21 ms·

We’ll Miss You, MetroCard Machine

147 points by danso 4y ago

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
The metrocard machines are interesting not just because they are easier to use then any other subway kiosk I’ve encountered but that they are unhackable. People have been trying to beat them since they were first installed and the closest anyone ever got, that I am aware of, is if you crease the card in just the right way so that the turnstile can detect the magnetic signal but bit read it entirely, it will let you through after swiping four times. Though supposedly the MTA cops know this trick and look for people with creased cards - in minority neighborhoods anyway. The cards themselves seem to have no stored value but instead point to a record in a central database.
- assttoasstmgr 4y ago
  Or that much of the system ran on OS/2: https://tedium.co/2019/06/13/nyc-subway-os2-history https://tedium.co/2019/06/13/nyc-subway-os2-history
  - nycdotnet 4y ago
    I had not heard this part - the article implies that the systems that connect the turnstiles to the mainframes run OS/2. Pretty neat. The machines that are the topic of the article (the MetroCard machines themselves) still run Windows NT 4. Blue screen shot from 2016: https://twitter.com/nycdotnet/status/750737744356319232 https://twitter.com/nycdotnet/status/750737744356319232
    - classichasclass 4y ago
      And one that bombed out to a DOS prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1unxbe/in_case_you_were_wondering_it_appears_metrocard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1unxbe/in_case_you_wer...
- user3939382 4y ago
  There’s a guy that reverse engineered them but he would only describe the broad strokes. Part of the system works with the value stored on the card so there is a way to get free rides but it’s not easy to figure out. https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/594-paper_MagneticStripeTechnology2.pdf https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/594... https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/765.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/765.en.h... https://blog.yossarian.net/2016/07/17/Decoding-the-Metrocard-Part-2 https://blog.yossarian.net/2016/07/17/Decoding-the-Metrocard...
- acomjean 4y ago
  I am a not I frequent visitor to NYC (i lived in white plains for a while).. The kiosks always seemed to work fine. So well I hardly noticed them. The cards, I had some trouble with. I felt I wasn’t doing it right till the “New Yorkers vs the MetroCard” video came out. A short masterpiece of actual New Yorkers at the turnstiles.. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/watch-new-yorkers-struggle-with-the-metrocard-swipe https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/watch-new-yorkers-s...
msoad 4y ago
Came back from Berlin to NYC. In Berlin there was no gates. You just walk to the train. You were suppose to buy the ticket and show it if they ask for it. Even that is unnecessary in the US. The best payment system for public transportation is no payment. In the US it doesn't cover much of the fare anyways but has so much overhead for the MTA. People who try to dodge the fare are actually poor and the most deserving of not paying anyways.
- bergenty 4y ago
  What nonsense. I was in Berlin last month, the ticket buying experience is abysmal. The machines don’t work. Sometime (don’t know when) you can only buy tickets on the train since they don’t have ticket machines at every station. When you do try to use the machines it’s some ridiculous combination of zones and unspellable names you have to type out to get your ticket that isn’t intuitive at all. In NYC, buy ticket on machine -> works for one trip wherever you’re going in the city. Outside the city? Just talk to the person at the ticket window and they tell you what to get.
  - msoad 4y ago
    The 9 Euro ticket was super easy to buy for me. I bought it in the airport. Not sure why it was so hard for you. I don't speak a single word of German either.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      Isn’t that like a limited time thing? Try starting at a random station and navigating from there. I was at seegersfeld trying to get into Berlin and it was ridiculous. Also getting back there at the end of the night. It also had nothing to do with speaking german, everyone I spoke to in Germany seemed to somehow know English.
      - Lacerda69 4y ago
        You are correct, it was limited thing from july to august this summer. unfortunately it's over now. it had a lot of benefits, making public transport really easy for everyone was just one. it also saved a ton of co2 and enabled a lot of people to travel around the country, who werent able otherwise. RIP 9€ ticket, you will be sorely missed:/
yieldcrv 4y ago
My friend's phone died while we were out in NYC, during one of the times with partial Covid restrictions. It was funny at first but then it stopped being funny because we really couldn't do a single thing together! Charge phone at a Starbucks? Can't enter, his vaccination card was on his phone! Slightly better now, but this is really an over reliance and the ubuiquity of having a phone. I get they are doing some sort of fallback with the OMNY machines, but I know how these contracts are cut.
- HeavenFox 4y ago
  You could just tap a contactless credit card.
- greenyoda 4y ago
  On an OMNY machine, you have three payment options: 1. Contactless credit, debit, or reloadable prepaid card. 2. Smartphone app. 3. OMNY card. Source: https://omny.info https://omny.info
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Yea, using a contactless debit/credit card seems like the way to go anyway. Much less annoying than mashing your expensive phone on the panel until it works. Even my basic local credit union has contactless cards these days.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I'm not sure the "reliance" on having the phone was as much on businesses as on your friend though. Every time I've been in NYC in the last 2 years, I've made 2-3 paper copies of my vaccination card for exactly the reason, and have been rewarded a few times when places wouldn't accept a photo of a card, and only a physical paper one. Obviously it sucked for you and your friend to have to deal with that, but it seems wrong to blame the city and its systems for it. If anything, NYC had plenty of room for you to have a non-phone fallback that you just didn't have. Compared to SF especially, NYC is, if anything, one of the more analog big cities in the US. There's tons of cash-only stores and restaurants, and they're seemingly the last city in the US to now be moving away from mag-stripe for their public transit.
twiss 4y ago
I'll forgive it for being designed a long time ago, but as a tourist I found the MetroCard machines very frustrating because they insist on a 5-digit postal code when paying by card, but I have a 4-digit one. I tried left- and right-padding it, and entering all zeros, but it wouldn't let me pay. It reminded me of "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses".
- grishka 4y ago
