Taking Google Maps For A Walk  

Google Maps has introduced a new feature that will enable you to plot walking routes as well as driving and public transport trip plans - Pound The Pavement. This will no doubt come in handy for people whose iPhone data traffic bills have rendered them unable to afford petrol any more - in fact it could create a virtuous circle...

Starting today, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and we'll try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them. Just get directions as you normally would. If you're going 10 km or less (some call this 6.2 miles), we'll show you a link that you can click to get "Walking" directions:

Our walking directions for the same hotel-to-aquarium route ignore the direction of one-way streets and make use of a pedestrian-only path under the freeway. This route is more than half a mile shorter than if you were to drive:

If public transit directions are available for Google Maps in your area, you'll seen an improvement to them as well. We used to point to your destination from the nearest transit station, but unless you could fly these directions needed some tweaking.

Walking directions are a new feature for Google, and while I'm pretty excited about it, there are some rough edges that compel us to release it in "beta." Walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but we don't always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there's actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don't know about, and they might save you some time if you find them. We're working on collecting new data on pedestrian pathways and on more effective ways to solicit your feedback, so that we can steadily improve this feature and get you where you need to be as efficiently as possible.