Vancouverscape, a Vancouver based blog covering travel, tech, and lifestyle

Apple Maps is now available in Canada, offering users rich 3D details for Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The newly enhanced city experience — which expands on the new map that Apple spent years building from the ground up — includes enhanced navigation and amazing details for road markings, land cover, trees, elevation and public transit routes.

In addition, Maps introduces a new windshield view for drivers and immersive walking directions shown in augmented reality.

Explore Cities with Highly Detailed Maps

Users can see elevation details across a city, new road details plus custom-designed landmarks such as the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal and Robson Square in Vancouver.

The nighttime mode, complete with a moonlit glow, activates at dusk. In addition to Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, the new Maps experience is also available in London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and other world-class cities.

Enhanced Navigation Provides a Better Driving Experience

Maps now features even more road details to help drivers navigate through cities more easily and safely. Turn lanes, medians, bus and taxi lanes and crosswalks are clearly displayed for navigating busy intersections.

When approaching overlapping complex interchanges, Maps will show a road-level view, making it easier to see upcoming traffic conditions or the best lane for an approaching exit. These new navigation features join route planning, which provides the estimated time of arrival for future departures based on expected traffic, as well as lane guidance, speed limits and natural language guidance available through CarPlay.

Transit Updates

Maps offers improvements for public transit riders with an updated transit map. Nearby stations are prominently displayed at the top of the screen, and users can pin their favourite lines in Maps.

Once a transit route is selected, Maps will automatically notify you when it’s time to disembark as you approach your final destination. You can even keep track on Apple Watch. Maps also includes important real-time information such as outages.

Immersive Walking Directions

With iOS 15, Maps introduces step-by-step walking guidance in augmented reality. Raise your iPhone to scan buildings in the area to generate a highly accurate position to deliver detailed directions that can be viewed in real-time.

Augmented reality guidance is currently available in London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C.

Discover Great Places with Curated Guides

Maps makes it easy to discover the many things to see and do in cities around the world through curated Guides. Tap the Explore Guides button in Maps to access over 2,000 guides that can also be saved. They’ll automatically update when new places are added for the latest recommendations. You can even create your own personal Guides of favourite places to share with friends and family.

Interactive Globe

In Maps, the globe shows Earth’s natural beauty with amazing textures and contours. View vibrant details of mountain ranges, deserts, rainforests, oceans and more. Now even the most remote and precious locations on the planet can be explored right from iPhone.

Cycling Directions

Now available for Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Arizona, Barcelona, Boston, China, Las Vegas, London, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Philadelphia, Washington state and Washington, D.C., cycling directions show the elevation for a ride, how busy a street is, and whether there are stairs along a route.

With voice guidance and Haptic Touch on Apple Watch, stay even more focused on the path ahead while enjoying the ride.

Additional Features

Look Around provides a way to explore parts of the world through an interactive 3D ground-level experience and a smooth, seamless 360-degree view. Users anywhere across the globe can explore places locally.

Speed cameras let you know when approaching speed and red light cameras along a route, with the added ability to see where cameras are located on the map. Share ETA enables you to share an estimated time of arrival with family, friends and coworkers with a simple tap or by asking Siri.

Incident reports make it possible to safely and easily report an accident, hazard or speed check along a route by simply letting Siri know “There’s an accident up ahead” or “There is something on the road.”

Favourites provides one-tap navigation to frequently visited places. Whether headed home, to work, to the gym or to school, simply tap and go once a location is added to Favourites on the launch screen.

Indoor Maps for airports and malls allow you to open Maps and see what level you’re on, look for washrooms and even find out which stores and restaurants are open. Visit Apple online for more info.