On November 18, 2019, Apple’s new map expanded to parts of the Midwest and much of the Western U.S.:

This is the sixth time that Apple has expanded its new map since its public launch in September 2018:

In June, Apple announced that its new map would cover “the entire U.S. by the end of 2019”:

With this latest expansion, Apple’s new map now covers more than half of the U.S.’s area...

...and two-thirds of its population:

It also now covers twenty-seven full U.S. states...

...and all ten of the U.S.’s ten largest cities:

In terms of area, this latest expansion is Apple’s largest yet...

...and it’s the second largest in terms of population:

It also has arrived faster than almost all of the others:

In the first areas covered by Apple’s new map, there was a noticeable increase in the number of roads marked as arterial roads (i.e., the yellow roads and the thicker white roads):

But as the new map continued expanding across the U.S., this trend started to reverse. And by the time Apple expanded to the Northeast, there was a noticeable decrease in the number of arterial roads on the new map versus the old one.

Using Manhattan as an example, I pointed this out in my page about Apple’s Northeast expansion:

And many Northeastern cities had similar decreases. For example, here’s Washington:

Given how lightly the arterials are colored, it’s difficult to see just how big the reduction is—so here I’ve highlighted the arterials in black:

And now that Apple has expanded to the Midwest and the West, this trend has continued. For example, here’s Indianapolis:

And Chicago:

And it’s not just big cities; small towns also have fewer arterials. For example, here’s Princeton—a small town near my hometown:

And La Moille—another small town near my hometown:

But this trend is perhaps most noticeable in rural areas, where there are not only fewer arterials—but fewer roads shown in general. For instance, here’s the area immediately northeast of my hometown:

And here’s the area immediately northwest:

Compared to Google, Apple now looks empty at this zoom:

And even when zooming out to all of Northern Illinois, there’s still noticeably fewer roads on the new map:

At this zoom on the old map, the yellow roads are U.S. routes—I’ve highlighted some of them below:

But on the new map, sections of many of these U.S. routes have been dropped from this zoom:

Why would Apple drop sections of these routes?

For example, why did Apple drop most of U.S. 136—but none of U.S. 24?

Traffic count maps from the Illinois Department of Transportation show that the sections Apple dropped generally have less traffic. For example, IDOT’s data shows that U.S. 24 receives about twice as much traffic as U.S. 136:

And the small part of U.S. 136 that Apple kept at Illinois’s eastern edge ...

...has much higher traffic than the rest of the route:

A similar situation exists with U.S. 6—Apple dropped most of the route at this zoom except for small sections in the middle of Illinois and suburban Chicago:

Once again, traffic counts are noticeably higher in the sections that Apple didn’t drop. For example, here’s the segment that Apple didn’t drop in the middle of Illinois:

And this pattern repeats with the other U.S. routes that Apple changed:

All of this suggests that Apple might be using iPhone probe data to determine which roads to show on its map. And if that’s the case, it helps explain why so many rural and less traveled roads have been downgraded or dropped from certain zooms:

It also might explain why Apple has been seeding new map expansions to small groups of users, weeks before releasing them to everyone.

Because of data licensing restrictions, Apple likely can’t use traffic data derived from the old map in order to make the new one. So Apple might be seeding new map areas to get traffic information that it can feed back into the map for road prioritization.

And if you watch how the new map has been changing while Apple has been “testing” it, this seems to be what Apple is doing. As time goes on (and as Apple accumulates traffic information), more and more roads are upgraded to arterials:

Meanwhile, a few days after Apple released its Northeast expansion to its entire userbase, there was a dramatic increase in the number of arterials shown in New York City:

Did the massive increase in users (once the Northeast went live) lead to a increase in probe data? And did that, in turn, lead to the dramatic increase in arterials a few days later?

It’ll be interesting to see if the number of arterials increases in Chicago, Indianapolis, and other areas after this latest expansion goes live.

