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It's also interesting to see how maps evolve (or fail to evolve) for places that are not San Francisco. At the moment, Apple Maps seems to have a more thought-
by serhei 9y ago
It's also interesting to see how maps evolve (or fail to evolve) for places that are not San Francisco.
At the moment, Apple Maps seems to have a more thought-through design for public transit than Google Maps. Which is to say, transit view in Apple Maps is either visually clean and uncluttered, or completely nonexistent, depending on whether they got around to adding your city. Clearly a lot of by-hand design work goes into it, which isn't a very scalable approach.
On the other hand, transit data in Google sometimes appears to have been munged with no human intervention and never received even a cursory check by a graphic designer. For example, turning on Transit view in downtown Toronto will show a mess of ungodly rainbow spaghetti which is meant to represent the streetcar system. There are lines on non-revenue tracks where no streetcars actually run, lines on streets that don't have streetcar tracks, random artefact lines that appear and then vanish two blocks later, and lines drawn diagonally through the middle of High Park where there is no street at all. Somehow, the data behind this spaghetti is diligently updated year-after-year (e.g. the new Cherry streetcar was added in 2016) without anyone involved in the process noticing that the results are hideously garbled.
It also took them about a decade to realize that the SkyTrain in Vancouver is a rapid transit system.
- zem 9y agotransit (the company) has some really nice blog posts about the difficulty of making transit maps https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-maps-apple-vs-google-vs-us-cb3d7cd2c362 https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-maps-apple-vs-google-... https://medium.com/transit-app/how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f https://medium.com/transit-app/how-we-built-the-worlds-prett...
- serhei 9y agoI really like the approach described in these links. Targeted algorithms solve specific problems (e.g. ILP to decide ordering of adjacent lines) instead of someone trying to put together a Grand Unified Machine Learning Algorithm that ends up having to be fudged manually after it gets 99 cases right and makes an egregious mistake in the 100th one. The more general problem Transit seems to be trying to solve (that no one else is) is having a map that can be kept up-to-date with transit alerts and diversions with minimal hassle. For example, it looks like their launch-time picture of Toronto's streetcars (in the first link) was generated when there was trackwork at the College and Bathurst intersection and the corresponding streetcar lines were being diverted around it. The second link explains rather well the reasons behind some of the problems evident in Google's Toronto map. For example, the unsnapping issue for adjacent lines occurs a lot because streetcar lines are heavily interlined.
- zem 9y agothey really are a great company. when there was an outage in san francisco's schedule reporting system, they had users tag themselves as being on specific buses, and tried to synthesise their own real-time schedule from that.
- lawkwok 9y agoWhat did Google say the SkyTrain was before? I've been using Google Maps for transit directions on the Skytrain over the past decade with no issues. I tend to use Apple Maps for everything now since it is more integrated into the system and, like you said, the information is more cleanly presented.
- serhei 9y agoIt drew SkyTrain as an ordinary railway (part of the map layer), which is probably treated the same for transit directions, but nevertheless an odd choice visually, since it gets lost in the tangle of freight railways which are drawn identically and which SkyTrain frequently runs alongside.