For as long as I can remember, the key time for a Metrocard has always involved 18 minutes. The cards, the MTA has long said, cannot be used on the same bus route or at the same subway station for 18 minutes. It’s a delay long enough to frustrate the average straphanging family looking to take advantage of an unlimited ride card, but it hasn’t stymied scammers.

Those who sell swipes have long been a thorn in the MTA’s side. We’ve all seen the folks who stand in station agent-less entrances offering to sell swipes for less than the cost of a ride. Some of them are more menacing than others, and some will go so far to jam up Metrocard Vending Machines to make sure their scams are the only ways into the subway system. I’ve seen them at some of the more desolate entrances to the Columbus Circle station, and they are positioned all over.

For years, the MTA has tried to cut down on these scammers. Summonses are ineffective, and arrests are just temporary setbacks. With only an 18-minute gap between swipes, these scammers can buy multiple Metrocards and simply swipe through the pack until the time is up. Now, the MTA is upping the fight against scammers in an effort to capture more money. As Pete Donohue noted in The Daily News, the authority has quietly upped the swipe time at a few stations and is generally being more aggressive in combating those who are using the same card multiple times at one station.

Donohue writes:

In the test program, the MTA targeted 28 stations where MetroCard records indicate high rates of fraud. Turnstiles were tweaked to reject a time-based card that had been used in the same station in the previous 36, 48 or 60 minutes. For decades, the lockout time has been 18 minutes, but that’s easily skirted by rotating through a series of cards.

The MTA’s theory: increase the lockout time and a scammer needs more MetroCards to make the investment in time or money worth it. “We know the police are out there doing everything they can to address this problem,” MTA spokesman Charles Seaton said. “We think we can do some things internally to make this kind of fraud less financially attractive.”

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign has some concerns about the plan. “It’s OK to make things harder for illegal swipers with longer blackout periods,” he said. “But transit officials have got to balance that against the mobility of the rest of us, such as when we’ve forgotten something at the office and have to reenter a station. We are New Yorkers and we are always in a hurry.”

As a frequent swiper, I am having a tough time finding too much fault with his idea. While Russianoff is right to raise a concern, do legitimate subway riders swipe in more than once in an hour at the same station? The only time I could imagine doing so is if I swipe in, realize I’ve forgotten something and then have to return home to pick it up. Even then, I could still journey a few extra blocks to enter at a different station.

The MTA has often proclaimed loses due to Metrocard scams in excess of $20 million. That’s enough to save some bus routes or avoid a future service cut. While no business can reduce its bleed rate to nothing, a 60-minute time limit at the same station seems perfectly reasonable to me as the familiar yellow-and-blue fare payment system lives out its last years. Once the Metrocard vanishes, I wonder what future scams will resemble.

I wish the NYC turnstiles were programmed to display expiration dates for Unlimited MetroCard.

— Second Ave. Sagas (@SecondAveSagas) March 24, 2012

Are you following me on Twitter? If not, you can do so right here. The limits of the MTA’s fare payment technology may be obvious, but don’t let that stop you from exploring various ways to consume Second Ave. Sagas. (And for those wondering, the card expired on Sunday night.)

As part of the MTA's public information campaign, MetroCard Vending Machines will soon be programmed with the above screen saver.

Every 30 days, I, like nearly 33 percent of subway riders, purchase a brand new MetroCard. My unlimited ride card is good for a month, but unless I have an EasyPayXpress card, at the end of 30 days, I have to discard my well-loved MetroCard and purchase a new one. Starting February 1, though, no longer will we have to go through the practice of wasting plastic as the MTA will be introducing the ability to refill unlimited ride cards.

While at Grand Army Plaza this morning for my silver chariot to whisk me away toward Manhattan, my eyes happened upon a new poster. “New!” the sign said, “7-day and 30-day Unlimited Ride MetroCards can now be refilled.” As with pay-per-ride cards, a straphanger can use his or her unlimited ride card over and over again until the magnetic strip wears out or until the expiration date on the back. So how does it work?

Beginning next Wednesday, the unlimited ride cards come with a twist: You can essentially store an extra month on them. Any time after you begin to use an unlimited ride card, you have the option to purchase a refill, but that refill must be for the same time period. In other words, you can refill a 7-day card only with another 7-day period, and you can refill a 30-day card with only another 30-day card. You also do not need to wait until your current time period is over to refill the card as each card will store one refill at a time.

