Google Maps May Soon Add a New 'Lighting' Feature to Highlight Brightly Lit Streets for Safer Night Travel

To help you walk towards home safely, Google Maps is reportedly planning on adding a new feature to its service to highlight brightly lit streets. Google is said to add a new layer to show the street with lighting to make its users' commute safer. The streets that are lit will be shown in yellow colour to differentiate it from those streets that are dark. The feature was discovered in an APK teardown of the beta version of the app. It is unclear if Google will make it live in the public version.

As discovered by XDA Developers, the new feature called 'Lighting' will help users identify streets that are brightly lit. As mentioned above, the feature will highlight those streets with good lighting with a yellow colour highlight to help users avoid streets with poor or no lighting.

It is expected that the feature will be piloted in India first where women's safety is a national-level issue. This feature is also expected to help those people for their night travels who are unfamiliar with the locality. There is no clarity so far on how Google will collect and update data on lighting on the streets.

Google has been rolling out new features for people who are new to a place or those who are tourists. In November, Google Maps added a new translation feature that allows a phone to speak out a place's name and address in the local lingo in order to help travellers communicate with their hosts. Moreover, for deeper conversations beyond directions and location names, Google Maps will now also link the user directly to the Google Translate app.

Additionally, Google Maps announced a new functionality last month that would let users follow Local Guides for recommendations. After that, the users can see the Local Guide's recommendations on Google Maps. They will be able to find top Local Guides in the For You section of the Google Maps app.