Oooh! I hadn't thought of that possibility. I do seem to be having some local network problems intermittently. Perhaps this will go away. @siderea This is par for the course. Google maps has been giving me wrong directions in the Boston area for more than a decade. @siderea One from Seattle I got the other day. It used to show a dotted walking route that went along the crosswalk locations (the stripes of gray) but now just shows a straight diagonal. Across one of the most dangerous streets in town. I don’t think anyone would actually follow this route but it’s baffling to present it this way as it elides the need for two crossings of streets. @siderea To the low signal reply that just loaded for me this was DEFINITELY not low signal as this screenshot was done on my home gigabit internet service which is a couple miles north of the location in this image. @glassbottommeg @siderea that is a wacky route for sure, but at least you get to see the statue of Charles Sumner in MacArthur Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Charles_Sumner_(Cambridge,_Massachusetts) (If any American reading this doesn't know who Charles Sumner was, you should fix that: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm ) @siderea I remember years back abandoning Google Maps for transit when I left the US, because the data it was working off was extremely limited. A big task for local public transit apps is to know which APIs to pull from for a given region - what municipal & private organizations actually operate here and where they publish their data. At the time, Google Maps seemed to mainly be aware of the US-based firms (Uber etc), plus a small handful of bus lines they manually imported. @siderea That definitely gave the illusion that hiring an uber was the best option - otherwise you'd be stuck waiting an hour for the bus. To combat that, our transit stops have a printed list of apps which actually use the city's API. Google Maps isn't listed.  @siderea yeah it's very obviously an ideology-made-policy, hypernormalization style, of some fucking techies who would rather call an uber than walk a few blocks. they're everywhere in SF and they contribute to the car dependence paradigm here that creates traffic where none would otherwise be, blocks bike lanes, and ultimately kills more pedestrians and cyclists yearly.  @siderea if I ask for public transit directions in my city sometimes it suggests I first drive to a transit stop. @cpm Yeah, there's that. And there's also the fact that you have no idea how long it's going to take a ride hailing service to get to you. So, so much for using Google Maps for estimating how long to leave to get somewhere on time by public transit. The trebuchet is strictly for partial traversal of the Charles River. There are many fine bridges with pedestrian access for that route.  @siderea The "get there how you can" approach might show the correspondingly faster speed now that those more circuitous legal routes aren't constraining the path. @MisterMadge This was an excellent opportunity for you not to share your uninformed opinion.  @siderea @siderea Google Maps is doing the same thing on my iPhone. Until very recently, it would precisely lay out the walking route required to get to transit, but I get the same bullshit arc now. Citymapper used to offer the trebuchet option, but Google has made it the default.  @siderea Lol. I wonder if they tried to AIify this by telling the AI that the shortest route between two points is a straight line.  @siderea you're supposed to jump and fly the last 4 mins, at walking speed. I wish I could tell you 'Seriously, just drop that useless map' (which it is as a map), but unfortunately nobody bets them with PT info.  @siderea In case anyone is wondering, it's not just on Android; walking directions appear to have also been abandoned in the web interface. @siderea Doing similar for me on iOS. Interestingly, it also does the same fake routing if part of the mixed mode journey is driving, which is utterly baffling. @siderea it does the same on iOS now. I guess that’s one way to get people to use Apple Maps instead🤦  @siderea |
Gregory's Server
In that example, the walking path is trivial – just follow Kirkland.
There are, of course, routes that are not trivial.