Travel safely during COVID-19 with Google Maps' safety features

Google Maps is introducing a slew of features to help you navigate through a world with the COVID-19 pandemic. The company gets its data from local, state, and federal governments and their sites to provide more accurate information for its users. Let's take a look at some of these features under the cut:

Google Maps will offer driving alerts to let you know about COVID-19 checkpoints as well as restrictions along your route, like if you're crossing national borders. This feature will start rolling out in Canada, Mexico, and the US. When you start navigation, the directions screen will show you alerts if you'll be affected by restrictions along your route.

When you look up transit directions for a trip, Google Maps will offer relevant alerts from local transit agencies. It will let you know if the government mandates will affect transit services or if you will be required to wear a mask on public transportation. These will be rolling out in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, France, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom and the US, with more coming soon.

As for those trying to head to medical facilities or COVID-19 testing centers, Google Maps will send alerts to remind you to verify eligibility as well as check the facility's guidelines to avoid being turned away or to clog an already overloaded healthcare system. This feature will be available first in Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, and the US, with testing center alerts coming to the US.

For those who want to avoid crowds on public transport, Google Maps is using its crowdedness predictions feature that it introduced last year. It employs tens of millions of anonymized contributions from past riders to let you know how full a bus line or train line could be. Now, you can contribute easily, too. Head to Directions and tap through to Transit Details. When it's available, you should see crowdedness predictions, and then you can share your experience. You can even help share info for those who need accessibility options, for instance, wheelchair-accessible doors, seating, stop buttons, and more.

These insights will be rolling out globally. Google started showing info like temperature, accessibility, security, and even designated women's sections in transit systems. It can show you when a station is historically more or less busy or give you live data about an area's activity and compare those to normal levels. All you need to do is look or a station to see the departure board as well as busyness data.

As mentioned, the data is anonymized from users who opted in to Google Location history, which is off by default. To protect the privacy of these users, Google says the information is surfaced when sufficient data meets privacy thresholds.