The addition of Transit to Apple Maps is fantastic, even better when you live in a city with a complex mass transit system.
To see this for yourself, fire up the Apple Maps app in iOS 9. Clear the search bar, then tap in it. A series of 8 circles should appear in it. Tap the one labeled Transport.
Next, tap one of the Transport circles that appear. For example, if you live near a bus line, tap Bus Stops. Your map should be populated by local bus stops, with a scrolling list of stops at the bottom.
If your local stops don’t appear, tap the info (i in a circle) button in the lower right corner and make sure the Transit tab is tapped. Mine was on Map by default. With the Transit tab tapped, you’ll have a transit-oriented map. Zoom way in to see your local stops.
Tap on a stop and you’ll see how far you are from it. You’ll also see a list of buses that stop at that stop and, most importantly, you’ll see how long until the next bus gets there. If you tap on the time (all the way on the right), the time of the next 3 buses will appear (Thanks Benjamin Mayo!)
Update: Updated the post to show how to get to the Transit view on Apple Maps. Hat tip to Gordon Meyer for walking me through that.
All of which is fine if you live in one of the miniscule handful of cities included in the US, etc. OR ONE OF THE 300+ CITIES IN CHINA???
I haven’t verified this personally, but it’s probably only listing the “time points”, as my transit service calls them. Those are the stops where the bus is actually scheduled to be at that time. For example, here’s the bus I take into the City, http://www.samtrans.com/schedulesandmaps/timetables/292.html. Anyone familiar with the Peninsula knows there are a lot more than 10 stops between San Mateo and the FiDi, but those 10 stops are just where the bus will be at those times. If the bus driver gets to a “time point” stop before the scheduled time, they’re supposed to stay at that stop until the scheduled time and then proceed. There are usually 2-5 stops between the “time points” that aren’t precisely scheduled, simply because in real life trying to schedule every single stop, often only a block or three apart is an exercise in futility.
It’s a drag if your stop isn’t a “time point”, because you don’t know what time your bus is actually going to arrive. But I just make sure I’m at my stop by the time of the previous “time point” and I’m golden.
They’re buying the map data in China from someone else, thats why they have so many cities there to start with.
I live in an apartment complex with a bus stop at the corner. When I tried the instruction above, it zoomed in on a transit station 8.5 miles away. Re-centering the map showed a park-n-ride stop over a mile away as the closest.
If Apple expects me to use this to actually ride the bus, they better show the actual closest bus stop that I can walk to.
As far as the “is this live or is this schedule” data question goes, it SHOULD at this point be “live”. All of the North American cities represented at this point do provide live transit data via public APIs. Whether the Apple implementation uses the live data or not is up for debate, but it would be a poor design decision not to use the resources as available. And Apple mostly makes good design decisions.
If you wanted to compare, grab the free app called “Transit App” – it definitely uses live data and if you compare your city in both apps, you should be able to tell pretty quickly how Apple’s version is calling data.
Hate to sound like I’m pimping for these guys, but … try the app called “Transit App” – i mentioned it just above. It has pretty much every municipality that offers live transit data. your city might be in there!
Yeah, I understand. It just chafes me to see all the cheerleading about the upgrade when it’s completely useless where I live (for now). It’s a little reminiscent of the bad old days when all the software happiness was bestowed on Windows and Mac users were sucking air.
I’m covered by paid apps and only occasionally use the bus. My comment was more an expression of annoyance about the coastal-centric nature of this kind of coverage – “Where I live it’s all cool, therefore it s all cool for everyone!”
I expect that the level of self righteous whinging and whining on this will be incredibly high for a few months. Just like it was in the early days of Maps. Rolling out a data product is far more complex than rolling out an app or service.
“Transit information for Seattle is not available.” Really?
if you are in one of the covered cities and it has tracked buses.
FWIW, the circles thing doesn’t work everywhere it seems. I do have transit here near Berlin, but there are no circles when tapping the search field. The much easier way is simply to activate the Transit view in the lower right hand circled-“i” menu and zoom in to the stations near you.