MetroCard

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.

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.

By the time the subways return to service at 6 a.m. today, New York City will have suffered through approximately 42 hours without our trains. The MTA announced a system-wide shutdown for noon on Saturday, and by 2:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, stations were roped off. The great Irene-inspired isolation had begun.

As with all things MTA, the system shutdown was not without controversy, and over the next few days, as our commutes slowly return to something resembling normalcy, we’ll hear a lot about the appropriateness of the response in light of the forecast. No one will ever be happy with the state’s and MTA’s reactions, but after December’s blizzard left trains stranded in snow drifts, the authority, by and large, made the right call this weekend.

Still, one thing gave me pause. Amidst the hoopla over the planned shutdown on Saturday morning, The New York Times found out that the MTA was not going to extend unlimited ride MetroCards. In a vacuum, this isn’t the biggest of deals. After all, the system was out for 42 hours during a period of generally less usage. August tends to see lower ridership than most months as people vacate New York, and the weekends aren’t popular for subway travel either.

On the other hand, though, the unlimited MetroCard calculus is not one to take lightly. When many — but not all — straphangers purchase their 7- or 30-day cards, they know how many rides they plan to take during the week and guess to the number of trips they need during the weekend to break even of come out ahead. Without travel for a day and a half or two days, the savings start to slip away. With knowledge of time away from the subway — a weekend out of town or lighter travel plans — many opt to eschew the unlimited ride card until the timing makes sense. The state’s decision to freeze the city cost unlimited ride users some dollars.

Of course, I’m nitpicking a bit. After all, the MTA provided free bus rides on Sunday when limited bus service was restored and offered free rides throughout the system on Friday and Saturday as evacuation plans went into effect. Furthermore, even though New Yorkers tend to spit in the face of natural disasters and extreme weather, no one was really going far on Saturday night as winds and rain descended upon New York. While the MTA shutdown brought the city to a halt, so to did dire warnings urging city residents to stay inside.

Yet, I can’t help but think that those of us with unlimited ride cards should get a bonus. We should get that extra day and a half back. We paid for it, and we couldn’t enjoy the benefits of subway service because, well, there wasn’t any. We’re all safe; the system is gearing up to launch in five hours from now; and all we need is our lost time back. After all, that’s the New York way.