New York's MetroCard Era Ends After 31 Years (financialpost.com) 62
After more than three decades of service, New York City's iconic MetroCard is about to retire, as December 31, 2025 marks the final day commuters can purchase or refill the gold-hued plastic cards that replaced subway tokens back in 1994. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been transitioning to OMNY, a contactless payment system introduced in 2019 that lets riders tap a credit card, phone or smart device at turnstiles.
More than 90% of subway and bus trips are now paid using the tap-and-go system, and the agency says the changeover saves at least $20 million annually in MetroCard-related costs. The new system also introduces automatic fare capping: riders get unlimited travel within a seven-day period after 12 paid rides, maxing out at $35 a week once fares rise to $3 in January. Riders who prefer not to link a credit card or phone can purchase reloadable OMNY cards.
Existing MetroCards will continue to work into 2026, allowing riders time to use up remaining balances. The MetroCard's arrival in 1994 was itself a significant shift from the brass tokens that had been in use since 1953. London and Singapore have long operated similar contactless systems; San Francisco launched its own tap-to-pay system earlier this year, joining Chicago and other U.S. cities.
More than 90% of subway and bus trips are now paid using the tap-and-go system, and the agency says the changeover saves at least $20 million annually in MetroCard-related costs. The new system also introduces automatic fare capping: riders get unlimited travel within a seven-day period after 12 paid rides, maxing out at $35 a week once fares rise to $3 in January. Riders who prefer not to link a credit card or phone can purchase reloadable OMNY cards.
Existing MetroCards will continue to work into 2026, allowing riders time to use up remaining balances. The MetroCard's arrival in 1994 was itself a significant shift from the brass tokens that had been in use since 1953. London and Singapore have long operated similar contactless systems; San Francisco launched its own tap-to-pay system earlier this year, joining Chicago and other U.S. cities.
bro (Score:1)
Free public transit policies have been tested in many other cities before. What happens is -- the buses and trains become rolling homeless shelters. If you have an actual job, paying $3 to get to work is not a problem. The minimum wage in NYC is $17 per hour, so most people make more than that. On top of that, by cutting funding to the system, the system gets worse. So for productive members of society - the changes are - you keep at the very most 20 minutes of your wages by not paying bus/train fare, howev
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Minimum wage is $17, might be able to afford a falafel a week while living in the sewers.
Livable wage is more along the lines of $80k and up.
Where was homelessness mentioned?
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Free public transit policies have been tested in many other cities before. What happens is -- the buses and trains become rolling homeless shelters
If that happens, then the buses and trains are being used that way out of necessity. It means that there either aren't shelters, or there are obstacles to using the shelters that make the buses and trains more functional as shelters than the designated shelters. Also, many homeless will use the buses and trains as shelters even if it does cost money.
As for places being used as toilets, the obvious problem there is the lack of actual toilets. This is not a problem just for the homeless. Most cities just don'
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Honestly, your bit at the end is basically just calling homeless people vermin, so I'm not sure why I am even responding to your disgusting post.
It's the usual issues. If you acknowledge that homeless people are actual people who have problems which can be partially or fully solved, then you need to work on the problems. If you think of them as vermin, then you can feel smugly superior while doing nothing (or making the problem worse). This is a common way for the religious to ignore their lord's teachings without feeling bad, though the religious are not the only ones who do this.
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You seemed to be confused. The goal is not to solve the problems of the homeless. The goal is to solve the problems caused by the homeless.
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I've been to cities before with free transit and I didn't see what you're describing. Maybe because these cities also had well funded programs to take care of homeless people so they weren't left to use public transit as their shelters.
Re: Wait (Score:2)
They got rid of tokens like 20 years ago in New York. It even made the newspapers when they took out the last coin slots and retired the revenue collection train.
Boston had contactless cards and mag stripe tickets for the nearly 20 years I've lived here. They're transitioning to credit-card nfc payments now.
DC never had tokens.
Philadelphia finally joined the 20th century and went fare-card only about 10 years ago.
I recall going to London on vacation In The Year 2000 and being taken somewhat aback by their m
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"will continue to work into 2026" (Score:2)
meaning - what - the cards will stop working after four or five more days?
