Google has announced new features on its Maps that will now alert users about Covid-19 related travel restrictions to help them plan their trips in a better way by maintaining social distancing norms. Users will also be notified about places that are crowded which include public transports, medical checkpoints and other important places. The company said that this new feature will help avoid going to crowded places. Interestingly, the new feature also comes at a time when governments around the world are making a calibrated exit from the Covid-19 lockdown and reopening cities as well.
Talking about how this new feature works, when users will look for public transit directions, they will receive “relevant alerts” from transit agencies about the precautions they need to take while traveling, for instance, wearing a face mask. Furthermore, if a public transit line is temporarily closed or remains suspended, users will ger a heads-up about that as well.
Here’s how to get information about crowdedness:
-Tap to see the Directions of a place on Google Maps
-Tap through to see the Transit Details
-Scroll down to find crowdedness predictions
-You can also contribute your own crowdedness experience
Google will also provide you with data as to how crowded a station is usually and you can also get live data showing how busy it is right now compared to its usual level of activity.
Here’s ho to know this information:
-Search for a station in Google Maps
-Tap on the station on the map to see the departure board and “busyness data”.
Google claims to be relying on anonymized data for these features. “These capabilities are powered by aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History, a Google account-level setting that is off by default. To protect privacy, these insights are only surfaced when have sufficient data to meet privacy thresholds,” said Google in its official blog post.
