Thank you. Everyone is talking about the color of the water or the roads, but this doesn't even bother me. But having all vegetation of any kind in the same color is an absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid decision. I can't be the only one who uses Maps to check the extents of a forest, for example. Or who uses shapes of different land uses to quickly orient oneself on a map.
Directions has mode because they are very different for car, bike, walking and public transportation.
Map view for biking should be very different from map view for cars as high ways are not usable for bikes and bike paths should be more prominient (while useless for cars).
Ditto for walking that also have different paths.
Using the map for "getting somewhere" is a very different purpose that "seing what's here". They need different modes.
I wrote an entire thesis about how much google maps sucks, particularly for non-drivers, and it still manages to shock me when I (very rarely) open it.
- The shape and size of houses. Yes, you can see individual buildings in Google Maps, but they are almost indistinguishable from the background.
- It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps.
- Streets that I should probably not set a foot on (highways) have a distinct color. This is really bad now with the redesign.
- No problem figuring out if an area is serviced by trams or trains, you see their tracks clearly and don't need to zoom in looking for individual stations. Again you can extract this information from Google Maps if you squint, but tram tracks next to streets are almost invisible.
Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.