9 ms·

An observation on MetroCards, after a $1 fee (2013)

44 points by nojito 5y ago

dheera 5y ago
Related: Never hit the "$19" button when getting a new MetroCard -- they are actively trying to cheat you with that, as it will leave you with just $0.05 short of a fare leftover on a card. https://www.6sqft.com/19-05-is-the-perfect-amount-to-load-on-a-metrocard-so-you-wont-have-leftover-change/ https://www.6sqft.com/19-05-is-the-perfect-amount-to-load-on... The article's number of $19.05 is likely out of date since the last fare increase though. And yes, the MTA is cheaper for hackers with an engineering degree and more expensive for unskilled laborers. SMH.
- _delirium 5y ago
  They got rid of the bonus for preloading larger amounts in 2019, which simplifies the math. Now any multiple of $2.75 is fine. For example, adding $22 to an existing card will get you 8 rides ($23 if you're getting a new card).
  - dheera 5y ago
    Got it. But having the buttons still say "$19" sounds pretty damn dishonest and manipulative to me. The buttons should really say "5 rides ($X.YZ)", "10 rides ($X.YZ)" or whatever and compute the exact amounts for the user.
- hansor 5y ago
  Can you tell me how much does it cost in US to have unlimited rides for month by MetroCard? I'm quite shocked that you do not(??) have flat feet. In my country it is 35$ per month for unlimited rides on metro, buses and trams.
  - dheera 5y ago
    There are daily/monthly plans in most US cities that you can add to your card, and if you do, it won't charge you per entry. For NYC it's $33 for 7 days or $127 for 30 days. The only people it really makes sense for are people who use it every single business day for commutes plus some more, and tourists who will use it several times in a single day. For people who don't use the system consistently every day it doesn't really make sense. In the case of NYC, 42 rides a month (== round trip every business day) still doesn't make sense to get a monthly pass, you need to also use it on the weekends for some more stuff in order for it to make sense.
    - hansor 5y ago
      So you are telling me that people do not travel 5x(10x) per week to work, and THEN in weekends by metro/buses? And its minority?
      - dheera 5y ago
        I think with actual NYC residents, yes, it makes perfect sense. The reality is the majority of people working in NYC don't live in NYC due to housing costs, so they won't need or even have access to the subway on weekends, they'll be in NJ or Long Island or somewhere else where subway coverage is sparse or non-existent, and other transit systems in those places don't take the MTA cards. And in terms of public transit usage, NYC is probably the highest in the US. I've lived in Boston and now near San Francisco. In my 10 years of living in the Boston area as a student, I never found a monthly pass useful, even when I was able to get a student pass for half price the math did not make it worth the cost. Being a student was special though because I was able to walk to 80% of the places I needed to go, and I had a bike which was pretty much 100% of my transportation during the summer months, and Boston is far more bike friendly than NYC in my opinion (modulo weather). In the SF bay area public transit coverage is so sparse it doesn't make sense to get a monthly pass either. Just yesterday I swiped into a BART station, then promptly swiped out and took an Uber from that BART station to my destination BART station because the wait time was 27 minutes. And on several occasions I've been in trains that have hit pedestrians and cars or delayed by engine failures of sorts and gotten delayed for 90+ minutes so I've had to get off and get an Uber.
tialaramex 5y ago
The London Underground's Oyster (more like OMNY than MetroCard) has a refundable deposit. So in principle you could give back your Oyster and get the deposit. Of course it's not very much money and most people might need an Oyster again sooner or later so this is rarely taken up, but it discourages people from throwing them away. Because people from far away are less likely to imagine ever needing an Oyster again, yet might still need one right now (especially before contactless payment cards would work just as well for most short term visitors) there was a scheme where you could just "donate" your card to charity at places like airports, I don't know if it still exists. Because Oyster is variable fare even in the simplest scenarios (a trip from Stockwell to Brixton for example, versus a train going from central London out to Amersham at the far end of the line are different prices, before any consideration about season tickets, time of day etc.) it is possible to have a card that's valid to enter the system (it has enough money that you could make some trip) but then make a trip it can't pay for. In this case the balance on the card falls below zero on exit, to use it again you'll need to first pay the excess and enough for a ride somewhere. So you'd expect to see some number of cards discarded in this state, since they are in some sense less than worthless. But the inconvenience of needing a new card seems to out-weigh that.
- dheera 5y ago
  This is the way almost all RFID systems I have used work, including Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Bangkok, Hangzhou, and the SF bay area. The RFID cards, however, are far more durable than the flimsy MetroCards that NYC uses. I keep all the cards from cities I visit though, since more often than not I end up passing through the city again within a few years. Some cities' cards unfortunately expire and eat all your balance, while others keep them for 10+ years. It's really nice though to just land at an airport and be on your way in minutes without fumbling and getting in line. On another hand I kind of miss the subway tokens that Boston used to use a long time ago. One of the advantages of tokens is that they are very much like NFTs in that if you have a token, it is a promise of a ride, any time, now or in the future. So you could also use them as an investment vehicle by buying 1000 of them, and the transit agency gets 1000 * (fare price) in liquid cash upfront that they can use to scale their infrastructure and make upgrades, while you can re-sell those tokens at a profit 4 years later. Or if you were arriving in Boston for college, you could buy enough transit ride tokens for 4 years upfront, if you were smart. Unfortunately with the RFID systems they don't usually pay dividends or interest on the balance on the card.