For those folks wary of keeping two months on one card — no one wants to misplace $208 in transit rides — you can also refill it after the expiration of your 7- or 30-day period as long as the card hasn’t reached its ultimate expiration date. According to Transit, the new refill option is “part of our continuing effort to provide customers with new options and added conveniences for paying fares.”

In a sense, this move has been a long-awaited one. Since the MTA announced plans to institute a $1 surcharge for all new MetroCard purchases, the authority had to adapt its system to allow for refillable unlimited ride cards. Despite the February 1 launch date, though, the MTA’s plan to institute such a surcharge will not be implemented until 2013. Still, for riders wary of going through 12 or more cards a year, this new option is both convenient and environmentally friendly. As I figure it, the MTA should save some money on fare collection costs as well as the refill option should reduce the number of cards they need to stock.

For more information, Transit says brochures are available at subway stations near you. After the jump, a glimpse at the poster I saw this morning. Read More→

The MetroCard Vending Machines offer refills in even dollar amounts but not in rides.

Earlier this year, an enterprising if law-breaking New Yorker made headlines when he claimed to make $20,000 off of discarded MetroCards. The first part of John Jones’ scheme is perfectly legal; the second part is not. Either way, the story, in a roundabout way, highlights a problem I’ve had with the MTA’s MetroCard Vending Machines.

In a nutshell, Jones took to the extreme what many of us do on a whim. He collects every discarded MetroCard he can find, and generally, many of them have odd amounts of cash left. Since the new $2.25 base fare went into effect with bonuses set to seven percent on purchases of $10 and above, straphangers in a rush don’t wait to work out the proper discount. They’ll fill up their cards with $20, receive an extra $1.40 and call it a day. When the card runs low, those who are unaware that they can refill it or simply do not care will discard the leftover change.

Jones collects those cards and combines them — a perfectly legal maneuver — and then he tries to sell them to those in need of a quick fare card. That’s the shady part, and it’s against the law. He’s been arrested a few times, but that hasn’t deterred him. “I’m surprised that people just toss money away,” he said to The Post.

I don’t condone Jones’ third step, but I know plenty of people who are aggressive in their pursuits of discarded fare cards. One SubChatter collected over $520 last year in unused MetroCards, and the MTA itself claims around $50-$60 million annually in unused cards. It’s not a problem so much as it is a fact of life. We lose things; we forget how much we had on our MetroCards; we leave the city, never to return, with an unused MetroCard tucked into a drawer somewhere.

The bigger issue though is one of design. As the screenshot atop this post — from days bygone — shows, the MetroCard Vending Machines aren’t programmed to be too user-friendly. When we refill our fare cards, we’re not buying rides. Rather, we’re just sticking cash on a card with a magnetic strip. There never has been an attempt to associate rides with the amount we’re paying. Instead of pre-selecting a card with a certain number of swipes on it, you have to know ahead of time that adding $39.95 to an empty card will get you, with the bonus, $42.75 or 19 rides even.

The MTA has no incentive to offer such a user-friendly interface because then cards will zero out more often. Maybe when or if the authority finally gets around to implementing that $1 surcharge on new cards in 2013, straphangers will become more aware of their leftover dimes and nickels. For now, though, the math-minded among us will know what to do while the rest of us can use bonus calculators or just keep slapping on $20 until the fare evens out. We discard pennies with little notice. What’s a few more cents on an nearly empty MetroCard anyway?

As New York problems go, having a few remaining cents on your pay-per-ride MetroCard but not enough for another swipe isn’t a particularly pressing one. It’s really simple to add enough for another ride, ask the station agent (if you can find one) to combine cards or seek out a MetroCard calculator (or two) for some pre-purchase math.

Yet, New Yorkers are too harried to find these solutions. One intrepid Subchatter has been collecting discarded MetroCards this year, and as of this week, he’s well over $560 in found money. His post from a few weeks ago provides a snapshot into his findings. With fares set to $2.25 and bonuses at 7 percent, New Yorkers would rather just give up on the nickels and dimes than deal with the math.

But what if they could donate their dollars? Three NYU students have put together a little project called MetroChange. Here’s their explanation:

MetroChange takes this value and puts it to good use, before cards are discarded. Swipe your MetroCard at a MetroChange kiosk; the value on the card is transferred to a central fund. This fund is donated to a charity once per month. The physical card is taken for recycling.