Cards are still in play (Score:5, Informative)
Which is good for people who may visit NYC and not want to have another app they'll never use again clogging their phone or, more importantly, not worrying about your bank account getting whacked when someone breaks into the system.
MetroCards were nice because if you were visiting for the day you could buy one with cash, use it, and either keep it as a memento or throw it away. They fit easily anywhere you could put a credit card and since they were so thin, no one knew if you had one. They were, in essence, a form of multipass [giphy.com].
Oh well, time marches on.
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Actually it threw me off the first time I went back to NYC when they had switched over is that there is no app (at least not yet), it just uses the card from your Android/Apple Wallet.
Re: Cards are still in play (Score:2)
I just tap my actual credit card on it
Linked accounts everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to drive around LA for work a couple months ago, and finding somewhere to park without preinstalling some application I didn't know I'd need was a hassle.
Those applications are also generally super invasive, scraping every bit of data they can. (This bothers me less than it used to; I use a relatively blank phone when traveling now.)
I do not wish to enter into a relationship with your corporation, I need a fucking two hour parking spot.
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That's why they take contactless cards..
Tap your existing credit/debit card on the reader and off you go.
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The downside for tourists is that they can get hit with currency conversion fees. Worst case it is a flat rate on every transaction.
That's one reason why I keep my Suica card for Japanese transport, even though Visa tap to ride is coming in now. Annoyingly I can't use it on my phone because although the hardware is capable, Sony charges a licence fee to enable the specific protocol they use (Felica).
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What alternatives would you suggest for tourists to avoid currency conversion fees?
There are plenty of cards out there that pass on the visa/mastercard/amex rate without adding any extra fees. If you change cash you'll almost always be getting a much worse rate than this, not to mention the extra cost of being stuck with leftover change when you leave.
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Buy a transport card with a single transaction.
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That only makes sense if you have a card which charges a per transaction fee. Most of them charge a percentage so you wouldn't save anything.
Plus most of these tap to travel services will calculate a daily charge rather than an individual charge every time you enter.
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I do not wish to enter into a relationship with your corporation, I need a fucking two hour parking spot.
Even better, that relationship with the corporation includes a contract of adhesion that can have an arbitrary number of pages of terms for you to agree with. So, to park for those two hours, you can be giving up tons of rights, including your constitutional right to sue, probably in perpetuity and not just for matters related to that parking spot. Thanks Judge Easterbrook.
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I do not wish to enter into a relationship with your corporation, I need a fucking two hour parking spot.
Perhaps we consumers should make it very personal too.
Register yourself as HRM Asshole McFuckface and insist on signing up for ALL of their communications channels. Then sue them for emotional distress when they send you horrifically offensive correspondence that includes foul language.
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So... they got rid of one card to replace it with an app or another card... Genius!!!
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Full information can be found at the OMNY web site [omny.info].
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I think you missed the point.
Why not just accept Metrocards via OMNY?
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What's the difference between the two, beyond the piles of garbage that the junked MetroCards create?
Re: Cards are still in play (Score:2)
Mainly because metrocards are magstripe, which require swiping them through a reader, mechanical wear and tear on things, and there has to be a big complicated mechanical contraption to issue new ones all the time and the old ones get thrown out. Keeping the MetroCards active requires two sets of vending machines and two sets of readers at every turnstile.
The OMNY system is contactless. It works with NFC credit cards. It works with Apple or Google Wallet. You can buy a preloaded card if you like. Once yo
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One potential issue (curious about solution) (Score:3)
I took my son to London and had a great time using the Underground and the bus system. Paying with contactless credit card was very convenient. And the payment cap per day was nice. But I was left wondering about one potential issue.
What do you do if one of you doesn't have a credit card or smart device/phone with payment system? Fortunately, I had two credit cards (we didn't have a data plan in London). So no real problem for us. It still left me wondering what would people do if they a payment method for each person? i.e what if you are riding more than a few times and hit the payment cap due to swiping multiple times per ride. Seems like either a chance to be accused of fraud. Or actual fraud.
What would happen to, say, a class field trip visiting NYC? I'm genuinely curious what people do in those edge cases.
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But they generally don't travel without adults accompanying them, and those adults tend to have credit cards.
