Google today added walking directions to Google Maps. An option to view walking directions now appears when you ask for directions for a journey of 10km (6.2 miles) or less. Google say "we'll try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them."
Google announced that this new feature is in 'beta' as "we don't always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there's actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street." In other words Google's walking directions might not actually always return the shortest route for pedestrians.
This is an excellent new feature from Google Maps and I'm sure that walking directions will improve over time. Hopefully soon we will get cycling directions as well.
Via: Google LatLong: Pound the pavement
_____________
3 comments:
You have a waypoint in this example which is what makes the trip so long. Remove the 'via' at the top and it goes to 4 mins.
Good spot - I was moving the 'from' and 'to' tags around trying to get the directions to stop heading back on themselves - then I tried moving the path around manually to try and stop Google giving a route heading back on itself (which added the waypoint).
In essence even without the waypoint the directions were off. Weirdly now I can't replicate the results and it gives the correct directions.
Seeing as I can't replicate the results it seems only fair to Google to remove the example.
Post a Comment