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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 1:46 AM
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Mapping out points of interest

A new "points of interest" feature was recently added to Google Maps. Areas with a certain unknown density of points of interest are drawn in an orange-y shade while other built-up areas are shown in grey and parks are drawn in green. I was surprised at how closely the "interesting" areas map onto parts of cities I'm familiar with that actually do have a lot of stuff worth exploring (some of the areas of interest are just malls, but those are usually easy to distinguish from the storefront areas based on the street pattern).

You can see this for yourself at http://maps.google.com/

This isn't exactly a rigorous or scientific way to compare cities but I thought a few different maps were interesting. Here are some of the cities I looked at, mostly the ones I'm familiar enough with to comment on. They're all scaled differently.

Toronto. You can see how commercial areas stretch out along major streets like Danforth Avenue. There aren't a lot of "clusters" of commercial areas outside of downtown, and the west side of downtown is more developed than the east. Some parts of the central business district, as in many North American cities, despite being heavily built up don't actually have a lot of publicly-accessible points of interest.


Montreal. More of an eastern (really northeastern) bias to where the points of interest lie. You can see some gaps between the old town and newer downtown area.


Vancouver. A lot of the downtown peninsula has points of interest, although parts of the West End are more residential. Off of the peninsula the city follows a Toronto-style pattern along streets like West Broadway (East Broadway is quieter) and Commercial Drive.


Quebec City.


Halifax. More of "blobs" of commercial activity rather than long streets (it looks like it has a vaguely gridlike street network but it doesn't, and it has few long ateries in the old core; maybe that's part of the reason for this pattern). There are some little commercial nodes in areas like Gottingen and Kaye Street (Hydrostone) and there is even one way out on Dutch Village Road. Dartmouth has more than I would have thought. Agricola didn't make the cut; maybe in a few years.


Charlottetown. The older part of town is pretty active.


London, for comparison's sake. I'm not sure if the reported "points of interest" are comparable across national borders but London unsurprisingly has comparatively extensive areas with a lot of them.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 4:38 AM
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I very much like the feature and use it when I am driving around in smaller communities in Ontario to locate their downtown's

BTW, here is the hard to find google maps legend
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 9:05 AM
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It's an interesting algorithm. It definitely accurately conveys density of commercial properties in St. John's, though I wouldn't use it exclusively.

It does an excellent job of highlighting the actually lively part of the Downtown, excluding Water Street East and Water Street West, which have some commercial/residential but are more industrial. It even captures the little commercial cluster up in Rabbittown.



It excludes the rowhouse neighbourhoods, most notably Georgestown. It actually makes sense when I think about it - there are bakeries, cafes/bookstores, meat shops, etc. but no density of these - just a business per block.

Beyond that it tends to find suburban strip malls and commercial parks, which unfortunately are what a lot of tourists are looking for (I have a friend who works at a downtown hotel. He's constantly horrified by the people from Europe asking how to get to the Avalon Mall).



A great feature just the same! (The empty bits in St. John's as along the left side above are high-elevation areas. The city used to prohibit construction above the 190 line).
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 1:12 PM
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/\ Those are really bad. The Montreal one is ridiculously arbitrary.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:12 PM
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Yeah, there are a lot of arbitrary cutoffs for retail strips. What happened to most of the retail along Yonge Street, Bloor, Queen East, King East, Eglinton, etc? There are certain parts highlighted that look like they correspond with certain BIAs, but that's about it.

I'd say something like these maps, which measure Flickr (orange) and Twitter (blue) activity are more indicative of commercial activity (white) and areas of interest (orange), as well as residential density to some extent (blue).


Toronto


Montreal


Vancouver
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:30 PM
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From what I understand, the google POIs are pulled from their DB which any user can add to (has to be approved by google before going live) so if for whatever reason, enough businesses aren't added in an area, the colouring won't form.

Does anyone have info on google's procedure for these areas?

I agree these do seem a bit arbitrary (although a pretty good guide). For example my hood (Eglinton and Mt Pleasant), there are lots of businesses on my street and Eglinton between Yonge and Mt Pleasant to suggest a blob. Bayview south of Eglinton is another in the area. Certainly more than say Gottingen and Young in Halifax (not to pick on Halifax).

An equivalent area to Gottingen might be Baldwin st which is also not highlighted.

Curious if Google has other criteria than it simply being in their DB.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:31 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Mtl View Post
/\ Those are really bad. The Montreal one is ridiculously arbitrary.
Actually, I find those quite good for Montreal. If you zoom in on the map it gets even more refined.

