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>It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps.

Thank you. Everyone is talking about the color of the water or the roads, but this doesn't even bother me. But having all vegetation of any kind in the same color is an absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid decision. I can't be the only one who uses Maps to check the extents of a forest, for example. Or who uses shapes of different land uses to quickly orient oneself on a map.

Yeah, it's quite clear the designers have never lived outside lived of a car sewer. Every justification they've given thus far circle back to contrast for road features and while driving. It's peak car brain.

Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.

I think the map view is missing a mode view.

Directions has mode because they are very different for car, bike, walking and public transportation.

Map view for biking should be very different from map view for cars as high ways are not usable for bikes and bike paths should be more prominient (while useless for cars).

Ditto for walking that also have different paths.

Using the map for "getting somewhere" is a very different purpose that "seing what's here". They need different modes.

It's not missing it, it's called "Layers" and they can highlight transit, traffic and biking.

Unfortunately the biking Layer also doesn't fix any of this. It only appears to highlight "cycling-friendly" streets here, but the results look random at best here.

Sounds like a data problem over a software problem.

The fact that what the cycling layer shows to me is useless is a data problem, yes. However, As I mentioned in my comment above, as a cyclist I care about seeing a visualization of my surroundings. OSM tells me at a glance if an area I want to cycle through is a forest, if there is public transit, etc. None of that is part of Google's cycling layer, or any other layer - apart from transit. But the faint lines added by the transit layer are not helping, either. The maps are an unreadable low-contrast mess.

> Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.

I wrote an entire thesis about how much google maps sucks, particularly for non-drivers, and it still manages to shock me when I (very rarely) open it.