Spectro-photometric distances. Upper panel: distribution of stars in radial Galactocentric distance versus absolute distance from the plane. Black points depict the flag-culled sample selected from DR14 as described in the main text. The dashed vertical line and the shaded area depict the cuts used to select our likely bulge sample and the close-to-the-plane subselection, respectively. The hatched area highlights the region used to select a disk-comparison sample (Sect. 4.2). Lower panel: (l, b) distribution of the likely bulge (gray dots) and close-to-the-plane (red circles, with transparency to emphasize their concentration towards the center) samples.