Google Announced New Safety Features For Its Maps

On Monday, Alphabet’s owned Google in an official blog post, announced the introduction of some new features in its Maps. These features are designed to equip travelers and commuters with important information regarding Covid-19. It will inform its users about the impact on various regions including travel restrictions, checkpoints, and degree of crowdedness on public transport.

These features are intended to help make public transit safer and allow users to check how crowded stations are at a particular given time. It will also help them with information about bus schedules on a certain route, Google said.

The company will be rolling out these alerts in the United States, France, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, Argentina, India, and the United Kingdom, the company said in a blog post.

These updates will also allow information to be accessed and modified based on Google’s crowdedness predictions. It will be based on different times the station has been busy in the past.

Furthermore, the information from these alerts will be culled from “authoritative data from local, state and federal governments or their websites.” The company also said that “they are actively working with other agencies around the world to bring even more of this helpful data to users in Google Maps.”

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Google is also adding new features to help individuals traveling to testing centers. They will help them better understand logistics including eligibility and guidelines specific to a given facility. Currently, testing center alerts are only available to its users in the U.S. However, users can access general medical facility information in Israel, Indonesia, South Korea, Philippines, and the U.S.

In April, the company also announced a joint venture with Apple to curb the spread of Covid-19 by contact tracing effort.