siruva07 5y ago
The same observations are made on container deposits and recycling rates in the USA. There are 10 states in the United States with container deposit legislation. The US overall container recycling rate is ~ 33%, while states with a $0.05 container deposit laws have a ~70% average rate of container recycling. Michigan is over 90% as its deposit is $0.10. So why don’t more states have “bottle bills?” Because Coke, Pepsi, and the beverage industry oppose it https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article/22008100/why-are-there-so-few-states-with-bottle-bill-laws https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article...
- JCharante 5y ago
  Growing up in a state with container deposits (ME) I'm shocked that it's not a nationwide program. I guess that's why the bottles always list states where it's redeemable. I wonder how the lobbying didn't prevent this in the ten states.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    Government that works.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Do those recycling numbers take into account the number of people who don't pay a deposit, but get a deposit back? IE people buying sodas in Ohio and then taking them to Michigan to redeem a deposit?
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    The containers are marked with a Michigan deposit logo, assuming anybody looks.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Yes - when a person buys a bottle in Michigan, 10 cents is added to the cost. When they return the bottle to Michigan, 10 cents is given to them. However, when a person buys a bottle in Ohio, 0 cents is added to the cost. And they can't return the bottle anywhere in Ohio for any money. However, they can return the bottle in Michigan for 10 cents, even though they never paid the deposit in the first place. So in that sense, naively doing (bottles returned)/(bottles sold) to determine the recycling rate of a state is wrong, because people will return bottles that were never sold in the state to begin with. So it would literally be possible to have a >100% recycling rate which doesn't make any sense.
sthnblllII 5y ago
Reusing an electronic payment allows your trips to he connected and used to track you. There was nothing wrong with tokens and this fee is a huge increase for people who don't want to be tracked. RFID would make it even more difficult to avoid the eye of sauron.
- sneak 5y ago
  There are single-use paper metrocards that come out of the machines. They haven't used tokens for many years.
sneak 5y ago
It's a real bummer, as those of us who don't want our trips tracked/correlated now incur an extra $1 charge every single trip.
- floren 5y ago
  You could maintain a small collection of cards, perhaps half a dozen, which you cycle through. Just keep them in a bowl by the door and grab one at random on the way out?
  - sneak 5y ago
    I no longer live in nyc, so this probably isn't practicable.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    You would have to also be sure to only load those cards from cash, which is an additional hassle.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff already pays for most things in cash anyway. It's cards that are the additional hassle, really.
asdff 5y ago
Fares are a boondoggle that I won't be surprised to see eliminated by major cities in the next decades. LA metro is planning on moving to a fareless system. As it stands fares only cover a tiny portion of the operating budget, and most riders on public transit live below the poverty line in LA county at least so the fare weighs a lot more heavily than you might expect.
- _delirium 5y ago
  > fares only cover a tiny portion of the operating budget This varies a lot by city and transit system. For example NYC subway + bus + train fares under the MTA umbrella amounted to $6 billion in 2019, which accounted for 38% of the total system budget [1]. The SF Bay Area's BART is another system that's largely fare-funded, with $485 million in fare revenue covering 52% of the 2019 budget [2]. It's definitely possible to eliminate these, but you'd need substantially more dedicated tax revenue. [1] https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics [2] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Fiscal%20Year%202020%20Preliminary%20Budget_2019-03-29%20FINAL.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Fiscal%20Year%... (p. 11)
  - asdff 5y ago
    Wow, I didn't realize these major systems were still so reliant on the farebox revenue. I thought that was what ultimately killed the private subway operators in NYC: a lack of subsidies or any other revenue for private companies beyond what they could make from the farebox. It seems like funding transit on dedicated tax revenue is the way to go. LA metro is building more transit projects than any agency in the country by far, and they are emerging from the pandemic with a 1.4 billion dollar larger budget than what they had before the pandemic in 2019. NYC subway can barely do regular maintenance, on the other hand. Sales taxes just make sense for funding infrastructure like transit, considering we all benefit from transit even if we don't personally use it. Transit alleviates congestion, improves air quality, and chances are if you live in a city, you probably rely on someone in your day to day life who themselves relies on transit to get around. It doesn't make sense to force the low paid worker to pay for the bulk of transit when their high paid bosses depend on them coming to work reliably on transit.