What do you think the map is missing?
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:36 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shappy View Post
From what I understand, the google POIs are pulled from their DB which any user can add to (has to be approved by google before going live) so if for whatever reason, enough businesses aren't added in an area, the colouring won't form.

Does anyone have info on google's procedure for these areas?

I agree these do seem very arbitrary. For example my hood (Eglinton and Mt Pleasant), there are lots of businesses on my street and Eglinton between Yonge and Mt Pleasant to suggest a blob. Bayview south of Eglinton is another in the area. Certainly more than say Gottingen and Young in Halifax (not to pick on Halifax).
.


Interesting - if this is the case it's odd that Bloor west of Christie / Grace to Lansdowne wouldn't be highlighted. Tons of new bars/restaurants that you'd think would show up. That's the biggest missed area in Toronto IMO.
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  #9  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:48 PM
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I can understand why some might call the orange layer a bit arbitrary, although I will say that for Winnipeg the key places and areas that actually draw people from other parts of the city all got the orange treatment. It's mainly the more marginal commercial strips that might be of interest just to those in the neighbourhood that were omitted.

Personally, I like this improved functionality... there have been times where I've visited a strange city and just wanted to go for a walk in an interesting neighbourhood, but it wasn't always easy to figure out where to go by looking at a regular map. With this, if I can find a blocks-long stretch of orange I can pretty much take it for granted that there will be something to see and do once I get there.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 2:56 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shappy View Post
From what I understand, the google POIs are pulled from their DB which any user can add to (has to be approved by google before going live) so if for whatever reason, enough businesses aren't added in an area, the colouring won't form.

Does anyone have info on google's procedure for these areas?

I agree these do seem a bit arbitrary (although a pretty good guide). For example my hood (Eglinton and Mt Pleasant), there are lots of businesses on my street and Eglinton between Yonge and Mt Pleasant to suggest a blob. Bayview south of Eglinton is another in the area. Certainly more than say Gottingen and Young in Halifax (not to pick on Halifax).

An equivalent area to Gottingen might be Baldwin st which is also not highlighted.

Curious if Google has other criteria than it simply being in their DB.
I think the Halifax one is just zoomed in more. It's not highlighting Gottingen, but rather this stretch on Young, which is definitely a commercial node in contrast to the mostly residential stuff around it.

The Mt. Pleasant and Bayview strips get highlighted when you zoom in closer, though yeah, they probably should be highlighted further out, since they're major commercial hubs in the area. (Likewise in Halifax, the two or three blocks on Agricola surrounding North Street should certainly be highlighted at a higher zoom level, but a lot of the commercial activity is new, so it might be taking a while for user-generated info to catch up to development).

Overall these seem pretty good. Flawed, but less so than, say, Walkscore, which I've always found to be pretty dubious.

But I wonder how much this has to do with demographics and Google's databases. Maybe the kind of businesses on, for example, Queen and Dundas streets are more Google-user friendly than the businesses on Bloor West. Much of the latter strip are mom-and-pop shops catering to a less affluent, more immigrant-heavy population, which is certainly not the case on Queen.
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  #11  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 3:02 PM
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Originally Posted by Drybrain View Post
But I wonder how much this has to do with demographics and Google's databases. Maybe the kind of businesses on, for example, Queen and Dundas streets are more Google-user friendly than the businesses on Bloor West. Much of the latter strip are mom-and-pop shops catering to a less affluent, more immigrant-heavy population, which is certainly not the case on Queen.
Good point. There are places like Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg which are urban to the max but cater to a decidedly less well-off population that isn't posting pictures of their 99 cent pizza to Instagram.

Then again, I suppose Google can't be blamed for catering to their market.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 3:09 PM
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Originally Posted by esquire View Post
I can understand why some might call the orange layer a bit arbitrary, although I will say that for Winnipeg the key places and areas that actually draw people from other parts of the city all got the orange treatment. It's mainly the more marginal commercial strips that might be of interest just to those in the neighbourhood that were omitted.