  I don't remember the vending machines, but I do remember the frustration from having to make several attempts at swiping that thin magnetic stripe card at the turnstile at just the right speed.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    You are not alone. 2 minutes of new yorkers doing the double metrocard swipe. (Contains opera) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic. And a few going over/under…
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    It’s how the tourists are sussed out.
    - grishka 4y ago
      I think I got good enough at it by the end of the week I was in NYC.
  - relyks 4y ago
    I had the same issue, but for me, now it’s trying to get close enough to the OMNY terminal without actually touching the terminal lol
- rexf 4y ago
  As a former NYC resident who primarily walked & took the subway, I have no fondness for the MetroCard machines. Using the machines to refill my balance was a clunky (or at best adequate) experience. Seems like the author is nostalgic since the machines are being replaced.
donohoe 4y ago
So with MetroCards going away the privacy implications of this are pretty big. Check out this thread on Twitter with more info: https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1565734877957394434 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1565734877957394434 Highlights: OMNY is not a project of the city. It is a system operated by the private organization Cubic Transportation Systems. Cubic has quietly taken over the monetization process of the majority of major US and western EU cities OMNY says they won't disclose your data except for potential sharing to law, "safety", and anti-fraud related entities, "affiliates and subsidiaries". OMNY is owned by Cubic subsidiaries include military service providers, & cos that serve the international intelligence community Cubic is owned by Veritas Capital. Veritas Capital, among other things, helps run the DHS's biometrics database. Their CCPA statement says they collect and share information collected from "portfolio companies" that includes Identifiers. Twitter thread has much more specific details.
- googlryas 4y ago
  You can still buy a physical card with cash, eventually at vending machines in stations, but also at places like target
  - tetromino_ 4y ago
    But then, once you have the physical omny card, how do you refill it with cash? Go back to Target?
    - googlryas 4y ago
      Yup - you can reload it with cash at the same stores that sell it. You'll eventually be able to put money into a vending machine to reload it as well. Or, you could not refill it, and just buy another omny card. I'm not sure what the surplus above fare costs is for a new card, but it's probably only a few bucks. If you're concerned about privacy, it might be good to not have a very long travel history all associated with a single omny card.
    - derefr 4y ago
tedunangst 4y ago
Machines are so well designed, yet other cities refuse to copy them. Septa in philadelphia finally switched to smart cards a few years ago, but the card machines are not nearly as responsive or easy to use as metro card machines. All they had to do is buy the same machines and change the label, but no. In particular, metro card touch screens actually respond when you touch them. Quickly, accurately, reliably. The septa machines, despite being many years newer, consistently miss touches and take several seconds to process each input.
knorker 4y ago
A metrocard machine once just ate a $20 from me, and then gave me an error message saying it was unable to charge by card, or hand back the $20. And if I wanted my $20 back then I should send a letter to some address. I did, but I guess they just saw "oh, doesn't even live in NYC. Fuck him, and thanks for the free $20". I'm still bitter.
- citiguy 4y ago
  That happened a lot. Even worse, you'd buy a metro card, lose it, and find it only after it's expired. Why they would expire I don't know. Once it's expired it no longer works. You could mail it back to them and ask for a refund, but seeing as you aren't sure how much money was on the card, most people just ate the loss. I for one, am not sad to see this whole thing go away.
  - bsimpson 4y ago
    As someone who traveled to NY for work just-often-enough for my MetroCards to be constantly expiring, this felt like an intentional grift to fleece visitors.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It’s perfectly incentivized to never be fixed.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      Really? In my memory the cards last for 2 years. I've got one I got last year that will work until 2023. That seems like a fairly reasonable amount of time for a paper card to last for. I don't live there, but I regularly get 2-3 uses out of my $1 metro card before it expires. If you're in from out of town, why are you leaving a ton of money on your card and/or not buying the $33 unlimited pass for 7 days that essentially pays for itself if you take a single trip each day? There's no minimum value you have to put on it either, so you can just put $5 on before every round trip or such and worst case you're out $2.50 if it expires before you use the return trip if you're trying to be that cautious. I've got my issues with the MTA, but it seems far from an intentional grift.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Congratulations, New York City has finally caught up to Hong Kong in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card ...are they still using OS/2 or have they finally upgraded to Windows NT 4?
phist_mcgee 4y ago
One of the most interesting/unique user interfaces for a train ticket machine I have used in a long time are ones you still occasionally see in French train stations [1]. Rather than a touch screen or buttons, you use a wheel much like the original ipod. To select an item you rotate the wheel, and then to confirm that selection you press the center button. After a few times using it, I actually came to love its simplicity, you could scrub through train stations incredibly quickly, and with just those buttons (and a cancel button) you could complete the whole process of buying a ticket in less than 30 seconds. Sadly, I think these machines are on the way out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdjdsD1lWS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdjdsD1lWS8
- qwezxcrty 4y ago
  I agree it's a nice interface after getting used to, but it was confusing like hell when it's my first time...
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    You see every single person press the screen at least once if they've never used it. Dominant ux pattern and all.
- jtvjan 4y ago
  In Paris, they had machines with a large vertical bar that you could roll to make a selection[1]. I found them much more comfortable to use than the newer(?) machines with a touch screen. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk5m3g-4Wqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk5m3g-4Wqk
- bradlys 4y ago
  The ones I’ve seen in Paris don’t use a wheel but instead use a hefty metal roller. It’s a bit unintuitive at first because it looks so weird.
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]

