The Huz Experience

Google Maps may be an excellent service, providing easily the best and most flexible online maps of the UK, but after extended use by someone who doesn’t like to drive – say, me – it begins to reveal a dark heart, the end result of its upbringing in a land where the car is king.

Yes, Google Maps is evidently designed for (and by) fat pies who refuse to step out of their SUVs until they’re inches away from their destination – Americans. Quite possibly Americans like the young couple who once told me in hushed tones, on a train but without a hint of irony, that public transport in California “isn’t for people like us“.

Despite the fact that Google Maps diligently records all known nasty one-way systems, and routes its directions accordingly – with no way of telling it to stop it because you’re on foot – it somehow omits that most basic of locations, the humble train station. No, you can’t find train stations on Google Maps, either by looking or by specifically searching. Instead, for unfamiliar towns and cities, you either have to trust that most major train stations can generally be found on “Station Road” or perhaps “Station Approach”, or look up their location somewhere else and make a mental note.

This is rendered even more bizarre by the fact that Google Maps actually include railway lines, albeit represented in the same way as the rather less uncrossable tram lines, leaving the location of the stations themselves as the only mystery.

All this, of course, means little more than the opportunity to put my limited artistic skills to good use when I have to print a map, or send one to someone else. Trying to remember where stations are when sending directions to friends probably helps keep my brain active, too! In the end, in a twisted kind of way, Google Maps are doing me a favour. Probably.