Are you a pathological time saver for whom every tick of the clock matters? Google’s new Popular Times feature has the potential to help you avoid lines and overcrowding. From today you can check out the busiest and most time-consuming intervals for each day of the week depending on your location.
Basically, you will be able to avoid queues and congestion at “millions of places and businesses around the world” just by Google searching your destination. The new feature could make breaking down and planning your day much easier.
Save time, get more done
“Do you ever find yourself trying to avoid long lines or wondering when is the best time to go grocery shopping, pick up coffee or hit the gym (hint: avoid Monday after work)?,” Google asks in a statement. “You are in luck.”
The new Popular Times section shows when it’s a good time to go to a certain place and when it’s best to stay exactly where you are because it’s too crowded. If you search for “Blue Bottle Williamsburg” and tap on the title, for instance, you’ll see how busy the cafe gets throughout the day, Google informed.
It might work similarly to Google Maps Traffic layers
This feature has the potential to be very useful. Keep in mind though, that we cannot expect it to be hundred percent reliable so don’t turn it into your time guru. Reports show that this “time saving trick” materializes when enabling Google Maps with My Location on your phone. This in turn sends chunks of data back to Google, describing how fast you are moving.
“When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.”
In short, much like how Google calculates traffic data on the road, the company could be able to determine how busy a place is in the same way.
Popular Times: A competitive advantage?
You just need to hope that not everyone will use the feature in order to have that competitive advantage over citizens across the globe. Google is probably hoping to help both businesses and consumers by diluting the traffic of individuals to specific locations during ‘peak hours’.
Would you use Google’s Popular Times feature? Share your view in the comments sections below.
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