Your whole day, in one Directions link

Opening a day in Google Maps used to mean choosing a piece of it first. Because a Google link carries one way of travelling, a day that walks, takes the metro and walks again was handed to you as three links labelled Walk, Metro and Walk, and a day with no ride in it as one called Directions. Which you got depended on what you had planned, and neither told you much before you pressed it.

Now it is one link, always, and it sits at the top of the open day, right after the line that says how many stops it holds and how far it goes. Press it and the whole day opens in Google Maps: where you start, every stop on the way, where you end. If the day is walkable it opens on foot; if something in it is too far to walk, Google reads the distances and offers what fits.

The itinerary has one of its own, in the same place. It opens the trip as its cities, in the order you travel them, so you can see the whole shape of it on a map in one press. Cities rather than every stop, because a fortnight holds ninety stops and a Google Maps link holds nine.

• The exact way across one hop, in the way you planned to travel it, is still on that connection itself, inside the day. That is where the metro is a metro and the taxi a taxi.
• Google takes nine stops between the start and the end, so a very long day drops the ones past the ninth and keeps where you finish. A day cut short in the middle would be a different day.
• The bar above the map has stopped repeating the panel beside it. It used to say "Visiting 6 countries and 6 cities" or "8 stops, 81 km" a few centimetres from the same words in the panel header.

How much ground the trip covers

The one thing that line said which nothing else did is now beside the trip's name at the top of the itinerary: 2 countries, 6 cities. It counts cities the way the map does, so two days a few kilometres apart are one city in both places.

Everything here reads the same on a trip you share or publish, so what a reader gets is what you planned.