> Why won't you show me the street name?
I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
But why would they? We have to use it anyway.
I once met a Googler who had previously worked on maps. I made a few grumbles (railway lines at the time were almost invisible, but very useful for orienting yourself when you exit a station, gardens were grey yet parks were green, "Transit" only shows the London Underground so it misses most of the local rail travel routes in South London, etc).
He agreed with everything, but said the staff working on Maps were all in California and wouldn't care, if they could even be made to understand the issues.
All of the things you mentioned have internal bugs, pitch decks, or maybe even patches pushed by individuals or whole teams. Likely even directors or VPs agree. But the organizational friction is massive and it's very hard to ship anything unless it's crystal clear that it is going to directly move a metric that is a focus for this year. And even then, if launching this feature touches multiple divisions, it still might not happen just because of the massive coordination effort.
That said, the green coloring was probably fixed in 2020. Transit has had a lot of work in the past five years, so maybe a chance London overground rail is fixed? The transit line rendering is still terrible, so you should probably use Apple Maps for that—theirs is beautiful.
Scrolling around the UK with the transit layer active, I only see the complete metro/light rail/tram systems of London and Sheffield (incomplete/missing "heavy rail" for both). Newcastle has one metro line, but not the others. No other city's lines are shown even though the stations/stops are often mapped. (I checked Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Blackpool.)
In much of South London "normal" trains are the primary public transport. The stations are marked, the railways shown in light grey, and there are usually even timetables listed [1] but there's no "Transit" line shown. These lines and services aren't shown anywhere in the country.
[2] is a public transport view of OSM. The colours are poor, but the orange lines are mostly missing in Google.
[3] is easier to read but only a railway map, though over 90% of lines in Britain will have passenger service. I generally use this if I'm planning a flexible trip somewhere unfamiliar.
I see some long-distance lines are shown in Japan, though surely only a fraction of what exists. They also get a darker shade of grey, so there's been some local effort there. There are still missing local lines in Tokyo though. I know Copenhagen, and there's been a significant improvement recently! The city/suburban trains are now shown. The regional trains are still missing though, which includes the train from the airport to the city centre.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Herne+Hill/@51.4521063,-0....
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...
Lines like Victoria-Orpington and CharingX-Hayes are not the metro and probably shouldn't be highlighted in the transport layer in my opinion.
The solution you are looking for is TFL taking over the suburban southeastern lines. That's what happened in my adopted home of NE London and today they are orange lines on the map. We also got brand new trains and 4tph on Sundays!
If you need that, you can try https://www.magicearth.com
A for everyone telling me I can enable it always in settings, I will answer that it still gets removed when you start navigation with 'Directions'.
But I still agree street omission is pretty bad.
I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.
>I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
Google Maps does this all over Belgium, showing hotels and restaurants and shops and never the street name. Very frustrating indeed.
I use OSM for street names, because it just works.
Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.
At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?
Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.