If you visit downtown Toronto at lunch hour in February, you may think that there's been a zombie apocalypse; almost no one is out on the street. It's not zombies; they're all 20 feet underground in Toronto's sprawling PATH network.
The PATH is a godsend in a winter city like Toronto (and it's good for hot, steamy summer days too), but it's huge and everything looks pretty much like everything else–a giant shopping mall built by a hundred different landlords. It's easy to get lost, especially if you don't come downtown often. I worked in downtown Toronto for more than thirty years and have gotten lost a few times, especially when trying to navigate to a new building.
A couple of years ago the PATH organization started updating their map (PDF link), which is posted all over the PATH. It's a big improvement over the previous version. But it's not interactive.
That need is served by a new third-party app, Pathmap, available for both IOS and Android. The app shows similar information to the offiical map, but it's searchable in that you can enter starting and ending points and see the route you have to take. You can either select the from and to points on the map or search for the name of a building or business.
The app has some rough edges–I found searching to be unreliable when trying to find a business. The basic navigation works well enough. What would be handy would be a link to a list of businesses and buildings, something like that in the PDF of the official PATH map.
I will be keeping this on my phone. It's a handy tool for getting around downtown Toronto.
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