Ever lose your Metrocard in the deep recesses of your apartment only to find it 10 months later long after its expiration date? Better yet, did you even know that your Metrocard, your pay-per-ride Metrocard, has an expiration date?
Well, they do, and the MTA seems to profit off of them. According to news reports, consumers lose about $600,000 annually to lost Metrocards (NY1’s report of a lost $18 million seems gratuitously wrong to me.) Now, the MTA is planning to extend the expiration date on the Metrocards by over a year. The Staten Island Advance had more earlier this week:
Expired MetroCards got a new lease on life yesterday, with subway and bus riders offered an extra year to cash in on any unused funds. Now, transit riders will have a total of two years after their cards expire to mail in the old cards and get the value transferred to new ones…
“One of the biggest customer complaints is that our riders lose money when they misplace a MetroCard and don’t find it in time to transfer funds to a new card,” Roberts said.
With the MTA’s not-so-recent move to insure 30-day unlimited-ride Metrocards purchased with a credit card and this move to give straphangers an extra year to use their pay-per-ride cards, the MTA is actually becoming more consumer friendly. This move comes at a minimal cost to the Authority, and while you won’t be able to use those 10-year-old Blue Metrocards you have sitting around the house, at least the gold ones will be good well past the next fare hike.
Now if only they would stop saying that express service on the F can’t happen before 2012.
3 comments
The blue MetroCards are from ten years ago?? Wow. I wish I had kept one, I miss those guys. And while I did know that my MetroCards have an expiration date, I was not aware that you can mail an expired one in and get the funds transferred.
That would rock. It won’t affect me much anymore, but when I was living in Alaska, every time I’d visit home I’d have to buy a new Metrocard because the one from my last visit had expired. I did waste a lot of money that way.
METROCARDS should NEVER EXPIRE, and an act of congress or the state legislature should make sure of that.
I can understand phonecards or other totally private enterprises writing their own self-serving rules, but this is a publicly-funded, quasi-government agency – and in the same way I believe that lottery tickets should remain valid and cashable, the “life” of a Metrocard seems equivalent to the life of the $20 bill used to purchase it – that bill can be tendered forever.
Does the MTA depend on these card losses/expirations to cover line-items in their budget? Whether it’s one-year, two-years or ten, penalizing the riding public for its inability to use cash for conveyance is just wrong. That the MTA is being lauded for this recent “extension” act is simply ludicrous.