Personally, I like this improved functionality... there have been times where I've visited a strange city and just wanted to go for a walk in an interesting neighbourhood, but it wasn't always easy to figure out where to go by looking at a regular map. With this, if I can find a blocks-long stretch of orange I can pretty much take it for granted that there will be something to see and do once I get there.
Point of interest is a term google uses to refer to any entry in their POI database. Could be anything from a doctors office, a gym, a community centre or a restaurant, etc. These shadings are not necessarily the "coolest" or most interesting. For example, I would say an interesting hood in Toronto is King east and Corktown for it's history and character but it's not shaded in the above map (though to drybrain's point it might be when zoomed in more).
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 4:03 PM
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Edmonton is basically what I would expect, the downtown portion of Jasper Avenue as well as most of the central business district, 124th street, Chinatown, 109th in Garneau, Whyte between 109-99, smaller pockets here and there, and lots and lots of shopping centres.
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Old Posted Aug 24, 2016, 4:47 PM
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Originally Posted by Drybrain View Post
I think the Halifax one is just zoomed in more. It's not highlighting Gottingen, but rather this stretch on Young, which is definitely a commercial node in contrast to the mostly residential stuff around it.
There only seem to be two levels of detail for the points of interest colouring. If you zoom in enough you see a building-by-building colouring, which is pretty interesting. If you zoom out just enough that gets changed to an approximate area-based colouring. If you continue to zoom out past that the areas appear smaller of course but the smaller orange blobs don't disappear. The treatment for every city is therefore similar, except for the difference in scale. I don't think different "cutoffs" are applied to different cities.

It doesn't always work that way but a lot of blocks are either fully coloured in or not, so blocks with commercial along one side but a lot of other grey buildings can end up being completely grey whereas a smaller commercial block would have been orange.

Quote:
But I wonder how much this has to do with demographics and Google's databases. Maybe the kind of businesses on, for example, Queen and Dundas streets are more Google-user friendly than the businesses on Bloor West. Much of the latter strip are mom-and-pop shops catering to a less affluent, more immigrant-heavy population, which is certainly not the case on Queen.
I did notice that some countries seem much sparser than others as far as points of interest go. If you zoom in to some areas you will find buildings that are clearly commercial that have businesses in them in streetview but not on the map. Nothing's perfect I guess, and there doesn't seem to be a more informative alternative out there.

It would be interesting to see how the points of interest evolve over time.
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Old Posted Aug 28, 2016, 8:07 PM
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FWIW, here's my own "pins" overlaid onto the Calgary map (I've messed with the levels a bit to make it easier to see at this zoom level).



Mind you, I don't use the pins to denote favourite places per se -- more places I've been to frequently, were haunts of mine at one point or another, or were places I was at a particularly memorable moment of my life or a journey. Some of my pins don't show up into you get to a lower zoom level though.

Also, I've never spent a whole lot of time in Inglewood, but there's lots of stuff there. Sorry Inglewood.
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Old Posted Aug 29, 2016, 12:04 AM
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Originally Posted by esquire View Post
Personally, I like this improved functionality... there have been times where I've visited a strange city and just wanted to go for a walk in an interesting neighbourhood, but it wasn't always easy to figure out where to go by looking at a regular map. With this, if I can find a blocks-long stretch of orange I can pretty much take it for granted that there will be something to see and do once I get there.
I think orange simply indicates shops...

There are large chunks of the walled core of Quebec City that aren't orange, likely for the simple and good reason that there isn't retail at street level there, but I would recommend a stroll in this area (for the old architecture and views) way before I'd send a tourist to other areas of the greater city that are orange. The old walled core is one of the main urban tourist magnets in the entire country, but you'll miss half of it if you only rely on Google POI orange zones.

In Sherbrooke as well, one of the main things I'd have a tourist do is to go take a walk in the "Old North" neighborhood (old Victorian homes and centenarian trees, still very homogeneous architecturally), yet I'm sure that's not orange, because there's no retail there.

I just checked for fun and nearly all the nice parts of Lévis (the older areas where you can find buildings from the 1700s) are not orange, yet there's an awful commercial section on Route 173 (the segment of it where you have the Chevy dealership, the A&W and the Taco Bell) that is.

So, yeah, if you're ever around here, please ask what's worth seeing, don't rely on the orange
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  #17  
Old Posted Aug 29, 2016, 1:32 AM
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^ It's pretty obvious that the orange just represents points of interest where you can spend money. It doesn't indicate as much in a place like Que. Cy. or St. John's where you might want to stroll through historic residential areas, or even scenic areas. But it does usually give a clue as to where these might be adjacent. Individual POI aren't always apparent without increasing the zoom levels either.
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Old Posted Aug 29, 2016, 3:39 PM
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^ Yeah, my intention wasn't to rely on the orange areas as the absolutely definitive guide to which areas are interesting from a tourism and sightseeing perspective. I just see it as a useful tool for knowing at a glance which areas might have shops, restaurants, entertainment, etc.
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