TfL Journey Planner oddities

[Hophead]

Picking up on a comment in London Underground, but placing here, as probably a more general thread....

Entering a journey from Gunnersbury to St. Mary Cray [link valid at time of posting] for an afternoon some days hence, I can get a 65-minute journey time, which sounds right, using the District Line & Southeastern. So far, so logical. The interchange between the two however is somewhere called "Elephant Park". I know London reasonably well and I have to admit to being stumped. Fortunately, the times do correspond with an interchange at Victoria, which I know only too well.

So, before I try a few more journeys to see what other bizarre locations I get presented with, has anybody else seen mystery locations like "Elephant Park"?

 

[Dai Corner]

At a guess it's the journey planner equivalent of the non-existent places cartographers put in maps to protect their copyright. Sometimes called Easter Eggs.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs

It will be interesting to see what others people find.

 

[essexjohn]

I entered a journey starting at "elephant park". Journey planner accepted this and it does indeed seem equivalent to Victoria.

 

[CatfordCat]

I've just had a play with this, and it's showing Elephant Park specifically as the junction of Buckingham Palace Road and Eccleston Street.

I can find references to some of the new residential development at Elephant and Castle being marketed as 'Elephant Park'

I'm more inclined to think someone has blundered.

 

[Busaholic]

I've just had a play with this, and it's showing Elephant Park specifically as the junction of Buckingham Palace Road and Eccleston Street.

I can find references to some of the new residential development at Elephant and Castle being marketed as 'Elephant Park'

I'm more inclined to think someone has blundered.

Sounds like London Zoo, notoriously unserved by rail transport!

 

[Dai Corner]

I planned a walk to Elephant Park (from London Bridge) and it gave a destination on Vauxhall Bridge Road, the opposite side of Victoria station to Buckingham Palace Road.

 

[Hophead]

Elephant Park is in the type-ahead list and shows a bus symbol. A journey from Elephant Park to Vauxhall Bridge Road starts at Victoria's Victoria line station. The journey planner is unable to offer a journey from Elephant Park to Victoria.

All very weird. I'd suggest that some test data has escaped into the wild.

Has anybody uncovered any other made-up locations? None of Rhinos, Hippos and Tigers seem to be present.

 

[Busaholic]

When the A-Z street mapping company found that their original work was getting copied by other companies, they introduced a non-existent street in London to their mapping, and gave it a name. From memory, it was a side street in the Borough area of S.E. London, and it formed the basis of claims of plagiarism against other publishing companies.

Similarly, and again before the age of the internet, Film Guides became a nice little earner, Halliwell's being the best known, and many jumped in on the act. TV Times was one such, claiming to offer original research and comments, but a competitor thought it was copying info from theirs, so they set a trap, these guides being produced annually, and invented an entirely fictitious film which somehow kept below the radar because, lo and behold, the next edition of the TV Times included it! That one went to court, cost TV Times a lot and saw an end to that particular guide.

Could any of this be a similar thing?

 

[jopsuk]

Trap streets are quite common on maps (or trap towns, etc) but this does seem quite a serious mistake as it seems in some circumstances to simply replace Victoria.

 

[PeterC]

I don't know if it is a mistake or a trap street but the transition of the street where I spent the first 3 years of my life to the one with which it has an end on junction is moved in the AtoZ. I once spent ages trying to work out where the house was until I spotted an unblurred name plate on GSV and realised what they had done.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Trap streets are quite common on maps (or trap towns, etc) but this does seem quite a serious mistake as it seems in some circumstances to simply replace Victoria.

I'd agree. This looks more like a genuine mistake to me. If you were going to put in the equivalent of a trap street, you wouldn't put it somewhere where it's going to potentially confuse a lot of people (which would also make it very easily discoverable).

Besides, the TfL journey planner isn't like a book that has all the info in one place - it's impossible to copy the data in it because of the dynamic nature of the data and the way you only get a tiny bit of data with each query. So why would you put a 'trap street' in it anyway? Perhaps you'd want to trap any 3rd party journey planner app that works by forwarding journey requests to the TfL website, but I'm fairly sure all the data available on the online journey planner is available free of charge via APIs anyway, so it'd be pointless writing an app in that way. To my mind this all points to genuine mistake.

 

[Hophead]

I wonder if there's been a mistake in entering the data for a new development near Elephant & Castle? The TfL Digital Blog entry for 4th January lists 5 new entries for Elephant Park, so they clearly want it to be there, but it seems unlikely that it should substitute for Victoria Station.

 

[Clip]

This also got picked up by Timeout too.

 

[Hophead]

The Standard have picked up on this now. Not from perusing the forum but the modern journalistic practice of trawling Twitter to see what they can find.

Londoners were left puzzled after Transport for London’s journey planner appeared to rename Victoria station to Elephant Park.
Commuters using the online planner to map out their journeys were left baffled after it tried to direct them to a station they had never heard of.
Scores of confused passengers noticed the glitch and questioned what was going on.
Travellers first began tweeting about the bug in the route planner on January 11 and it appears to have been causing confusion since then
In a similar glitch, the journey planner has renamed Alexandra Palace rail station to Palace Gates Road....

It's an error, apparently, which will be fixed.