A lot of parks in the United States have open hours of “Dawn to Dusk” or something like “sunrise to 7 pm”. They are really not “variable hours”
Suggestion: when a place is a park or a trail then sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk should come up as options for opening and closing hours.
Currently there is no way to correctly indicate the hours the park is open for almost all parks in my area.
This has been proposed repeatedly to no avail.
Business owners can set the opening hours by uploading a spreadsheet as explained here:
Thus is likely the best solution. So you will need to suggest this to the park Management.
Cheers
Morten
Dusk and dawn hours change every day as our planet goes around the sun, are different for different locations and are not the same from year to year (see Wikipedia article on equation of time). Asking park management to update this is not a viable answer.
This is not a “variable” time request. Dusk and dawn are very fixed times and are natural for parks, much more natural than hours on a clock.
This is a major safety issue as people may go to a closed park marked as open because of incorrect posted open hours in Google Maps. Most parks outside urban areas do not have a gate or fence but are nonetheless not safe outside open hours.
As you can see there this has been discussed back in 2017 and since then to no avail.
All the best
Morten
Hi there! Can we bring this discussion back? @MortenCopenhagen the link posted back in September 2023 is broken, so I wasn’t able to access that thread and read the history. As I do more work with trails, blueways and with city and county park staff, there is a significant need for this option in the Hours field within Google Maps.
Hi. The link link stopped working when the new version of Connect got implemented. But it would not help you except to know that it has been proposed repeatedly over many years.
You could search the Google Business Profil support to check if sunset/sunrise has been implemented for opening hours.
It is not related to being Local Guides, so the
is more likely to know if this is now available. Otherwise making a spreadsheet is likely still your best option.
Thanks for the quick reply, Morten! And thanks for your dedicated service to the Local Guides community! I will check out that source provided; thank you. But I do think it applies to Local Guides, since we do have some responsibility of verifying if Maps information is accurate. If the published hours for a park, natural area, trail, blueway, etc. - which have a place and are indeed listed on Google Maps - are “Dawn to Dusk,” and not set hours like 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., there should be a field set to identify those hours. Certainly not a hill to die on, just a recommendation to make the Map more accurate.
Our chances to get new features implemented are very minimal, unfortunately. But please keep pushing. Sending in-app feedback is a pretty direct way to reach the responsible team.