Notice how many fewer labels are on the 2016 map. Comparing the screenshots, most of the missing labels are city labels.

Just how many fewer cities are labeled today? Let’s count…

2010 - 46 cities
2016 - 8 cities—an 83% reduction.

But even more interesting are the kinds of cities that have been removed from this zoom. For instance, the area’s second, third, fourth, and fifth largest cities (Newark, Yonkers, Paterson, and Bridgeport) are all missing today—even though they appeared on this zoom in 2010:

Strange, isn’t it?

But this seems to be a pattern with almost every metro.

For instance, here’s Chicago:

And notice that Chicago’s reduction is nearly as big as New York’s:

2010 - 44 cities
2016 - 12 cities—a 73% reduction.

And like we saw in New York, the Chicago area’s second largest city (Aurora) is also missing.

We also see this same pattern in the Bay Area:

And it’s an even larger reduction than Chicago’s:

Doesn’t it appear as if there are more roads today than in 2010?

For instance, look here at Connecticut:

And not only are there more roads, many others have been upgraded.

Take these roads on Long Island, for instance:

Across the map, around forty roads now look more prominent than they did in 2010. I’ve highlighted them in black, below:

Interestingly, many of these upgraded roads are shorter segments that are generally less important than the roads that already looked prominent in 2010, such as Interstate 95 and Interstate 80.

All of the these upgrades and additions make today’s map harder to read. For instance, take the area just north of New York, near Yonkers:

In 2010, there were plenty of roads—but today, there are now so many roads so close together that it’s difficult to trace the path of any one road with your eyes. They all bleed together.

And look again at Long Island:

The primary Interstate across Long Island—Interstate 495—is clearly shown as such in 2010. But today, it’s unclear: all of the upgraded roads muddle the map and 495 gets lost among them. You can’t even tell which road the “Interstate 495” icon belongs to.

Nor have any of upgraded roads been labeled:

If these roads were important enough to warrant an upgraded appearance, why weren’t they also labeled or given icons? After all, an unlabeled road is only half as useful as a labeled one.

But if you’re using the map to try to understand this area, there’s an even larger issue…

* * *

At the zoom-levels we’ve looked at, the map is primarily about cities and roads.

Just look at how barren the map looks without them:

Left: Google Maps, 2016
Right: Google Maps, 2016—with all of its cities and roads removed.

Quite a difference, isn’t it?

Now let’s see what the map looks like with just cities and roads:

Surprising. Even with everything removed—other than cities and roads—the map still looks like a map.

In many ways, the map above is a simple network map: The cities are the nodes. And the roads are the paths between the nodes.

If you live in a city, you’re likely quite familiar with network maps. You might even use them pretty regularly.

Here’s a good example of one:

And here’s an even more famous one:

One thing you’ll notice about these maps: they rarely have lines that don’t have any stations. And they rarely show stations that aren’t connected to lines.

After all, what would be the point of a line that didn’t stop anywhere? Or a station that didn’t get stopped at?

And yet this is exactly what we’ve seen on Google Maps, both in 2010 and in 2016.

Take another look at our Bay Area maps:

Notice the pattern?

2010 - Lots of cities, but very few roads.
2016 - Lots of roads, but very few cities.

...or put another way:

2010 - Lots of stations, but very few lines. (And many stations aren’t connected to lines.)
2016 - Lots of lines, but very few stations. (And most lines don’t have any stations.)

If this was a transit map, it wouldn’t be very useful.

So is it useful as a road map?

For instance, look here at the Pittsburg / Antioch area:

2010 - Cities, but No Roads. Pittsburg and Antioch are shown—but how to get there? No roads are shown that go to Pittsburg and Antioch.

2016 - Roads, but No Cities. Roads leading to Pittsburg and Antioch are shown—but Pittsburg and Antioch aren’t labeled. Why travel on those roads? Where do they go?

On the 2010 map, Pittsburg and Antioch are what cartographers call “orphan cities”. That is, they’re cities that lack connections to the rest of the road network.

A similar situation exists with Santa Cruz:

2010 - Santa Cruz, but No Roads. Santa Cruz is shown, but it’s orphaned (i.e., there are no roads going to it).

2016 - Roads, but No Santa Cruz. Four different roads leading into Santa Cruz are shown—but Santa Cruz isn’t.

On either map, it’s not immediately clear how to travel between San Francisco (or any other Bay Area city) and Santa Cruz.

Then again, it’s not clear how much these issues really matter. We never really need to figure out where we are or how to get where we’re going because mapping software now does it all for us. And there’s increasingly less and less reason to ever “read” or consult a map.

So all things considered, Google Maps’s city reduction was likely an optimization for glancing at the maps on mobile devices, and the new roads were added to make the maps look less empty (once the cities were removed). After all, a map with fewer labels is a map that’s faster to read.

Consider that between April 2010 and April 2016 (when all the screenshots were taken), sales of mobile devices exploded:

📈 Source: Benedict Evans / Andreessen Horowitz

Also during the same period, mobile usage of Google Maps surpassed desktop usage.

Given these trends, it’s likely that Google Maps was optimized for mobile—which explains many of the changes we’re seeing.