Getting Transit Directions On Your Mac

With the Maps app in El Capitan you can now search for transit directions. If this is available in your city, you'll be able to see how to get from one point to another using public transportation. You can specify the start time or arrival time and often can choose between many options. You can share these directions with your mobile device or print them. You can also simply view transit lines without setting start and end points.

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

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at how you can get transit directions using the Maps app on your Mac.
A new feature in the Maps app in El Capitan is the ability to get directions using public transportation. Now it's not available in all cities but I'll use one where it is available, New York city right here, as an example.
You can just go into Directions here to get directions as you would before. But notice that you have Drive, Walk, and now Transit directions. So let's say we want to get from the Met to the Mets. So after hitting the big Directions button here we can use Searches to find things. So we'll search for the Met here and there's The Metropolitan Museum of Art and then we'll search for Citi Field and select that.
Now I still having driving directions selected so it's going to give me driving directions. But I'm going to switch to Transit and it will give me some transit options. Once it calculates a different route it is going to give me a selection of them. So I have three different routes here and I can switch between them to see which one I like better. 
It gives you can estimated time. It also gives you some other stuff like how much walking is involved. You can see a summary of what the route involves. You can hit Details here and actually get some detailed instructions on how to get from one to the other that you can then follow.
You can also change the time. So say I'm not leaving right now, I'm leaving in thirty minutes, it will recalculate the route based on current schedules and give you estimated times for those and also it will rearrange them as to which one is more convenient for you.
You can also do Custom here. So you can set a custom time. So if I'm not leaving until later or I want to set an arrival time. Say I want to arrive by a certain time it will calculate everything backwards letting me know when I should leave to arrive there.
Now when I first calculated the directions you probably got a quick view of all the transit routes and you may think that could be useful to see. You actually can see that. You can turn Directions off here and then under View make sure you have selected Transit to show. So in the normal view it is just Map but now I can select Transit and have this cool transit map of my area providing that transit information is available for the city that you are in now.
Of course Apple is going to be adding in more cities as time goes on. You will see announcements for these so if they don't have it for your city check back in a month or two and see if they've added it then. People who have been using iOS, of course, have been used to being able to navigate using maps and it's kind of awkward to do it on a Mac because you are not exactly taking your MacBook with you on the subway and using that to navigate and get around. 
But it can be useful to see these directions and then once you have them you can actually do things with them like print them out. So you can see here I've selected these directions and I've selected this route here and looked at the details. I can go to Print and I can see what it is going to look like by using the Open in Preview. I can see I get three pages here. One is the map and then I get directions on two other pages.
But I can do other things as well. I can use the Share button here to send these directions to say my iPad which I may have. I can email them and I can even do things like Messages and other stuff like that. Add them to Notes. So there are a lot of different ways to get these directions from your Mac to some device or some method of reviewing them as you are actually traveling.

Getting Transit Directions On Your Mac

Comments: One Response to “Getting Transit Directions On Your Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information