44 points by nojito 5y ago

Related: Never hit the "$19" button when getting a new MetroCard -- they are actively trying to cheat you with that, as it will leave you with just $0.05 short of a fare leftover on a card. https://www.6sqft.com/19-05-is-the-perfect-amount-to-load-on-a-metrocard-so-you-wont-have-leftover-change/ https://www.6sqft.com/19-05-is-the-perfect-amount-to-load-on... The article's number of $19.05 is likely out of date since the last fare increase though. And yes, the MTA is cheaper for hackers with an engineering degree and more expensive for unskilled laborers. SMH.

_delirium 5y ago
They got rid of the bonus for preloading larger amounts in 2019, which simplifies the math. Now any multiple of $2.75 is fine. For example, adding $22 to an existing card will get you 8 rides ($23 if you're getting a new card).
- dheera 5y ago
  Got it. But having the buttons still say "$19" sounds pretty damn dishonest and manipulative to me. The buttons should really say "5 rides ($X.YZ)", "10 rides ($X.YZ)" or whatever and compute the exact amounts for the user.
hansor 5y ago
Can you tell me how much does it cost in US to have unlimited rides for month by MetroCard? I'm quite shocked that you do not(??) have flat feet. In my country it is 35$ per month for unlimited rides on metro, buses and trams.
- dheera 5y ago
  There are daily/monthly plans in most US cities that you can add to your card, and if you do, it won't charge you per entry. For NYC it's $33 for 7 days or $127 for 30 days. The only people it really makes sense for are people who use it every single business day for commutes plus some more, and tourists who will use it several times in a single day. For people who don't use the system consistently every day it doesn't really make sense. In the case of NYC, 42 rides a month (== round trip every business day) still doesn't make sense to get a monthly pass, you need to also use it on the weekends for some more stuff in order for it to make sense.
  - hansor 5y ago
    So you are telling me that people do not travel 5x(10x) per week to work, and THEN in weekends by metro/buses? And its minority?
    - dheera 5y ago
      I think with actual NYC residents, yes, it makes perfect sense. The reality is the majority of people working in NYC don't live in NYC due to housing costs, so they won't need or even have access to the subway on weekends, they'll be in NJ or Long Island or somewhere else where subway coverage is sparse or non-existent, and other transit systems in those places don't take the MTA cards. And in terms of public transit usage, NYC is probably the highest in the US. I've lived in Boston and now near San Francisco. In my 10 years of living in the Boston area as a student, I never found a monthly pass useful, even when I was able to get a student pass for half price the math did not make it worth the cost. Being a student was special though because I was able to walk to 80% of the places I needed to go, and I had a bike which was pretty much 100% of my transportation during the summer months, and Boston is far more bike friendly than NYC in my opinion (modulo weather). In the SF bay area public transit coverage is so sparse it doesn't make sense to get a monthly pass either. Just yesterday I swiped into a BART station, then promptly swiped out and took an Uber from that BART station to my destination BART station because the wait time was 27 minutes. And on several occasions I've been in trains that have hit pedestrians and cars or delayed by engine failures of sorts and gotten delayed for 90+ minutes so I've had to get off and get an Uber.

tialaramex 5y ago

The London Underground's Oyster (more like OMNY than MetroCard) has a refundable deposit. So in principle you could give back your Oyster and get the deposit. Of course it's not very much money and most people might need an Oyster again sooner or later so this is rarely taken up, but it discourages people from throwing them away. Because people from far away are less likely to imagine ever needing an Oyster again, yet might still need one right now (especially before contactless payment cards would work just as well for most short term visitors) there was a scheme where you could just "donate" your card to charity at places like airports, I don't know if it still exists. Because Oyster is variable fare even in the simplest scenarios (a trip from Stockwell to Brixton for example, versus a train going from central London out to Amersham at the far end of the line are different prices, before any consideration about season tickets, time of day etc.) it is possible to have a card that's valid to enter the system (it has enough money that you could make some trip) but then make a trip it can't pay for. In this case the balance on the card falls below zero on exit, to use it again you'll need to first pay the excess and enough for a ride somewhere. So you'd expect to see some number of cards discarded in this state, since they are in some sense less than worthless. But the inconvenience of needing a new card seems to out-weigh that.

