A few ideas for Google Maps

February 8, 2005, 12:03 PM ET

Being a map buff, I can't get over how cool Google Maps is. It crushes the competition.

That said, I have a few ideas for improving it:

When driving directions expand past the bottom of the page, requiring the user to scroll down, it's tedious to click on one of the directions and have to scroll up to see the turn-specific map for that direction. Perhaps the directions could be in a <div> with overflow: auto set, so no scrolling would be necessary.
From the main page, I zoomed in all the way, just for fun -- but I had no idea where that took me. (Nebraska? Kansas?) It'd be helpful if the site displayed the name of the city and state in the case when the entire map's contents are certain to be within a single city.
Incorporate public transportation. Add an "I'm taking public transit" option, which would change the driving-directions algorithm to look at public-transit routes.
Incorporate current traffic. Scrape (or partner with) traffic sites so that the system weighs current traffic patterns -- influencing the driving directions and displaying an "estimated time" for each leg of the journey.
Incorporate Google Suggest, so that addresses are auto-completed.
When will a driving-directions program advise me to use Lower Wacker Drive? That really is the Turing Test for map programs that give directions in Chicago.