Now You Can Avoid Crowded Places with New Feature from Google Maps

Ethan James 22 Dec 2021

If you don’t like going to your favorite spot in the city and finding it completely crowded, this new feature from Google Maps will certainly be useful. Google developed a feature called ‘Area Busyness’ and with its help, you will be able to see if a certain part of your city or your neighborhood has more people than usual at a certain moment. The feature has just started appearing on both iOS and Android devices.

The Area Busyness feature works by collecting anonymous location data from people who have this function enabled in their Google Accounts. According to Google, the feature calculates how busy a certain place is for every hour. When you open Google Maps and a certain area is considered busy, you will simply see a ‘Busy Area’ label next to it. To see when this area is less crowded, you should tap on the label and see a detailed chart for different times of the day.

Obviously, this feature will not work for every single location in the city. It is designed to provide information about shops, restaurants, and different locations where people tend to gather — museums, certain parks, and such. To get this feature on your device in the upcoming weeks, it is important that you have the latest version of Google Maps on your device. The feature will be offered to users globally, so it doesn’t matter where you live in the world.

While this feature was announced only last month, the information about busyness has been available in Google Maps since 2016. Last year, the company included labels such as ‘Usually not too busy’ and ‘Usually as busy as it gets’ for different locations.

What do you think about this feature? Will it be useful for you? Feel free to share your opinions in the comment section below!