When the MTA announced its Doomsday Budget over the winter, most observers did not believe the authority would actually go through with the plan. While Albany dillied and dallied its way to a half-baked solution, New York’s transit advocates were skeptical that the MTA would cut service and bolster fares by 25 percent. Even isolated Albany politicos politicians aren’t immune to that much of a transportation disaster.
Despite our guarded optimism, a popular map-making company was not so confident. Streetwise, the publishers of the ubiquitous laminated fold-out maps, printed their 2009 New York City edition with the Doomsday cuts in place, amNew York’s Heather Haddon reported this morning. The map has no W or Z trains and features now-wrong subway information. The company sent the map to the printers earlier this year while Albany was still hammering out a solution, and a spokesperson claimed including the cuts “wasn’t an easy decision to make.”
While future editions of this map will feature the proper New York City transit information, the Florida-based company has no plans to recall the incorrect maps. For transit buffs, this is something of a collector’s item. For those relying on the map — and the tourists in particular — this misprint will just lead to more underground confusion.
9 comments
Well, these maps will hardly be any more or less accurate than many of the others out there in circulation. For a city with an all but frozen network, the service patterns on that frozen network change with an alarming frequency–and are notoriously difficult to understand, let alone map with perfect accuracy.
No matter what, they’ll always ask “Does this train stop at 42nd Street?”
In the other direction, I always thought it’d be a fun prank to distribute maps of New York City Transit with a few extra lines, and then watch tourists try to go to Second Avenue to catch the T.
I want to walk up to a transit employee and ask where I can catch the QJ or AA train, just to see what kind of reaction I get.
Probably the same response as if you asked for the J or C train.
Ha ha ha!
Haha I don’t think its going to lead to a lot of tourists confusion… Seriously how many out of towners are taking the W or Z? Or for that matter the J or M? I’ve lived in the city my whole life and I’ve only taken them maybe twice.
This reminds me of an incident that was reported in the newspapers in the summer of 1980.
Some kind of encyclopedic dictionary had just come out, and in a table of Presidents of the United States, it listed Ronald Reagan as the 40th President.
The trouble was, the election was not until November 1980, which at that time was still in the future!
Whichever company was the publisher explained that they had originally assumed that the book would not come out until early 1981, and that the project had simply gone faster than had been anticipated.
But, imagine if their prediction had been wrong!
The incident concerning that map demonstrates that it is very bad judgement to publish information which may or may not be correct, depending on the outcome of events that will take place in the near future.
I just want to share this thought with my fellow New Yorkers:
Today was what I call a “triple-crown” day in New York baseball.
Mets win, Yankees win, and Boston loses!