In April 2003, the MTA ended a 50-year era. For five decades, New Yorkers had to load up their wallets and pockets with tokens if they planned to spend a day out on the town, but on a mid-April day seven years ago, the agency ceded ground to the MetroCard and ceased token sales. It was a death nearly a decade in the making and seemed to represent the death knell for something straphangers had come to love and hate.
There’s only one hitch in this plan to phase out tokens: They won’t go away. In amNew York yesterday, Heather Haddon focused on life after death for the token, and this once-ubiquitous piece of New York life is still kicking. From refunds to jewelry, tokens live on.
By way of framing the story, Haddon spoke with Ward Wallau, head of a California-based company that turns tokens into collectibles. She writes:
Last year, straphangers turned in 27,000 tokens to NYC Transit, up 13 percent from the year before. Those who redeem the predominantly brass discs receive what they were worth when decommissioned, from 20 cents to $4 for express bus tokens.
About 12 million tokens are still out there, with some straphangers known to hoard the coins in the event of a fare hike. Last year, the MTA got back more than 1,000 of the 20-cent token, which haven’t been used since 1970, according to agency figures. “It’s something everybody had to use. It was like the, ‘I belong to New York City badge,’” said coin expert George Cuhaj.
Wallau has tapped into the MTA’s mountain of old tokens, which are stored in a Queens warehouse. Since 1991, he has bought the tokens in bulk at a 40 percent discount to turn into jewelry, with the MTA pocketing about $35,000 a year from the deal, a spokesman said.
I’m struck by the first item in Haddon’s piece. At what point does the statute of limitations on tokens expire? I’m surprised to hear that those of us who hoarded tokens can still turn them in for cash. It’s not surprising that in a bad economy, New Yorkers are trying to milk every last dollar out of the pieces of history left in shoe boxes around the city.
I find Wallau’s jewelry great for subway aficionados. The cuff links with the 1970s-era NYC tokens evoke a particular nostalgia. But this token-oriented renaissance made me reflect back on the death of the token. In March 2003, when the MTA announced the end of token sales, Richard Pérez-Peña of The Times offered up an obituary. Dead at 50, said The Times, the end came via “technology and economics.”
As Pérez-Peña noted though, it was not a surprising death. “The death of the token has been a planned, gradual demise, conceived in the 1980’s and set in motion in 1994,” he wrote, “when the first electronic turnstile was installed and the first MetroCard sold.”
The end was nigh on January 7, 1994 when the MTA introduced fare cards to riders at select stations along the East Side IRT and BMT Broadway lines. By April, transit officials were wrangling over future discounts, and New Yorkers were slow to accept the MetroCard. Not until May 1997 were every bus and subway station equipped with the new electronic fare technologies, and the last station to receive its MetroCard readers was Myrtle Ave. in Bushwick. Even then, the new fare payment system was marred by unpopularity and confusion. The more things change…
In 2003, as token booths became a thing of the past, only eight percent of all subway riders were paid for via those familiar bronze coins. Today, the MetroCard may be on the way out. Jay Walder wants to make the technologically-obsolete MetroCard a thing of the past and bring fare payment systems that allow for quicker entry and cheaper collection to the system. And yet, somehow, the token lives on, a reminder of a bygone era and a fashion statement for subway-loving New Yorkers.
16 comments
I seem to recall that I didn’t mind the transition to Metrocards nearly as much as I minded the transition from the older mechanical turnstiles to the electronic ones. It used to be that you could reach forward as you approached the turnstile, drop your token in the slot, and walk right through without ever breaking stride.
When the electronic turnstiles first hit stations, I found that I had to slow my pace significantly, as there was a longer delay between dropping the token and the unlocking of the turnstile. For that first few weeks, I would often walk full force into a locked turnstile, which had not yet registered my token.
Of course, with Metrocards, the bottleneck at the turnstiles is even bigger. With the old mechanical turnstiles there would be hundreds of people going through without ever slowing down. Now, not only are the turnstiles slower to unlock, but enough people have to swipe again that you can never assume that the person in front of you is going to go through right away.
I wonder if the MTA will ever figure out a way to get Metrocard-based access to the system to be as quick and efficient as it was with the old turnstiles…
I doubt it, since they’re going to get rid of Metrocards, but the smart card turnstiles should be quite a bit more efficient than Metrocards. The number of rescans should be a lot lower than Metrocard reswipes.
I don’t remember ever needing to rescan in Singapore or Shanghai.
While New York is older than Singapore and Shanghai and has older infrastructure, a smartcard would be newer than in those cities, and so should work as well or better.
The Smart Cards in DC and London are fantastic. You just touch and keep walking. No break in your stride at all. The DC SmarTrip are not nearly as useful as the Oyster Cards — which are significantly smarter. But the RFID technology is similar.
Do the SmartCards in other countries also work on buses? One technological limitation in New York is that the buses cannot always (reliably, anyway) be connected to a central computer database to check a balance, so the remaining value needs to be stored on the MetroCard.
Thus, two things happen with a swipe: the current balance is read, and a new balance is written to the card. Then both functions need to be verified, meaning another card-read. Lots of room for error here.
If all the balance information could be centralized in a host computer, there would be no need to write to (and verify) the card, and it would go much smoother. I also don’t know of any “write-able” RFID devices.
When I visited Chicago about a year ago, they had smart cards that worked in both the subway and the bus system.
I will never trade in my tokens for cash. The few I have are great souvenirs of a bygone era. I hope when the new technology is put into place that the turnstiles will continue to say NO TOKENS as a reminder of what used to be. Maybe they will add NO METROCARDS to that message.
Doesn’t this happen to all of us:
[You swipe]
TOO FAST SWIPE AGAIN
[You swipe more slowly]
TOO SLOW SWIPE AGAIN
[You swipe a little more quickly]
SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE
[You feel like screaming, “What the f___ did I do wrong THIS time?”]
Won’t it be great when we can just WAVE our card?
I’m with you.
and eventually “INSUFFICIENT FARE”. Happened to me about a week ago . I don’t know how many fares I paid that morning, but after swiping 15 or so times (at a single Atlantic Ave HEET with a long line of people behind me), and then getting the Insufficient Fare message at a different bank of turnstiles, I didn’t have time to wait on line for the (probably useless) token clerk, so I bought a new card and swiped my way through.
In those situations, the token clerk is far from useless. My experience has always been positive with token clerks in that situation. They’ll let you through the turnstile and at the very least, provide you with instructions on restoring the fare if they don’t do it themselves.
Understood, and I think there was an SAS post about this a couple of months ago. But I was late for work, and didn’t have time to wait on line. If I went to a different clerk at a different station, they wouldn’t know that the turnstile denied entry.
And yet the Transit Authority always tells us that an extra fare will NOT be deducted unless you go to another turnstile!
It sounds like, when this happened to you,
a fare was being deducted for every unsuccessful swipe.
enroll in the EasyPay program. Even if fares are deducted with unessessary swipes, you can receive free rides after 46 trips over a single month. BTW This is quite easy to do living in New York. The other option is unlimited ride Metrocards.
[…] Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas offers some perspective on the token’s 50-year run. « What’s That Racket in GCT? | […]
And the new Orion buses have this new announcement just like the messages that are displayed on the displays of the new bus shelters: “Welcome to New York. It’s a MetroCard City. For more info on the MetroCard, visit http://www.mta.info” even though it isn’t even an airport bus lol.