> I remember a few years ago Apple bought a fantastic public transit app (Embark?), shut it down and I still don’t think their Maps app comes close to the original transit app.
Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows you to select which transit systems, much more customizable in route planning, alerts on stops, schedule changes, when to leave, and it utilizes live data from other riders on where a bus or train is if you're willing to share your location during your ride.
Worked well in every North American city I've been in with a transit system.
>Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
Have you tried Citymapper? It looks pretty similar in features and covers a different set of cities (there's some crossover but not as much as I'd of thought), might be useful.
From my use in London, out of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Citymapper, I've found Citimapper to be the worst.
They're all basically working with the exact same data, but I find Apple Map transit directions to be the easiest to use, providing I'm in one of the limited cities it supports.
I've also never liked the built-in Transit functionality in either Google or Apple maps. It always seems like it's trying to be smart, rather than giving me the information I actually want. (The information I actually want is, "should I leave now, or will I just be stranded underground for 30 minutes?" I know how long it takes me to get down to the platform at the stations I frequent, but Apple and Google don't.)
I wrote my own little thing: https://jrock.us/mta.html. It just pulls the train arrival times for my home and work stations, the transfer stations along the way, and system-wide service advisories. It fits on one screen. The code is a trash fire (it's just jquery that injects raw HTML), but it works ;)
Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
https://transitapp.com/
It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows you to select which transit systems, much more customizable in route planning, alerts on stops, schedule changes, when to leave, and it utilizes live data from other riders on where a bus or train is if you're willing to share your location during your ride.
Worked well in every North American city I've been in with a transit system.