crowdedness

Image: Google Area Busyness is an expansion of the information Google Maps already provides about the crowdedness of public transit and the popularity of specific stores and locations throughout the week.

Its crowdedness, its tangle of competing voices and viewpoints, betoken a society struggling toward accommodation, tolerance, perhaps even fellowship, and a time in which miscegenation is no longer the exception but the norm: “It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.”

Crowdedness information is generated from a mixture of historical location data, as well as self-reporting from Maps users on individual trains.

Google is testing giving information on the crowdedness levels of individual carriages.

As well as crowdedness, Google says Maps is also being updated to offer more information about past travel.