October 2008 Map - Zones missing

Here are the missing links to photos of the zoneless Tube maps on Flickr:

www.flickr.com/photos/31597203@N02/2992389998/
www.flickr.com/photos/31597203@N02/2991533987/
www.flickr.com/photos/31597203@N02/2991547543/

Is there a flat-fare future on the horizon?

(Is there ****!)

I grabbed at least 10 - all with this error. I did get a few random looks when I was tearing my way through the pile of maps trying to find ones with mistakes!

Looking at that image, there are other printing errors as well - where the Overground and Bakerloo lines cross the river, the blue lines that mark the edge of the river continue through the tube/rail line. This does not affect the District, DLR, Northern, Jubilee or Victoria Lines - see south of Gunnersbury for example.

In some (but not all) places where lines cross other than at stations, one line does not break but both continue above each other. This happens at e.g. Paddington, Baker Street and south of St John's Wood. The crossings at Wood Lane, Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf a fine.
Very oddly, the Northern line goes under the District but over the Circle west of Monument and at Embankment. Between Warren Street and KXSP the Vic Line goes under the met over the H&C and merges with the Circle making a short bit of green.

This suggests that rather than layers being deleted, that they're in the wrong order.

Funny thing is, when LT was looking into fare restructuring in the 60's 70's, zonal systems were the first idea to be thrown out.

Must be mixed in with other batches, seems to be mainly in outer London. I can't get to London until Tuesday next week, so fingers crossed to grab a few more.

I don't use Illustrator myself, I can't stand the thing, but for all the other vector packages I use, its virtually impossible to accidently screw up the order of the layers.

There is some seriously weird stuff going on here. What normally happens when something gets printed is that different vector objects 'knock out' objects behind them. In other words, where Piccadilly goes over Central at Acton, it doesn't print blue on red (making purple) it leaves a white gap in the red. Layers won't make any difference to this. If red went over blue, there would be a gap in the blue.

Usually, four-colour process printing is set to 'overprint the black', solid black, not half-tones, is printed on top of everything, leaving no gaps in the event of poor registration. You can see this on a station poster at the interchange rings, where the black is a little bit darker because it has some extra colour underneath from the lines.

On this map, blue seems to have been set to overprint (except where it meets black), but not just the LT corporate blue (pocket maps are printed in five colours, station posters in eight) but the Cyan is also overprinting, but with tints as well as pure cyan (except where it hits the Met). Black tints seem to be overprinting too, explaining where the zones have gone.

You usually specify general overprinting, it is not a default option except for pure black. You can also specify individual objects to overprint, but looking at the Surface Lines between Euston and Kings Cross, its hard to work out what has happened. The Victoria Line has overprinted the H&C and Circle, The Piccadilly Line has overprinted the Met & Circle. I can't imagine a single error creating behaviour like this.

In other words, either LS London got a chimpanzee in to play about with the overprint settings at random, or else a corrupted file or software incompatibility has created the bizarre behaviour.

Its been a bad year for map mistakes, what is going on?

Do you mean that the correctly printed map has mistakes too?

Lets have them then!

There has been a reasonably big gap between this map and the previous one. Part of the problem might be that LS London has been taken over by a company called Pulse Creative. This corresponds pretty well to when maps started appearing with glaring mistakes on them (e.g. interchange ring at Notting Hill vanished, warning daggers at Chancery Lane and Pinner not explained).

Its almost as thogh the people concerned want the Evening Standard to write a piece on how incompetent they have become.

Definitely red on the pdf.

2 to 6 absolutely not errors. Its of no purpose to show this information, not useful to the user in any way. Indeed for perceptual reasons, there are very good reasons for showing quite a few of these 'wrong'. Take a look at

privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/underground/mythset/12geography.html

Although it is unlikely that these were shown in this way on the map for sound reasons.

I think i am starting to understand and agree with mackenzieblu's point.

Taking the Line that I know, looking around Fulham Broadway, West Kensington/Barons Court there are several "errors" as to which Line crosses which and where!
No consistency!

I agree, although there should be some local consistency, e.g. the NLL and Goblin either side of Kentish Town should both either go under or over the Northern Line.

Cetacean; you'd be suprised at that. Max has even commented on this very point on his website. As far as Ive seen in pdf editions, it stretches as far as making the lines at interchange stations be in the correct vertical order. For example, behind the interchange blob at Oxo Circus.

Rogue map now spotted at Wood Lane. Plenty of copies still left at Highbury.

Looking at the racks, there is no pattern, dud maps can be found at back, middle, and front, in blocks of six or so. I can't imagine station staff refilling racks six at a go from two different boxes of maps, and so I wonder whether the boxes contain a mixture of good/bad maps and the station staff have not been alerted to watch out for this.

Any station staff glancing at this? Has there been a general announcement: look out for dud maps/throw away boxes marked with such and such batch number? If you did get instructions, did you get anything similar for the March map, where the original had only minor mistakes, but apparently a new edition was printed.