Google Maps just fucking SUCKS now

[ET21]

I've not liked their new traffic later, the colors almost seem too bold in some areas. They've started to sharpen the lines on their latest updates

[empirestate]

This all begs the question: is there anybody out there who's developing an online, interactive mapping service that actually tries to emulate good, traditional cartographic principles and content? Is OSM the closest thing we have? Maybe ArcGIS? Anybody? Bueller?

[vdeane]

As far as I know, OSM is the closest we've got.  Maybe it's time to design a "roadgeek" tileset for OSM using something like MapWorks, Jimapco, or even what MapQuestOpen looked like?  Even a custom Google color scheme would still have to be Google-style, since they don't retain API hooks they themselves don't use.

[roadman65]

I was going WB on US 6 just past I-84 near Milford, PA and was caught in a treadmill.   As soon as I got to a point past the part where it narrows down to two lanes, I get moved back to the point before the Sunoco Station on the left side just past the interchange.   Though it was a one time thing until I was thrown back again.

Passing the same gas station over and over again is like being in the Flintstones' universe.  Passing the same house, sofa, lamp, over and over.  That is for those of you who remember the classic cartoon by Hana Barbara.

[paulthemapguy]

Why in the hell did they discontinue the darker orange color for limited-access freeways!?!?  It should be easier to discern different types of highways, not harder!  They need to use MORE colors!  Garbage 

[kphoger]

Soon, it'll all be light grey on light grey.

Oh, wait, do I mean like this?  Yeah, I just snipped that today.   

[BrianP]

Why in the hell did they discontinue the darker orange color for limited-access freeways!?!?  It should be easier to discern different types of highways, not harder!  They need to use MORE colors!  Garbage 

Part of the problem is that Google doesn't care about those of us who use the maps to see roads.  They have two core user bases: those who only want to plug an address into the driving directions and use their phone as a GPS, and those who use it to find businesses and places while walking around downtown.  This update is for the latter.  They're making the roads hard to see to make places easier to see, similar to how many tourism maps will use a flat style with often inaccurate road data.

I came to the same conclusion.  Google Maps is not intended for finding a route from point A to B.  It is intended to find destination(s) and let the app find the best route for you which includes taking traffic into consideration from your start which is likely your current location to your destination.

[Roadsguy]

Now it feels like I cranked f.lux to maximum every time I use the map.

[jakeroot]

Part of the problem is that Google doesn't care about those of us who use the maps to see roads.  They have two core user bases: those who only want to plug an address into the driving directions and use their phone as a GPS, and those who use it to find businesses and places while walking around downtown.  This update is for the latter.  They're making the roads hard to see to make places easier to see, similar to how many tourism maps will use a flat style with often inaccurate road data.

I don't think they're making roads harder to see, they're just making freeways less visible. In fact, the roads seem to stand out a bit more than they used to. There's a faint outline to all the roads that's more pronounced than I recall with previous versions.

After using the new maps for a day, I actually quite like it. The freeway colors are a bit odd, but I'll get used to it. To be completely honest, I always thought freeways were a bit unnecessarily bright. I don't know if they need to fade into the background quite as much as they do now, but I would be okay with a blue or greyish-red (like OSM). Orange was way too bright.

[20160805]

^ The old OpenStreetMap colors were awesome IMO: blue, green, red, orange, and yellow IIRC for freeway, trunk road, primary, secondary, and tertiary arterial respectively.

[jakeroot]

^ The old OpenStreetMap colors were awesome IMO: blue, green, red, orange, and yellow IIRC for freeway, trunk road, primary, secondary, and tertiary arterial respectively.

OSM was/is great for map viewing/scanning -- to an extent. I use Google Street View and 3D imagery so often that using anything except GMaps is mostly a waste of my time. OSM isn't so great for finding POIs, though. It's capable, but it's nowhere near as useful as Google Maps. What would be most ideal would be if Google adopted some of OSM's color schemes, and then muted them a bit. OSM's "Humanitarian" color scheme would be an excellent choice to start with.

[Roadsguy]

OSM is just too busy, trying to render too much at once with colors that can be hard to distinguish. The current Carto style is better than the old Mapnik style in that regard for the most part (trunk routes through huge forests were hard to follow, like US 22 and 522 between I-99 and 322). Compare Google to OSM in Europe. Which is easier to pick the names out from the borders? OSM needs front-end usability work for the map on the main site, aside from that it's just a great database.

As for Google, the only thing I really don't like about the new style is freeways being so yellow. Make them a more prominent orange and it'd be great.

[J N Winkler]

After using the new maps for a day, I actually quite like it. The freeway colors are a bit odd, but I'll get used to it. To be completely honest, I always thought freeways were a bit unnecessarily bright. I don't know if they need to fade into the background quite as much as they do now, but I would be okay with a blue or greyish-red (like OSM). Orange was way too bright.

