Google today announced that its environmentally friendly route feature, which it first talked about earlier this year, is now available for iOS and Android users in the United States, and support in Europe will start in 2022.
This new route selection, which allows drivers to choose the fastest and most fuel-efficient route, is obviously the highlight of today’s release, but the map also has two other new features: a new easy navigation mode for those who may need a route but don’t need it. Bicyclists provide turn instructions (launched in the next few months), as well as expand sharing information for bicycles and motorcycles.
Russell Dicker, senior director of Google Maps Transportation, said: With the environmentally friendly route function, we will always show you the fastest route-now the most fuel-efficient route if it doesn’t happen to be the fastest. So, with just a few taps, you can see the relative fuel economy between different routes, and if there is a difference in arrival time, you can choose the option that best suits you. For those users who want to see the fastest route anyway, Google Maps will have a setting that allows them to see only the fastest route.
Google believes that this new route choice is possible to allow map users to avoid more than 1 million tons of carbon emissions each year-the equivalent of removing 200,000 cars from the road. Of course, before the actual data comes out, we should still be inclined to be skeptical of such numbers. However, I believe that many users will choose a longer but more fuel-efficient route. This is not because the focus of Google Maps itself is fuel efficiency. After all, it can save users money, not carbon emissions, which is still a vague concept for many people.
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By default, even if fuel efficiency is not considered, route selection is a difficult issue. Dick pointed out. What we are trying to do is to build some technology that allows us to get a lot of good choices very quickly and on a large scale, because, of course, everything at Google is related to this. The core variables for choosing a more fuel-efficient route are distance, Time, altitude, speed and stable speed.
What Google calls a streamlined version of navigation was born in the past year when the demand for cycling routes in Google Maps increased. However, many cyclists do not put their mobile phones in front of them while riding, and they do not necessarily want turn instructions. Therefore, the focus of the streamlined navigation mode is to provide information about your major events and upcoming changes in altitude, including of course seeing your location on the map.
As for bike and scooter sharing, Google has partnered with the Donkey Republic, Tier and Voi base in Europe, and Bird and Spin in the United States. The map service can now display your shared sites in 300 cities around the world.