Their current site hosts the video above, and their blog contains numerous photos of their prototypes. The MTA has not embraced the proposal as tt would, after all, somehow involve reallocating money from someone — the straphangers who discard it or the MTA — and giving it to charity. “Though it sounds like a good cause, unfortunately the MTA is in no position to give millions of dollars to charity,” the authority said in a statement. “We encourage riders to reload their MetroCards.”

I’m trying to decide if it’s a solution to something that isn’t a problem or an inventive way to give to charity. Either way, it’s certainly creative.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood, over 40 percent of commuters use a 30 day unlimited ride MetroCard. That figure is well above average. (Source: WSJ)

Over the past few months, as my schedule has allowed for it, I’ve spent some time poking around inside the MTA’s datasets. I’ve explored turnstile numbers along the L train in Brooklyn, and I’ve looked at glimpses of exit and entry data at various times of the day. If I had the time and coding skills, I would have explored the fare media breakdown across the system. Luckily, The Wall Street Journal has seemingly done it for me (and you and anyone else who gets lost in data about the subway).

The visualization — available right here in its interactive glory — is a near-textbook use for governmental datasets. Two Journal reporters have provided an unprecedented snapshot into the way we pay. They’ve broken down MetroCard use — pay-per-ride, senior fares, 30- and 7-day Unlimited swipes — by station over time periods both before and after the December 2010 fare hike. It’s quite the glimpse into ridership patterns.

In an accompanying article, Andrew Grossman and Albert Sun discuss their methodology and findings. Essentially, they mapped a few different variables. First, they categorized every MetroCard swipe by type of card. Second, they looked at changes in use during the 27 non-holidays before and the 27 non-holiday days after the December 30th fare increase. They explained some highlights of their findings:

Users of 30-day unlimited MetroCards tend to be wealthier than those who pay per ride, MTA surveys show. Their growing use in neighborhoods such as Greenpoint (up 11.8%) and Bushwick (16.7%) in Brooklyn could point to gentrification under way there. The monthly MetroCard use in those areas came despite a Dec. 30 fare hike pushing the cost from $89 to $104.

The fare hike appears to have hit other neighborhoods harder. In Broad Channel, Queens, about an hour from Midtown Manhattan by subway, use of monthly passes dropped 15.5%. Riders said they had stopped buying it because of the cost. “You are paying more per month if you are only using it going back and forth to work,” said Teri Bautz, a Verizon worker who rides the A train to Manhattan from Broad Channel. “Some months, you have an entire week off. In the beginning it was beneficial, now, not so much.”

According to recent MTA data, overall use of the 30-day card is now around 31 percent. Before the fare hikes, around 33 percent of straphangers used a monthly unlimited. But if anything, the decrease represents a market correction. As I explored last October, MTA demographics surveys revealed that 25 percent of 30-day card users did not reach the break-even point. At the time, that point came on the 46th swipe. When the MTA raised fares, the break-even point for the $104 card moved to 50 rides, and in October 2009, 36 percent of 30-day card users did not reach 50 swipes.

Similarly, Grossman and Sun found that seven-day card use has increased. Although few riders used the 14-day card, it’s likely that many of them switched to the seven-day card either because use patterns or personal economics dictated the expense. Furthermore, some 30-day card users who couldn’t afford to pay $104 at once for a MetroCard likely downgraded to a seven-day card as well. They may pay more over the course of four weeks, but the seven-day purchases allow them greater flexibility for start dates. Still, in 2009, nearly 36 percent of seven-day card users never reached the break-even point (as compared with a pay-per-ride discount), and that trend likely continues today.

Anyway, the map is fascinating. It’s broken down into neighborhoods based upon the areas surrounding the closest subway stops, and the data is tremendous. We can see across-the-board increases in the use of pay-per-ride cards after the fare hikes. In fact, the only stations that didn’t enjoy such an increase were closed due to construction work. The use of 30-day cards declined in the city’s less well-off areas, and seven-day cards rose in popularity at nearly every subway stop after the fare hike.

Over the next few weeks, I’d love to spend some more time with the data. It seems, for instance, that MetroCard purchases break down across socio-economic lines as well as neighborhood and borough, and the data could raise some interesting questions concerning the MTA’s pricing schemes. For now, just enjoy the visualization. It’s a great example of the creativity that can emerge from open data.