I frankly didn't care about the color so much as I cared about there being enough contrast for me to differentiate freeway and expressway segments on the same road.  The former combination of orange and yellow worked well for this purpose; the current combination of gold and yellow, separated by just a few shades, does not.  This retrograde step is especially glaring in the case of roads which are slowly being upgraded to freeway and have disjoint freeway segments connected by expressway, like US 70 in North Carolina east of Raleigh.

I wonder if part of the motivation is to cut off customer feedback about which roads are freeways and which are not.  This is something Google still gets wrong--for example, here in Wichita it correctly tags the parts of Kellogg Avenue that are freeway, but further west it tags the Garden Plain-Kingman freeway segment as ordinary expressway.

It is still valuable to have online mapping make a clear distinction between freeways and expressways because a certain segment of the driving public (myself included) will accept slightly longer travel time and much longer travel distance in exchange for free flow, especially on freeways that are reliably uncongested.  This does not have to conflict with Google's apparent goal of improving the relevancy of Maps to people walkabout in strange cities.

[US 89]

My issue with the new maps is that it seems the decision on which roads are arterials seems a bit arbitrary in some cases. For example, near SLC, why are 11400 S and 12600 S arterials when other similar roads like 9000 S aren't? Or why isn't Bangerter between UT-201 and the airport an arterial, when it is expressway to freeway grade in those areas?
That's what mostly pisses me off about this update. Freeways and arterials aren't really distinguished, and other roads are just white and tend to blend into the background. The arbitrary decisions about arterials make some roads look like freeways while other equivalent roads seem to fall off the map.

[/rant]

[vdeane]

Heck, there are some places where the artieral ends randomly.  NY 33, for example, should be at arterial at least to I-490.
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1475983,-77.7295579,14.71z

I don't think they're making roads harder to see, they're just making freeways less visible. In fact, the roads seem to stand out a bit more than they used to. There's a faint outline to all the roads that's more pronounced than I recall with previous versions.

After using the new maps for a day, I actually quite like it. The freeway colors are a bit odd, but I'll get used to it. To be completely honest, I always thought freeways were a bit unnecessarily bright. I don't know if they need to fade into the background quite as much as they do now, but I would be okay with a blue or greyish-red (like OSM). Orange was way too bright.

Maybe at close in zooms, though I think the small border is offset by the overall lack of contrast.  Trying to see any of the white roads at zooms 11 or 12, though, is effectively impossible.  The map is just washed out (in fact, at zoom 5 it's like staring at a light bulb).

I didn't think the orange/brown was "too bright".  I liked being able to see which roads were freeway/expressway at a glance.  After all, freeways are the most important roads - they should stand out, right?

OSM is just too busy, trying to render too much at once with colors that can be hard to distinguish. The current Carto style is better than the old Mapnik style in that regard for the most part (trunk routes through huge forests were hard to follow, like US 22 and 522 between I-99 and 322). Compare Google to OSM in Europe. Which is easier to pick the names out from the borders? OSM needs front-end usability work for the map on the main site, aside from that it's just a great database.

As for Google, the only thing I really don't like about the new style is freeways being so yellow. Make them a more prominent orange and it'd be great.

Agreed.  OSM is VERY cluttered, especially in areas with parks/forests, like the Adirondacks (or all of Canada, which seems to have splotches of green randomly placed all over the map).  If it weren't for that and the lack of many of Google's features, I'd switch over there.  It's too bad the MapQuestOpen style scheme went away.  That was awesome.

I still don't like the "staring into a light bulb" effect of the new Google color scheme, though I do agree that fixing the freeway color would go 80-90% of the way to fixing it.

After using the new maps for a day, I actually quite like it. The freeway colors are a bit odd, but I'll get used to it. To be completely honest, I always thought freeways were a bit unnecessarily bright. I don't know if they need to fade into the background quite as much as they do now, but I would be okay with a blue or greyish-red (like OSM). Orange was way too bright.

I frankly didn't care about the color so much as I cared about there being enough contrast for me to differentiate freeway and expressway segments on the same road.  The former combination of orange and yellow worked well for this purpose; the current combination of gold and yellow, separated by just a few shades, does not.  This retrograde step is especially glaring in the case of roads which are slowly being upgraded to freeway and have disjoint freeway segments connected by expressway, like US 70 in North Carolina east of Raleigh.

I wonder if part of the motivation is to cut off customer feedback about which roads are freeways and which are not.  This is something Google still gets wrong--for example, here in Wichita it correctly tags the parts of Kellogg Avenue that are freeway, but further west it tags the Garden Plain-Kingman freeway segment as ordinary expressway.

