Roger Fingas
Apple is now offering Maps transit directions for the Czech capital of Prague, returning focus to the app's European users after a stretch of concentrating on the U.S.
Riders in the city can use Maps to navigate the city's various buses, railways, and tramways. Options include trips to a number of places well outside the city core, such as Kladno.
To date the only other European cities with Apple transit coverage have technically been London and Berlin, though people in the U.K. can travel anywhere that has National Rail service.
In fact outside of the U.S. and China, there are very few countries with Maps transit support. Some others include Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, the last only in Rio de Janeiro for the sake of the 2016 Olympics, which start this Friday.
Last week, Apple also upgraded Maps with data from Parkopedia, making it easier to find information on parking lots such as hours, prices, and even open spaces and EV charging.
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15 Comments
It's not as if Apple just now decided to start adding European metros, they've clearly been working on multiple continents concurrently. However, the limited transit systems in most US metros take much less time and work to map and implement than the extensive transit systems found throughout most of Europe.
Also, Apple Maps Transit does not yet support "anywhere" in the UK that has National Rail service.
From time to time adding one city to Maps transit cannot be a successful strategy. At this pace, it will take 50 years before all major European cities are covered. As long as the coverage is so fragmentary, there is no inclination to actually use it.
Apple need to act like a really global company, adding transit data on a country wide base.
Cool and quite surprising that Prague made in to club. Will try next time. Now it has Flyeover and transit data! It is difficult to guess how Apple chose cities but readines of data and will for cooperation from local data providers can be important, Pace of added cities is groving so it may take less then 50 years :-)
Finally. I cannot understand why Apple has needed so long time. In this case it was really easy - every transit datas are being collected by the Ministry of traffic in the Czech republic and everybody can use them for free. And this is just one of more examples where is possible to act more quickly then Apple can do.