View Transit Routes With Maps

In addition to getting transit directions in Apple Maps on your Mac and iOS devices, you can also simply view transit routes. Turning on the Transit mode will show you major routes like light rail and subways. You can also zoom in to see bus stops and then view an entire bus route.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: So you probably know that the Maps app on your Mac and also on your iPhone and iPad can give you transit directions as long as the transit data is there for Apple Maps in your location. You can get from point A to point B using public transportation.
But you can also take a look at public transportation. Actually see the subway, the light rail lines, actually look at the bus routes and do all of that without going into Directions. It's kind of neat. It gives you this view of your local public transportation without having to go to your website for your local transportation authority.
So here I am in the Maps app. I'm not going to go and try and get directions. Instead I'm going to go to the upper right here where I can switch on Transit or Satellite Views. I'm going to switch to Transit. You can see instantly I see the local light rail lines and you would see say the subway lines if you were in New York City. I can click on the stations here and get information about which lines go through there. I can also click on the line indicators here like right here and see that there are five lines in this area.
If I wanted to on any of these I could click for more information and I see some of the information about these lines like here's the C, E, W lines. It gives me some various times when the next trains will be comings; 8 minutes, 38 minutes, 68 minutes. I can then further go in and click on the line itself and it will zoom out and show me the entire line. A nice little map there that maybe better than what I can get locally by going to the website. So I've got that for the light rail lines.
What about bus routes? Well bus routes are actually here on the map but you don't see them anywhere because this would just be a sea of lines showing all the different bus routes since it's a major metropolitan area. But if you zoom in far enough instead of seeing the lines what you're going to see are the stops. You can see suddenly some of them appear here. So I've got these little red bus stop routes here. As I move around the map I can see other ones.
If I wanted to find out about this bus route I can click on it and see information about it. I can click on the route itself and then it draws the route for me on the map, expands the map so I can see the entire route which is really nice. Plus I can zoom in and start to see the bus stops on that particular route. So in many cases again this is better than what you might get from your local transit authority right here in Apple Maps.
You can click to find out more about any particular bus stop and Clear to back away from that one route there and maybe search for another. The key thing is to remember to zoom in far enough so you can see the individual bus routes.

View Transit Routes With Maps

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