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But the great-grandparent to your post specifically mentioned a situation where the number of uses of the same card per day for fares is capped. They did not mention what the cap is exactly and probably you won't hit it with yourself, your partner (who may be on a joint card with therefore a shared cap) and a couple of kids. What if you have five kids though, or seven? Or, what if, as that poster mentioned, you are transporting a field trip? In other words, like that poster mentioned, what about the edge ca
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Edge cases are handled by ... wait for it ... a ticket machine. There is this American fascination that everything is an either-or problem. That you can have contactless cards or tickets, but not both, that you can have socialised or private healthcare but not both, that you can either fund or defund the police, that you can either pass or not pass critical legislation as opposed to amend it, that the world is card or cash and there's some evil conspiracy to make it exclusively one or the other.
In reality t
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All that is what you would expect, and your answer is a fine answer to the original poster. My post though, was in response to Bert64 and was to remind them of what the original poster was actually asking. I personally have not been to London in forever.
Re: One potential issue (curious about solution) (Score:2)
Field trips usually pay in bulk at the window or have some other bulk arrangement
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Re:One potential issue (curious about solution) (Score:5, Informative)
What do you do if one of you doesn't have a credit card or smart device/phone with payment system?
Kids in NYC get their own bus/train passes issued by the school. Also if you are a teacher in NYC you have ID, you can show the station agent and they let you all through or you can even get a form for your trip and schedule it so someone can meet you.
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All well and good, but I was thinking about field trips from schools outside NYC. But as other posts note, it's possible to buy an Oyster card in London. I assume NYC will have a similar scheme.
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Yes they have an application for schools to plan trips since there are always schools visiting the city, New Jersey alone probably does hundreds per year.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/... [nyc.gov]
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https://omny.info/omny-card [omny.info] The oystercard equivalent exists.
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What do you do if one of you doesn't have a credit card or smart device/phone with payment system?
In London, you buy an oyster card and top it up with cash in various different places.
Re: One potential issue (curious about solution) (Score:2)
Cash in some places but not in the stations, you have to top up oyster using a bank card somewhat ironically.
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A) You can use the same payment method for up to four people without further intervention, just tap for each in turn.
B) You wouldn't use this for the class field trip example, but for other cases you get a reloadable OMNY card: https://omny.info/omny-card [omny.info]
This is also useful if you want to pay cash, or if you get a transit benefit from your employer that isn't via a contactless card, etc.
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What do you do if one of you doesn't have a credit card or smart device/phone with payment system?
This is an American problem. The kind of problem you get when you consider every problem as having two opposing solutions. In reality the answer to your question is "nothing". Nothing has changed with the introduction to contactless payments. You can still buy an Oyster card, you can still top it up and use it for trains in London. In NYC you will also be able to use an OMNY card.
This is something you can get as a tourist too. If you didn't have two credit cards, just go to a ticket machine. This isn't an e
The best thing about metrocards was... (Score:2)
"Swipe Again at This Turnstile"
(real heads know what I'm talking about)
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??
Never been anywhere that used a MetroCard (our local metro bus just switched to cards or cash a couple years ago).
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Enter 'the bend' (as it was commonly called). A manner in which one could fold the metroc
Re: The best thing about metrocards was... (Score:2)
Aye, that was indeed a nice feature and will be sorely missed.
I don't always pay for transit, but when I do, (Score:2)
I prefer paying with Federal Reserve Notes.
When the seller avoids debt (Score:3)
When the seller requires payment before providing a product or service, there's no debt and therefore no opportunity for "legal tender" to apply.
No need to "link" a credit card... (Score:2)
No need to "link" a credit card; just tap any card at the turnstile and you're in. If you're riding enough to hit the fare cap, be sure to use the same card every time; they track usage by credit card number.
Omny is shit (Score:2)
You know what Metrocard could do that Omny can't? Charge my commuter benefit Visa card -- you know, the one that lets you use pre-tax money to pay for the commute? I could buy Metrocard with it. Omny won't accept it. Of course when I call them they refer me to the issuer, who refers me back to Omny. Since it worked with Metrocard and it works with other transit systems, I'm pretty sure the problem is with Omny, but they don't give a shit.