Another Google update

There is good news for Google Maps users like myself – those tired of its “Get Directions” feature being primarily designed for cars, making you respect one-way streets and incorporating speed limits into the calculations: Google has announced it will now offer walking directions . I discovered, for example, that apparently I spent 3 years taking a sub-optimal route to school:

Unfortunately for Ottawa, off-road pedestrian paths haven’t been incorporated into the dataset yet – so walking directions will ignore the entire NCC path system. Hopefully, they’ll be incorporated in the future. For those curious about the time estimates Google Maps serves up, apparently is 3 miles / 5.1km per hour – so adjust according to your own speed.

Advertisement
This entry was posted in commuting , online , pedestrians . Bookmark the permalink .

5 Responses to Another Google update

  1. Sean says:

    Cool,

    Maybe once they add the NCC paths we can use it for a bike to.

  2. Les says:

    Too funny. I was thinking about this very thing whilst mapping out a trip we did last evening that included a NCC bikepath. I was sad that my map was not 100% accurate.

    http://www.cyclemania.ca/2008/08/cycling-thursday-evening-jaunt-ottawa/

  3. Padraic says:

    Well, OpenStreetMap has some awesome data on paths and trails, but it’s a few years off from having a “directions” feature, unfortunately.

  4. Dave says:

    I noticed this a couple of days ago, actually. I like how it will cheerfully give you walking directions for even ridiculous distances. Ottawa to Toronto is, apparently, a pleasant 3 day, 8 hour walk. Overall though, definitely a nice feature, though it’ll be good when (with Google, “if” is out of the question) they integrate data on walking trails.

  5. Pingback: Cycling - Mapping my bike rides can be frustrating | Cyclemania - Cycling Blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

Please log in to WordPress.com to post a comment to your blog.

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s