That's wonderful! We've needed this for such a long time. How much longer until we can get directions by bike?

However, it will let you walk on water and for several hundred km at a steady 5mph without rest for days.

Those Googlers are sooooooo hyper... B^>

Rgds

Damon

I was wondering about this. I just started biking to work and since I normally take the highway two exits, I don't know the local roads to take and all the internet sites just point in the direction of the highway. This helps a lot.

They've had a similar feature for quite some time. When I visited Tampa I used this for the bus schedule and routes to get around. Great tool!

this is cool. if you use this in Denver it gives you a Transit option and then tells you what buses to take.

Wonderful! I really hope Live Maps starts incorporating public transit and walking directions into their map services. They've mentioned they would in an update, but who knows when that'll come.

But I'm not going to be leaving Live Maps anytime soon, because it's better, and because my city wasn't made for walking. Unless you go towards downtown or uptown, but that's it. Neither where I live or walk often.

Unless you live in a really urban area, I doubt a walking directions feature is going to be helpful. Though public transit seems more plausible.

Great addition.

This is going to be a great addition for Google Maps. Hopefully this will encourage people to walk or use bikes more often as they can now find the fastest route.

I haven't been able to find a route in this city where selecting this option gives a result any different from the avoid highways checkbox. I also haven't managed to convince it that walking along the waterfront is possible.

Hm, every destination I try, all this does is basically change from "fastest route" to "shortest route" with a recalculation of the travel time (which assumes you walk an exact and constant 3mph for the whole trip). Not exactly a new feature, just a new name.

If this is really going to be worthwhile it should take things like public parks or shopping centers into account and tell you to just walk through them, rather than constantly following the roads. After all, aren't off-the-road shortcuts one of the benefits of not driving?

for cycling it will need a hill avoidance option

This is certainly a step (heh) in the right direction, but it's still, shall we say, very very beta.
I checked directions for my walk to work, wondering whether it would direct me along the noisy Stanley Park Causeway in Vancouver, or be smart enough to advise the quiet, green Pipeline Road instead. The former is straightforward for cars, the latter would be clearly better for pedestrians.
I clicked hopefully, and…well, the results are good for a laugh.
Try this: go to Google Maps, and click 'get directions'. Enter 1900 Haro Street, Vancouver as your starting address, and 1500 Bellevue Avenue, West Vancouver as your destination. Check the driving directions, which are perfectly accurate, then click 'Walking'.
My, that's the long way around, especially the two-way ferry journey to Vancouver Island. Oh well; at least it mentioned the ferries, and didn't suggest swimming.

This option doesn't appear for Japan - so I guess US only?

It is not only for the US, I have tried it in Spain and it works too. Also, the changes are not limited to changing the routing from "fastest" to "shortest", it routes through pedestrian only streets (which doesn't happen if you are in car mode) and it avoids hills whenever possible.

Yeah, it seems to be more of a feature to make google look more eco friendly. I am more impressed with their addtion of Public trasport (at least if look at routs in the denver area)

for example: A random route in denver

walkit.com is a fab site which allows you to generate walking routes in several cities in the UK.
It's designed specifically for walking, so has got better pedestrian mapping than Google, and great extra features such as calculating calories burned and CO2 saved... Definitely recommend it for UK readers.

This would seem to be a great improvement. Also an an opportunity to share the path, i.e., ways that are for pedestrians, cyclists, roller blades, etc.