Google Maps knows where you are working, living and how’s the traffic around you. Today, its slowly rolling out a brand new Google Maps feature that should further improve your real-time navigation experience: The app will now tell you whether there’s parking available at your destination.
If you set up your route from Point A to Point B, a small blue icon with the letter “P” appears next to the estimated time of arrival stating that the situation is either Easy or Medium. If the parking options are Limited the icon turns red.
Once you start navigating and the directions expand, you receive further details along with the current availability.
The navigation service Waze (owned by Google) unveiled similar feature several months ago, so Google is now porting it to its main navigation app.
According to early adopters so far supported locations are limited to malls, airports and other public spots. Hopefully more will be added soon.
It’s likely Google will gradually expand it to more markets and bring it to the stable versions of its mobile Google Maps apps. However, there are no official details about it. It’s not clear how it works, or where Google gets the data from. In case you were wondering, Google is also using location data from you to help it predict real-time traffic conditions along your route. So the parking feature might also have a similar component in it — but this is just speculation at this point.
Meanwhile, if you want to test out the feature, you have to get on Google Maps v9.44 beta for Android and hope that your area is supported.
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