dheera 5y ago
This is the way almost all RFID systems I have used work, including Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Bangkok, Hangzhou, and the SF bay area. The RFID cards, however, are far more durable than the flimsy MetroCards that NYC uses. I keep all the cards from cities I visit though, since more often than not I end up passing through the city again within a few years. Some cities' cards unfortunately expire and eat all your balance, while others keep them for 10+ years. It's really nice though to just land at an airport and be on your way in minutes without fumbling and getting in line. On another hand I kind of miss the subway tokens that Boston used to use a long time ago. One of the advantages of tokens is that they are very much like NFTs in that if you have a token, it is a promise of a ride, any time, now or in the future. So you could also use them as an investment vehicle by buying 1000 of them, and the transit agency gets 1000 * (fare price) in liquid cash upfront that they can use to scale their infrastructure and make upgrades, while you can re-sell those tokens at a profit 4 years later. Or if you were arriving in Boston for college, you could buy enough transit ride tokens for 4 years upfront, if you were smart. Unfortunately with the RFID systems they don't usually pay dividends or interest on the balance on the card.

siruva07 5y ago

The same observations are made on container deposits and recycling rates in the USA. There are 10 states in the United States with container deposit legislation. The US overall container recycling rate is ~ 33%, while states with a $0.05 container deposit laws have a ~70% average rate of container recycling. Michigan is over 90% as its deposit is $0.10. So why don’t more states have “bottle bills?” Because Coke, Pepsi, and the beverage industry oppose it https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article/22008100/why-are-there-so-few-states-with-bottle-bill-laws https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article...

JCharante 5y ago
Growing up in a state with container deposits (ME) I'm shocked that it's not a nationwide program. I guess that's why the bottles always list states where it's redeemable. I wonder how the lobbying didn't prevent this in the ten states.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Government that works.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Do those recycling numbers take into account the number of people who don't pay a deposit, but get a deposit back? IE people buying sodas in Ohio and then taking them to Michigan to redeem a deposit?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  The containers are marked with a Michigan deposit logo, assuming anybody looks.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Yes - when a person buys a bottle in Michigan, 10 cents is added to the cost. When they return the bottle to Michigan, 10 cents is given to them. However, when a person buys a bottle in Ohio, 0 cents is added to the cost. And they can't return the bottle anywhere in Ohio for any money. However, they can return the bottle in Michigan for 10 cents, even though they never paid the deposit in the first place. So in that sense, naively doing (bottles returned)/(bottles sold) to determine the recycling rate of a state is wrong, because people will return bottles that were never sold in the state to begin with. So it would literally be possible to have a >100% recycling rate which doesn't make any sense.

sthnblllII 5y ago

Reusing an electronic payment allows your trips to he connected and used to track you. There was nothing wrong with tokens and this fee is a huge increase for people who don't want to be tracked. RFID would make it even more difficult to avoid the eye of sauron.

sneak 5y ago
There are single-use paper metrocards that come out of the machines. They haven't used tokens for many years.

sneak 5y ago

It's a real bummer, as those of us who don't want our trips tracked/correlated now incur an extra $1 charge every single trip.

floren 5y ago
You could maintain a small collection of cards, perhaps half a dozen, which you cycle through. Just keep them in a bowl by the door and grab one at random on the way out?
- sneak 5y ago
  I no longer live in nyc, so this probably isn't practicable.
- walrus01 5y ago
  You would have to also be sure to only load those cards from cash, which is an additional hassle.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff already pays for most things in cash anyway. It's cards that are the additional hassle, really.

asdff 5y ago

Fares are a boondoggle that I won't be surprised to see eliminated by major cities in the next decades. LA metro is planning on moving to a fareless system. As it stands fares only cover a tiny portion of the operating budget, and most riders on public transit live below the poverty line in LA county at least so the fare weighs a lot more heavily than you might expect.

_delirium 5y ago
> fares only cover a tiny portion of the operating budget This varies a lot by city and transit system. For example NYC subway + bus + train fares under the MTA umbrella amounted to $6 billion in 2019, which accounted for 38% of the total system budget [1]. The SF Bay Area's BART is another system that's largely fare-funded, with $485 million in fare revenue covering 52% of the 2019 budget [2]. It's definitely possible to eliminate these, but you'd need substantially more dedicated tax revenue. [1] https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics [2] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Fiscal%20Year%202020%20Preliminary%20Budget_2019-03-29%20FINAL.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Fiscal%20Year%... (p. 11)
- asdff 5y ago
  Wow, I didn't realize these major systems were still so reliant on the farebox revenue. I thought that was what ultimately killed the private subway operators in NYC: a lack of subsidies or any other revenue for private companies beyond what they could make from the farebox. It seems like funding transit on dedicated tax revenue is the way to go. LA metro is building more transit projects than any agency in the country by far, and they are emerging from the pandemic with a 1.4 billion dollar larger budget than what they had before the pandemic in 2019. NYC subway can barely do regular maintenance, on the other hand. Sales taxes just make sense for funding infrastructure like transit, considering we all benefit from transit even if we don't personally use it. Transit alleviates congestion, improves air quality, and chances are if you live in a city, you probably rely on someone in your day to day life who themselves relies on transit to get around. It doesn't make sense to force the low paid worker to pay for the bulk of transit when their high paid bosses depend on them coming to work reliably on transit.