Roger Fingas
Apple has once again expanded the availability ot public transit directions in its Maps apps for iOS and macOS, this time brining them to New Orleans a few weeks ahead the city's annual Mardi Gras festival.
The new coverage lets riders mix bus, train, streetcar, and walking directions, including options like Amtrak, which gained expanded Maps support last October. As usual routes are color-coded, and feature network logos where appropriate.
This year's Mardi Gras parade is scheduled for Feb. 28, and will likely see a massive influx of tourists, making it an opportunity for Apple to expose more people to Maps or at least avoid complaints about transit directions being missing.
The app's transit support has been expanding relatively slowly since Apple reintroduced it in 2015 with iOS 9. The company actually removed the feature in iOS 6 as part of a broader move to strip out Google content and switch to its own mapping platform.
Much of Apple's transit coverage is in the U.S., where 29 cities are supported. The only other regions with equal or better support are China, Japan, and Great Britain — in other places, support is often limited to a handful of cities if any.
Apple will sometimes deliberately time expansions with major events. It added Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, and incorporated Houston just days before this weekend's Super Bowl.
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3 Comments
Come on Roger. AppleInsider gets credit for being the only main site that has correctly called these "regions," not "cities." There are actually over a thousand cities now and hundreds of millions of people in those regions. You do your readers a disservice when you use terms like "handful of cities." Since readers are also confused about why Apple just doesn't turn on the transit directions in all regions at once, like Google did and Apple could also, DED's article should be linked whenever a new REGION is announced since he explains both why they are rolling them out so slowly and why it isn't correct to refer to them as "cities."
Peace
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/07/why-apples-transit-maps-are-rolling-out-so-slowly
Woo! Lassie le bon temps rouler!
Except nobody in New Orleans uses public transportation!! Except taking a streetcar ride to no whee and back!! And those are not running during the parades! What a waste of time!