As it stands now, fewer arterials means that traffic is shown on fewer roads (because at most zooms, Apple only displays traffic on orange and yellow roads):

And fewer arterials also means that many roads abruptly disappear upon entering the new map’s coverage area, as if the new map is some kind of Area X:

But while there’s often fewer roads on earlier zooms, it’s quite a different story on the closer ones. In Chicago, for instance, there’s a noticeable increase in the number of alleys shown on the new map:

And the same goes for many rural towns, like LaSalle:

But what makes Apple’s alley detail in LaSalle even more impressive is that Google largely doesn’t have it:

And if you look again at LaSalle on Apple’s old and new maps, you’ll notice another new detail—building footprints:

If you’re a regular user of Apple Maps in the Midwest, this is one of the new details you’ll probably notice first. That’s because the old map had building footprints in just six areas—and, together, these areas totalled less than 1% of the Midwest’s land area:

Surprisingly, the old map didn’t even have building footprints in most of Chicago, including Chicago’s entire South Side:

And now many parts of Chicago look completely different, such as the University of Chicago campus:

Meanwhile, in the areas where Apple already had buildings, many have received much needed upgrades. For example, Apple’s model of Chicago’s second tallest building now resembles the actual building:

Outside of large cities, it was surprising to see how many buildings and structures that Apple had captured but that Google hadn’t—such as the community college outside my hometown:

And numerous industrial and agricultural structures, such as this ethanol plant:

And scores of grain silos:

In some areas, Apple even captured shopping cart corrals:

But the results are more mixed with some of the other shapes Apple has been adding, such as baseball diamonds:

And in some areas, they weren’t captured at all, such as here:

And here:

To get a sense of how many baseball diamonds Apple was capturing, I tallied all of the baseball diamonds that Apple had digitized in every town within 15 miles of my hometown:

Of the 86 baseball diamonds visible on Apple’s satellite imagery in these thirty communities, Apple had digitized just over two-thirds of them.

Meanwhile, six of these towns have public, outdoor swimming pools. Apple captured the pools in half of them:

But missed the pools in the other half:

And in several of these towns, the new map is still missing green shapes for parks, such as here in Hennepin:

And here in Troy Grove:

But it was the opposite in my hometown. While the old map had shapes for just three of its parks, the new map added shapes for all ten of them:

As you can see above, my hometown looks much greener than it used to.

But surprisingly, the parts of my hometown that are the most green on the new map are the parts I least expected to be:

The area marked by the arrow above is my hometown’s primary commercial district—a mixture of parking lots, industrial parks, and big box stores along Interstate 80. It has far fewer trees than the rest of town:

But on Apple’s new map, it looks the same as the tree-covered state parks nearby:

This pattern repeats in Ottawa, the next town over from mine on Interstate 80. Once again, the town’s commercial district looks like a giant park:

And the same goes for the main commercial areas in Bloomington:

And many of the larger commercial areas in suburban Chicago:

What seems to be happening is that Apple is digitizing patches of grass in commercial and industrial areas—but deliberately not digitizing patches of grass around homes.

For example, back in my hometown, Apple has digitized the grass on this church’s west side—but not on the east side, where the church owns a house for the clergy:

This is also likely why much of Detroit is covered by “parks” on Apple’s new map:

Detroit’s city government has been demolishing abandoned homes—and Apple is digitizing the vacant lots as parks. But notice how carefully Apple avoids digitizing the yards of the homes still standing:

All of this is likely related to Apple’s privacy stance:

But for our purposes, it helps explain why Apple missed the parks in the towns we looked at earlier: because of the house-like structures inside of them (park shelters, etc.), Apple thinks that they’re private yards and didn’t create shapes for them:

I point all of this out—the missing parks, pools, and baseball diamonds—not to pick on Apple, but rather because none of this seems like an error a human editor would make. For instance, would a human editor miss a third of an area’s baseball diamonds?

Instead, all of this suggests that Apple’s mapmaking process is increasingly automated—much like Google’s.

Given the pace of Apple’s U.S. expansion, it seems that Apple’s initial map, which it had spent four years making (and had hints of human labor), served as a training set for the extraction algorithms that are now accelerating Apple’s mapmaking effort.

And if that’s the case, it explains why Apple still expects to cover the entire U.S. by year’s end, even though there’s 48.6% left to go...

Now that Apple’s new map covers more than half of the U.S...

...here’s what’s left:

In terms of area, Alaska covers a particularly large slice of what remains: