Google Maps Is Releasing ‘Area Busyness’ Feature to Help You Detect Crowded Places
Google Maps has begun to roll out a feature that highlights the busiest parts of your city or town.
The new feature, dubbed ‘Area Busyness,’ is intended to help you avoid crowds by instantly detecting whether your neighborhood or a section of your city has more than the usual number of footfalls.
The feature is compatible with Android and iOS and can be used in areas with restaurants, shops, and recreational facilities such as museums. After installing the latest version of Google Maps on their devices, users in India and around the world will be able to use the Area Busyness feature.
Area Busyness on Google Maps, which was announced last month, combines live busyness trends to show the busiest places in a specific city or town. The busyness trends are said to be based on aggregated and anonymized location history data collected by Google from people who have chosen to receive it through their Google Account.
“This data is useful in calculating how busy a location is typically during each hour of the week,” Google explained in a blog post.
On Google Maps, the area near its busiest state is labeled “Busy area.” You must tap it once to see a chart displaying how busy the area is at various times of day, as well as a directory of restaurants, shops, and recreational facilities (such as a museum) within it.
Google confirmed to Gadgets 360 that the Area Busyness feature is now available to all users worldwide, with India included.
Since 2016, Google Maps has included busyness data. You’d be able to find it by tapping a specific location on the maps. In addition, Google Maps introduced indicators such as “Usually as busy as it gets” and “Usually not too busy” under location names last year.
Google, on the other hand, has recently expanded its efforts in this direction by beginning to highlight congested areas directly on virtual maps. The update also coincides with the emergence of the Omicron variant of coronavirus, which is forcing people to stay indoors and avoid congested areas.
