As part of iOS 13 (released last year), Apple added traffic light icons to its navigation display in areas where its new map was live:

And now, roughly one year later, Google is adding them too. On August 27, 2020, Google quietly added traffic light icons to its U.S. maps.

Here’s New York:

And San Francisco:

Google has added these icons in all 50 U.S. states, including Alaska and Hawaii.

And unlike on Apple Maps, Google’s traffic light icons are visible outside of navigation mode.¹

Presumably, Google extracted traffic light locations from its Street View imagery—after using all of us to train its extraction algorithms:

If true, this hints at what Google might be adding next...

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1  But the decision to always show these icons on the main map (outside of navigation mode) seems to have come with a tradeoff...

If you look closely at some of the screenshots below, you’ll notice that Google is allowing the traffic light icons to overlap other map labels:

This is a curious decision because it often makes street labels harder to read:

Then again, if Google removed all of the street labels overlapped by traffic lights, there would be fewer street labels on the map. (And for many Google Maps users, there are already too few street labels on the map.)

So this is likely why Google is allowing the overlap (even though it looks less than optimal). ↩︎