Nobody enjoys commuting. The daily trip from a place of comfort to your workplace is rarely fun. And since most people tend to go to work at the same time, traffic jams and other annoyances quickly make the situation worse.
Google is seeking to take some of those annoyances away with its new Transit mode. While this initially seems like Do Not Disturb in a fancy train-shaped hat, it’s clearly meant to be something deeper that can help to automate more of life’s annoyances away.
We’ve known this feature was coming for a while, but it’s now finally rolling out.
Transit is all about making your commute that bit easier
We all inhabit different worlds multiple times a day. Our home life is different from our work life,and work life is different from our commuting life. So really, our phone should act differently during those times too.
That’s the point of the new Transit mode. Like previous modes, it’s Do Not Disturb with a twist, adding a number of different options that take it past “I want to sleep now, so shut up”.
Transit mode is, unsurprisingly, built around the idea that you’ll want different settings active during your commute. For instance, when switched on, it can switch on your Bluetooth, ready for your Bluetooth earphones. It can also switch to silent, vibration, or sound modes, depending on your needs.
But the real magic here lies in the “Set up commute notifications” section. It’s here you’ll be able to leverage Google’s other services to make the mode work better for you.
Put in your home and work addresses, and allow access to your Google Timeline and location data, and it will use this data to turn on automatically when it detects you’re on the way to work. It will also learn when and how you travel to work, and start scanning ahead for potential traffic and other problems, and display the data your phone’s home screen.
Yes, it’s basically what Google’s app used to do, but now it’s tied into a mode as well, making it far more useful, and removing some common annoyances.
The best part is this new mode is now available through the March Pixel Drop, so all you need to do is make sure your Pixel has access to, and has downloaded, this month’s Feature Drop. It can be found under the Modes menu on your pull-down Quick Setting menu.
