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Two weeks ago, we reported Google Map’s new feature ‘Walking Directions’, which was put on trial. Now its official from Google Earth and Maps team that the feature is ‘Live’. The feature allows you to give instructions to the Google Maps regarding any walking directions. This means that you just have to select your location and the one where you wana go, and Google will give you the walking direction/foot way. The directions are available with in the radius of 10 kilometres from the source.

As the feature is not flawless, it is released as a ‘beta’ version. The current path showed by these directions only include pedestrian-only path where as the directions of one way streets are ignored which means that these routes will prove shorter as it considers the freeway as well.

Image Source: Google Lat Long Blog

Public transit directions have also improved. Previously, Google Maps used to point out the destination with the help of nearest transit station, but now step-by-step directions on foot are given.

According to the Google Earth and Maps Team’s software engineer, Andy Schwerin:

Walking directions are a new feature for Google, and while I’m pretty excited about it, there are some rough edges that compel us to release it in “beta.” Walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but we don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don’t know about, and they might save you some time if you find them.

Right now the application seems to be cool for tourists but not the locals as they would be knowing their place well. Anyway more data of pedestrian pathways is being collected by the team and more enhancements are expected in the coming days.

We’re working on collecting new data on pedestrian pathways and on more effective ways to solicit your feedback, so that we can steadily improve this feature and get you where you need to be as efficiently as possible.

added Andy.