100-year history of NYC's subway payment (& why we're so far behind)

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Another advantage of the MetroCard over tokens is that it made transfers easier. Before MetroCard the only transfers I remember were bus-to-bus. When you paid your fare you'd ask the driver for a transfer and he'd hand you a slip of paper to give to the driver of the bus you transferred to. With MetroCard you didn't need this slip of paper because the system just knew where you'd been and would let you transfer for free without you having to ask. You could also do transfers that hadn't been possible before, like subway-to-bus or bus-to-subway.

The wake up call for U.S. banks was in January 2014, when Target had a data breach. It took a major data breach for U.S. banks to adopt new and more secure payment technology. After 2014, banks started rolling out chip & pin and contactless cards. This was also the same year Apple launched Apple Pay.

0:39 NYC actually trialed contactless payments in 2010. Hardly anyone had a contactless card or a phone with NFC then, so it wasn't widely used.

Metrocards also interestingly stored their value on the card itself compared to the tap systems that operate on a blacklist and delayed transaction approval. The turnstile would read the value on the card then do the math and write the new value back to the card all in the same swipe.

About instant transaction approval when we pay contractless. The best way to implement it is to use offline-online authorization on credit/debit cards. It means when we tap the card in fact transaction has not yet happened. The system takes card details from the card and processes it in few minutes later. If you don't have enough money and the transaction will be fails, the system just adds your card to stop-list.

Great video! I will say, however, that I disagree a bit with the point at 8:40 in the video. Chicago was an early adopter of the same fare technology system used by London (Cubic) and so it had the capability for credit/debit card tap-to-pay at the same time as London back in 2013. There was actually a bit of a controversy when Ventra first released because you could pay with either the new Ventra card or credit/debit card from day one; people weren't used to the card clash if they had multiple credit/debit cards in their wallet. Another primary reason London and Chicago kept their physical cards (Oyster and Ventra) is to allow riders to still do cash payments. So while there was a bit of an element of U.S. banks moving slowly, NYC was also unfortunately a bit behind even other U.S. systems for fare technology.

The worse part with tokens is that if you run out over the weekend and don't realize it until Monday morning like so many you end up in long lines with other impatient nyers during rush hour. And every time people in line hears the train coming we all get even more annoyed. Lol

Well, as a Londoner I understand the system they implemented to accept contactless (NFC), which they coded in-house, is instant because at first they just read that the card is valid, then at the end of the day you get charged the full amount. When I tap my phone it always comes instantly off as "TfL Charge - £0.00". Interestingly, this code is licensed to Cubic which is the company that licensed it to NYC and NSW, Australia.

There's also a factor of transaction fees with cards. A ticket is deliberately a low cost item. If visa wants a few cents for the use of its system and your payment processor (who talks to the visa system on your behalf) wants the same, then you can looking at losing 2-3% per sale. That can hurt for an operation on tight margins making its money on high volume small sales. I wonder if that's part of the business proposition of capped weekly systems: if you can charge each rider's purchase as a single weekly transaction of higher value then you are losing less in fees because any fixed element of the fee is a smaller proportion.

Yes, there was a reduced rate (half price) for seniors and for a short period during the 1970s on Sundays for everyone. What a senior would do is go to the token booth and buy a token or show the token booth attendant they already had a token and show their ID and they would get a paper ticket to be used for the return trip. Same process for everyone on Sundays except no ID had to be shown.

@0:11, not a CREDIT but more likely a debit card. These days, you can also use your phone or smartwatch, and the fares will be capped just the same as the dedicated Oystercard. @8:21, I found swiping the MetroCard was a hit and miss affair. It more often than not took a couple of swipes to get through the turnstile. @8:59, we don't swipe our cards here in the UK. It's either tap to pay, or entering your PIN into a portable card reader.

As to discounts during the token era, people were issued a special card that they had to flash at the token booth. That would indicate the proper fare or no fare at all. Also if the police were in hot pursuit, they would just show their badge and hop the turnstyle. Badge worked on busses as well.

Of course the mta could have used a closed loop tap and go payment as many cities did, but Metrocard had just been rolled out when the tech was ready. and yes students had passes they could show the token booth person for them to unlock the turnstile. Notice we still call it the token booth even though they don't see anything

Contrasting the usage, in San Francisco Bay area you need to tap the card to get on and you tap when you exit because you pay by zone. Trains like Bart is five because there are turnstile when you enter and exit. But for other types of trains (there is a dozen separate transit systems there) you need to remember to tap out or you pay the most expensive fare. Same for many systems around the world. Ny doesn't have that since it's 1 price for everything.

Your video made me realize the origin of those tokens. I inow they were in use in Toronto Canada as well. If the machines were origianlly designed to accept coins, I would think that would have been much easier to just modify them to accept a different type of coin (aka the token) than to revamp everything, especially since in those days, mag stripe tickets were probably not yet possible and once that system is deployed everywhere, it takes a lot of energy to great the innertial and change it.

Mid 1970s half-fare weekends. Upsurge of crime and fear and during a loss of NYC population. Pay one fare and get a return coupon. I don't know more, but did use it. Note, PATH had coin fares into the mid 1980s and at a nicely lower fare than NYCtransit.

I'm a bit confused. None of the other transit systems adopted the NYC paper swipe method. Places like DC (SmartTrip), SF (Clipper Card), and Boston (Charlie Card) got the tap cards like London's Oyster. Why didn't NYC adopt that method?

During token era, I go to the booth to get a paper ticket for return trip. All I do is show my disability card. Put token in the first station I am at. When returning home, I go to the booth to give that paper ticket while showing my disability card and walk thru the yellow hats/doors which is those emergency doors are now. On the bus just pay half the fare in coins with showing driver my disability card. Yes I can still revive bus transfer ticket. The red or blue color paper with bus route on it. If the hate can’t be evenly in 5 or 10 cent values they will tell you what your half fare price is. It also on the box. I wish they accept dollars paper but they can’t bc they used vacuum machine to suck it up. But still paper dollars could be in different box inside the fare box.

One thing I don't understand is why NYC designed the Metrocard so that it's so difficult to swipe, especially for people who aren't used to swiping Metrocards. Tourists and other people who don't regularly take the subway often take quite a bit of time figuring out how to correctly swipe the Metrocard. This is obviously not good for the same reason it wouldn't be good to allow people to swipe their credit cards to go through subway turnstiles and wait a few seconds for the transaction to be approved: transit systems like the NYC subway deal with large numbers of people going through the turnstiles and people need to be able to go through the turnstiles quickly and efficiently. I'm sure that even in the 1990s, the technology existed to make a fare card that's more intuitive to use.