Whether you’re helping your users shop for a home or plan a staycation, chances are one of the things they’re most interested in is understanding proximity to shopping and restaurants. Many cities have specific areas or districts where these types of businesses are concentrated, which often makes them the most vibrant and popular places. We identify these commercial corridors with an algorithm that finds the areas with the highest concentration of restaurants, bars and shops and visually differentiates them. Now you can style them on the map using our recently announced cloud-based maps styling feature.

Commercial corridors currently appear on Google Maps, but in the Maps API services they have not been a distinct feature, so any changes to the landscape color ended up erasing them. Many of our customers make changes to the color of the landscape to better fit their brand or experience. For example, if you pick up our “night mode” style, you lose commercial corridors.

We’ve also heard from customers who simply want to make commercial corridors more prominent for their users. To enable you to continue customizing your maps without losing this valuable context, we’ve added a new commercial corridor feature type that can be customized using cloud-based map styling in the Google Cloud console. This allows you to incorporate commercial corridor styling into your maps on the web, Android, and iOS.

To try it out, create a new Map Style or edit an existing Map Style, and edit ‘Landscape’ > ‘Commercial Corridors’.

Haven’t tried out cloud-based maps styling and our other Maps customization features yet? Check out the documentation for the Maps JavaScript API, Maps SDK for Android, and Maps SDK for iOS to learn more.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.