Google Maps is optimized for a mile-high view of traffic. When people are actually using Google Maps they're using it turn-by-turn, which didn't exist within Google Maps in 2010. That was also before Google purchased Waze, which allowed them to basically dominate live traffic. Google shows roads because it has live data for those roads. Any road that google lacks decent traffic data for, it won't show unless you zoom the hell in. Something that the author totally missed is Google killed their maps engine over a year ago. Which never mattered much to mobile users, but was a body blow for desktop users. Google Maps Engine drove Google Earth, which hasn't been updated in about five years on desktop. Google Earth mobile uses an entirely different system. You can still fire up Google Earth, but if you bought Pro (or got Pro for that glorious 15 months where it was functional and free), you have lost: - parcel numbers - traffic counts - demographic data Because Google knows you aren't looking that shit up on Mobile and because Mobile was such a predominant use of maps that there was no point in keeping desktop working for corner cases like me. Which sucks, but at least I got my numbers before they killed it.Given these trends, it's likely that Google Maps was optimized for mobile — and this explains some of the changes we observed earlier.