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February 9, 2007

Google Maps Shows Buildings and Metro Stations

Chris Maloy found new features in the US Google Maps:

Today, I noticed a few things are happening with maps.google.com around NYC:

1. Map view now shows pencil outlines of buildings

2. Map/Satellite/Hybrid shows locations of Subway/Metro/LIRR stations.

Personally, I hope this is a sign of things to come with google.com/transit adding MTA, Metro North, NJ Transit, and LIRR to the offering!

You'll get this for most important cities in the US if you zoom in to the maximum level in the street map or the hybrid view.

13 comments:

  1. that's just cool
    The last thing google did in my country (egypt)
    is making streets n famous places highlighted in red in google earth :P
    (at last they didn't forget us)

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  2. I checked a couple of other cities. They've done this with parts of Philadelphia and San Francisco. I imagine there are other cities as well if you take a look.

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  3. Living in NYC, I've been waiting for a "would you like directions via driving, or subway?" for a while now, just integrated into Google maps, Google transit shouldn't even be a separate thing.

    Right now the only site I know for subway directions is HopStop.com, which incidentally uses the Yahoo map api. It's a pretty useful and innovative site, they include things like a 360 photo view of each subway stop exit/entrance, but I'd much rather just have this feature integrated into Google. Soon enough...

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  4. This is a great new feature and it is there for Washington DC.

    I think it would be nice if bus stops could be on the map.

    Another feature I think would be great, especially in urban settings: being able to choose to get driving directions or walking directions. So far I only know about ask.com doing that. (http://www.ask.com/?tool=map&o=0&l=dir)

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  5. One thing that would be nice: if I want directions from my house to the nearest metro station, it would be nice to be able to type in my address and then the destination address would be, let's say, "Dupont Circle Metro." But when I do that it doesn't know where that is.

    The metro/subway stations should be searchable even if I don't know the exact street address.

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  6. this feature has been available for a while in Paris.

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  7. For Ken above, in NY you can also use http://travel.mtanyct.info/ for point-to-point directions.

    The site also gives the times. For instance, if you want to be somewhere by 3 p.m. it tells you what time you have to be at the bus station to catch the next bus.

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  8. Thanks for pointing this out! I really hope that this comes to the Treo app soon.

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  9. Just checked Boston, MA on Google Maps and the "metro" stations are shown here too!

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  10. Las Vegas Monorail has been left out. But the building outlines are there

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  11. "Right now the only site I know for subway directions is HopStop.com, which incidentally uses the Yahoo map api."

    Via text messaging, Dadnab (http://www.dadnab.com) currently gives public transportation directions for Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Seattle, and is expanding to other cities.

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  12. St. Louis has the pretty buildings, but no subway map. There's a fun mismatch where the building outlines are old but the street map is current at Busch Stadium: http://maps.google.com/?ll=38.623551,-90.192336

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