Apple's Improving Underground Navigation with Transit in Maps

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Subway navigation is about to get much easier in hundreds of cities around the world. At the WWDC conference in San Francisco today, Apple introduced a Maps app refresh, which brings advanced Transit info to your iPhone. Transit view in Maps includes subway times and maps, bus information and ferry schedules. You can tap on a stop or station to view bus and subway lines that run through it, along with a detailed schedule for each. It'll launch with support for cities around the world, including Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, London, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington D.C. and 300 cities in China.

You'll have access to a lot more detail when underground, such as location information that'll help you identify the best way in and out of the subway. Once you're above ground, you'll be able to locate nearby restaurants, shops and activities, with a special callout for locations that accept Apple Pay. The new version of Maps will be available in iOS 9, the next version of Apple's smartphone and tablet operating system, which will likely roll out to users as a free update later this year.

Update: Google has been providing transit information in one form or another since 2007, though today's announcement represents a major step forward for Apple Maps, which in many ways lags behind Google's equivalent. Google Maps is available for download on iOS devices, so there's no need to wait for transit implementation in iOS 9.[card card-name='Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card' card-id='22125056' type='javascript' bullet-id='1']