With all of talk swirling about $2 base fares and Unlimited Ride MetroCard cost increases, I thought it would be fun to see just how much per ride I pay for my 30-day Unlimited Ride MetroCard each month. I take at least two rides a day during the work week as I commute to and from my job. I lead a fairly active social life as well. Since I started a new card on Wednesday, this month is a great time for my experiment. I’ll update my data – which you’ll find in the center column at top – each day and chart my progress. My guess is that I get a pretty sweet deal.
Amidst all the hoopla surrounding the fare hike, the MTA is starting to make preparations that will lead to the phasing out of the MetroCard, a 13-year-old subway icon. Gone will be the familiar gold-and-blue flimsy plastic cards. In its stead, we’ll have touch-and-go SmartCard RFID technology that should speed up lines and make paying for public transportation rides even easier.
Jeremy Olshan in today’s New York Post elaborates on future technological developments I’ve tackled in the past: The MTA is gearing up to extend its touch-pay system to buses and will start a one-year study to assess SmartCard technology. Here’s what Olshan had to say in what could be a harbinger to many an elegy for the Metrocards:
The MTA’s smart-card pilot program on the Lexington Line, developed with Citibank and MasterCard, will soon be expanded to 275 buses and opened up to all contactless credit and debit cards issued by banks.
“At some point, we will have a reader that says Visa, Amex, MasterCard,” said Paul Korczak, the NYC Transit official who oversees the MetroCard told Re: ID, a smart-card industry trade publication. “Card companies are very excited about this extra opportunity.”
…Later this year the MTA expects to award a contract for a one-year study to determine the future fare payment system, NYC Transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges said. There is some urgency as the MetroCard readers and vending machines are nearing the end of their useful life, officials said.
There’s a lot to like about all of this information. First, extending the pilot program to buses should improve bus load times. Other than slow speeds due to traffic, bus load times are the number one most infuriating part about riding a bus. Waiting for people to dip their MetroCards can seem endless, and anything to pick up the pace here is a-okay with me. That the pilot program will include options for 7- and 30-day unlimited MetroCards is an added bonus.
Korczak noted that the MTA will look to choose some crosstown bus lines and some north-south bus lines. This way, passengers can experiment with transfer options as well. Starting the program on only east-west lines would severely limit the number of people willing to take part in the experiment. I would imagine that the crosstown buses the MTA chooses will be the M79 and M86 lines as those also intersect with Mastercard-enabled stations on the East Side IRT lines at Lexington Ave.
Second, the article lays out what we’ve heard for a while: The MetroCard technology current in place is an aging and nearly obsolete technology. It costs the MTA money in credit card processing fees to load up all of the MetroCards, and the vending machines have also shouldered some of the blame for the fare hike. If the MTA can save money by undergoing a technological upgrade, it’s time to bring SmartCard technology to the subways. The Metro in DC and the Tubes in London, for example, both employ the technology. New York should too.
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.
While not the most exciting of news especially after Monday’s fun with condoms, now, subway riders won’t end up harming their naughty bits with the EasyPay XPress MetroCard, a balance replenishing system that works much like the EZ-Pass program.
Using super-advanced technology – no wait, basic computer technology – the MTA has finally figured out a way to tie your MetroCard into your bank account, reports The Daily News. So says the newspaper:
The EasyPay XPress MetroCard, which is good for two years, works like the popular EZPass system. When the card’s balance dips to $25, it’s replenished with a $50 infusion.
Although EasyPay XPress MetroCards were designed with express bus riders in mind, subway and local bus riders can also use them, officials said.
“Initiatives like EasyPay XPress are designed to make it as easy and convenient as possible for our customers to access MTA services,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority Executive Director and CEO Elliot Sander said.
Except for those of us who have done the economics and prefer the unlimited options, never again will unsuspecting straphangers bang into the turnstile bar without noticing the Insufficient Fare sign light up. Instead, the MTA will just suck the money out of your bank account, $2 at a time.
Edit: One commenter asked if the pay-per-ride discount applies. It does. If you buy $20 worth of rides, you get a $24 MetroCard. Likewise, when the MTA charges your bank account $50, you get $60 on your MetroCard.
Old-school blue MetroCard picture courtesy of AMNY.com.
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