First there was the Edsel.
Then New Coke.
And now "New" Google Maps.

They've decided to convert everything to shades of blue, green, gray.
It's hard enough to see on a computer screen at home and impossible on the road.
Plus, back roads have been reduced to a near-invisible gray line.
The only way to see them is to zoom in to the last level, but then you can't see the bigger picture.

Nebraska has a well-designed state bike map where you can see low volume roads at a quick glance.
The colored routes only apply to state highways - green, blue, yellow, red.
(I think blue should be the least traffic a la William Least Heat Moon - but hey.)
Back roads are in gray - and show up against the white background. Solid - paved; dashed - unpaved.

https://dot.nebraska.gov/media/h1fn2...map-side-2.pdf

Opinions?

It is indeed terrible. They copied the road color scheme of Apple Maps. It was a purely a marketing decision to make it easier for Apple customers to try Google Maps. Aside from being a dirty shameless ripoff imitation, it also made the map nearly impossible to use visually. Disaster.

Did it change just recently for you? On my phone it changed in November 2023 (12 months ago).

I ditched Google Maps for bike touring and now use Mapy.cz.

“Terrible” is an understatement. And I thought it was just me.

Consistent with the decline of Google search itself. Poor search results (overall superficiality over substance, and often providing what it thinks you should ask or want to know, versus what you asked), and now the option to provide more than 10 search results per page is gone, as if that usually suffices, and or everyone only uses smartphones. But now Google can show more ads. At least DuckDuckGo offers continuous scrolling of results.

Huh? Here’s two screen captures from the Google map app on my phone. The first one is from 2015 and the next one is from this August. They look pretty much the same.



Even when I went to Google Maps instead of the app, I got this map. The Arsenal is about 6 miles across

I looked at my app after seeing this thread and had no idea what others are referencing because it looks the same as ever.
So I googled 'Google maps changed' and saw threads from message boards spanning various dates over the last 2 years...but nothing recent.


Sucks if some people can't easily see secondary roads.

Maybe it’s device-dependent or OS -dependent. It’s definitely different than it was using my iMac and iPhone. As the OP notes, the color scheme is not good. For me, there’s not enough contrast.

Damn, back then Pennsylvania got the short end of the stick when it comes to contrast

My three screen captures cover 9 years and three different Apple products. Here’s the screen shot from the Chrome browser on my Ipad. I can’t find how to add bike routes to the map however.

This is how your capture looks on my computer. Dark green lines are bike paths. They can be activated by clicking on the Layer Icon, bottom left (see capture below). FWIW, I've compared rendering in Locus and cycle.travel. Much less detail until you zoom in. Understandable due to the screen size.

[EDIT] More interesting than the color scheme is which (commercial) locations are highlighted. They are probably personalized... [/EDIT]

My version of Chrome (which I don’t really use) didn’t have the icon for bicycling. The Google map app on both my phone and Ipad have the icon which I use a lot. The Google map app on my phone was instrumental in getting me from Lake Itasca to Memphis this September, although I don’t always follow Google’s suggestions. Some of them are stupid. Here’s on example from my 2015 tour in Pennsylvania. The Google map suggestion was to take me way off the Delaware River up into the hills on a 43 mile route.



Here’s the profile from the route with nearly 3000 feet of climbing.



The same route on by car was only 34 miles with 1200 feet of climbing. I took the lower route and it was a very quiet road that was pleasant to ride.




I found this problem constantly on my most recent trip. Google would send me off into the hills around the Mississippi with steep climbs while the flatter road was avoided.

Yeah... I do not use Google Maps to plan my routes. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that their algorithm puts a heavy premium on safety. I use cycle.travel as per suggestions made in another thread. Only good things to say about it. I've tried to figure the endpoints of your example. cycle.travel picked the more reasonable route.

New on the left. Old on the right.

Disgusting.

​​​​

Your picture is renders too small to see much of a difference, much less one that is “disgusting”.

I'll try to find a higher resolution comparison image, but even at the small rendering size, do they look, quote, "pretty much the same"?

Bit blind, aren't you?

Here you go.

The biggest problem from a cycling perspective is that major and minor roads are now the same color. Makes it very difficult for bicyclists to choose quiet roads to ride on.

If you zoom in you'll also see that they took away the width on smaller lanes and made them simple lines. The changed color of woodland also makes green colored paths harder to see.

And yeah, the new colors are also more disgusting. Who wants to look at puke cyan and turquoise all day?

The new has a higher contrast there, easier to see roads. But it would be nice if highways were yellow again, instead of just a darker tint of blue-grey

Am I missing something? The old roads are white, now they’re grey… except for that major yellow road that is blue/grey.

The old park and water colours were better, but the grey roads do have higher contrasts

Here's another example. The first one from from now, the second is what old Google Maps used to look like. See the loss of clarity?

One more comparison:

The old one is slightly more zoomed in so road names and numbers appear, and it looks more of a mess. I prefer the new one, but something inbetween, say blue for motorways, yellow for major roads and grey for minor roads?

Old Google maps used to have three different colors for expressways, busy roads, and minor roads. They've reduced this.

In the map below, A86 (red label) is a controlled access expressway. The other dark grey roads south of it (for example D909) are regular city roads with traffic lights. As you can see they have exactly the same color.

How does a bicyclist read this map? It's hard to tell where you can go and where you can't.

It makes sense that the D roads are a different colour as in the old one

As far as I know you can ride on all D and N roads in France, but not on A roads

That said, riding through Paris has become a breeze thanks to all the new bike lanes

If you look at the old map in forum post #19 above, you can see that controlled access expressways were orange, busy city streets are yellow, and regular city streets are white.

That three tiered system was great in my opinion. Doesn't matter if they use an orange theme or any other colour theme, just make it obviously different.

The new one it's much harder to read.