To replace a damaged MetroCard involves, as with many things at the MTA, a process. A rider has to get a form from a station agent, figure out how to fill it out and mail it back to the MTA in a postage-paid envelope. Over the course of a year, Transit processes 170,000 for demagnetized cards or for those scanned twice, and the average turnaround time is 7-11 days.
Lately, though, this cumbersome process has been slowed because the envelopes have become a scarce commodity. As the New York City Transit Riders Council President’s Forum a few weeks ago, a station agent spoke on how the postage-paid envelopes hadn’t been restocked in months, and Pete Donohue noted earlier this week that the envelopes were in short supply.
Today, the News reports that the MTA is going to use a nascent technology called the Internet to improve the MetroCard trade-in process. Beginning in the second quarter of 2011, when customers encounter a faulty card, they can fill out an online form to process an exchange. That move online should allow the MTA to cut down on administrative and mailing costs and should also speed up the exchange. The online upgrade, reportedly in the works since 2009, has been a long time coming, but what’s taken so long?
6 comments
Thank you for addressing one of my biggest pet peeves!
The “combine card” function was (and probably still is) broken at my local station for some time. Since we’re paying good salaries for token-booth personnel, it would make sense for token booths to be definitive solutions for metrocard issues, not just for them to pass the issue down to the next station on the line. I am insulted that the clerks and their management think so little of productivity and stretching my fare dollar that they don’t have a mandatory “is everything working” checklist at each station and ensure that if something is broken (like the metrocard machine), that it gets fixed pronto.
The MVM is linked in a network that is supposed to tell mamgement when there is problem with that MVM and then a maintenance team is sent out to fix it. The problem has nothing to do with the clerk in the booth and MVM maintenance management has decided to do more of the MVM repairs and maintenance especially in the Manhattan zone on the 10pm to 6am shift. There are more more MVM maintainers on that shift than the 6am to 2pm and the 8am to 4pm shifts combined in Manhattan. Since the late shift is cleaning up all the calls from earlier in the day that are left over no one is doing the proper maintenance tests on the combine card feature and the crdit card reader which don’t show up on the network as a trouble call.
?MTA is going to use a nascent technology called the Internet
– nice
I give it two years! This so-called “internet” thing is a passing fad!
How will your actual metrocard get to the MTA?
And don’t forget that all along we were dupposed to see the agent in the booth to get the mailer.
More and more THESE days, you will suddenly realize, “WHAT agent in the booth”?