It is still valuable to have online mapping make a clear distinction between freeways and expressways because a certain segment of the driving public (myself included) will accept slightly longer travel time and much longer travel distance in exchange for free flow, especially on freeways that are reliably uncongested.  This does not have to conflict with Google's apparent goal of improving the relevancy of Maps to people walkabout in strange cities.

Unfortunately, it seems that Google removed the expressway distinction entirely.  Now those sections are considered arterials.  Since they also removed the corresponding API key, this unfortunately can't be fixed with a custom color scheme.

[jakeroot]

I don't think they're making roads harder to see, they're just making freeways less visible. In fact, the roads seem to stand out a bit more than they used to. There's a faint outline to all the roads that's more pronounced than I recall with previous versions.

After using the new maps for a day, I actually quite like it. The freeway colors are a bit odd, but I'll get used to it. To be completely honest, I always thought freeways were a bit unnecessarily bright. I don't know if they need to fade into the background quite as much as they do now, but I would be okay with a blue or greyish-red (like OSM). Orange was way too bright.

Maybe at close in zooms, though I think the small border is offset by the overall lack of contrast.  Trying to see any of the white roads at zooms 11 or 12, though, is effectively impossible.  The map is just washed out (in fact, at zoom 5 it's like staring at a light bulb).

I think you might need to adjust the contrast on your display. I don't have even the slightest problem distinguishing the white roads from the background. Granted, I have "perfect vision", but I think it's more about contrast than one's vision.

I didn't think the orange/brown was "too bright".  I liked being able to see which roads were freeway/expressway at a glance.  After all, freeways are the most important roads - they should stand out, right?

But there are other colors that could have been used that would stand out without blinding the user. Like I suggested upthread, blue is a great color, because it's not any where near as bright (it's usually opposite orange on color wheels), but it would still stand out against a white background.

Freeways are the most important road, yes. But having freeways stand out like they did appealed to only a small group of users. This latest update was a clear attempt at fading the colors more into the background, in order to highlight POIs. Google Maps' largest user base is clearly those who are using it to find POIs (and to help them get there).

[LM117]

Soon, it'll all be light grey on light grey.

Oh, wait, do I mean like this?  Yeah, I just snipped that today.   

Thank God my android hasn't changed yet.

[J N Winkler]

Freeways are the most important road, yes. But having freeways stand out like they did appealed to only a small group of users.

Do you have independent evidence that this is so, or are you reasoning backward from the de-emphasizing of freeways?

[jakeroot]

Freeways are the most important road, yes. But having freeways stand out like they did appealed to only a small group of users.

Do you have independent evidence that this is so, or are you reasoning backward from the de-emphasizing of freeways?

Obviously the latter. But I wasn't the first to propose the theory:

Part of the problem is that Google doesn't care about those of us who use the maps to see roads.  They have two core user bases: those who only want to plug an address into the driving directions and use their phone as a GPS, and those who use it to find businesses and places while walking around downtown.  This update is for the latter.  They're making the roads hard to see to make places easier to see, similar to how many tourism maps will use a flat style with often inaccurate road data.

Valerie is spot on. Google Maps' core user base does not use the app to dick around like we do.

Now, I don't know why de-emphasizing freeways makes POI's stand out better (nor why we couldn't have it both ways), but if Google thinks that having freeways blend-in improves the visibility of POI's, then by all means, de-emphasize the freeways.

[J N Winkler]

My point is that we shouldn't assume the Google product designers understand their market or technology well enough to have a full appreciation of the implications of various design choices.  This is, after all, the same company that developed an AI for Google Photos that labeled black people as gorillas.

Assigning almost the same color to freeways as to expressways/arterials smacks of myopia arising from living in Silicon Valley, where the freeways are so congested the mobility they offer is not much better than on expressways or arterials.  There are still many regions of the country where this is not true.

[empirestate]

It is still valuable to have online mapping make a clear distinction between freeways and expressways because a certain segment of the driving public (myself included) will accept slightly longer travel time and much longer travel distance in exchange for free flow, especially on freeways that are reliably uncongested.

Whereas for some of us, in certain parts of the country, that same willingness results in avoiding freeways, rather than opting for them.

[doglover44]

Has Google maps gotten better ?

[Brandon]

Has Google maps gotten better ?

Short answer: no.  It also doesn't help that Google suffers from creator provincialism and applies California traffic law everywhere.

[myosh_tino]

It also doesn't help that Google suffers from creator provincialism and applies California traffic law everywhere.

In what way?  I'm just curious.

[kphoger]

It also doesn't help that Google suffers from creator provincialism and applies California traffic law everywhere.

In what way?  I'm just curious.

I think he's referring to prohibiting left turns across painted flush medians.