147 points by danso 4y ago

The metrocard machines are interesting not just because they are easier to use then any other subway kiosk I’ve encountered but that they are unhackable. People have been trying to beat them since they were first installed and the closest anyone ever got, that I am aware of, is if you crease the card in just the right way so that the turnstile can detect the magnetic signal but bit read it entirely, it will let you through after swiping four times. Though supposedly the MTA cops know this trick and look for people with creased cards - in minority neighborhoods anyway. The cards themselves seem to have no stored value but instead point to a record in a central database.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago
Or that much of the system ran on OS/2: https://tedium.co/2019/06/13/nyc-subway-os2-history https://tedium.co/2019/06/13/nyc-subway-os2-history
- nycdotnet 4y ago
  I had not heard this part - the article implies that the systems that connect the turnstiles to the mainframes run OS/2. Pretty neat. The machines that are the topic of the article (the MetroCard machines themselves) still run Windows NT 4. Blue screen shot from 2016: https://twitter.com/nycdotnet/status/750737744356319232 https://twitter.com/nycdotnet/status/750737744356319232
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    And one that bombed out to a DOS prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1unxbe/in_case_you_were_wondering_it_appears_metrocard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1unxbe/in_case_you_wer...
user3939382 4y ago
There’s a guy that reverse engineered them but he would only describe the broad strokes. Part of the system works with the value stored on the card so there is a way to get free rides but it’s not easy to figure out. https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/594-paper_MagneticStripeTechnology2.pdf https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/594... https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/765.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/765.en.h... https://blog.yossarian.net/2016/07/17/Decoding-the-Metrocard-Part-2 https://blog.yossarian.net/2016/07/17/Decoding-the-Metrocard...
acomjean 4y ago
I am a not I frequent visitor to NYC (i lived in white plains for a while).. The kiosks always seemed to work fine. So well I hardly noticed them. The cards, I had some trouble with. I felt I wasn’t doing it right till the “New Yorkers vs the MetroCard” video came out. A short masterpiece of actual New Yorkers at the turnstiles.. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/watch-new-yorkers-struggle-with-the-metrocard-swipe https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/watch-new-yorkers-s...

msoad 4y ago

Came back from Berlin to NYC. In Berlin there was no gates. You just walk to the train. You were suppose to buy the ticket and show it if they ask for it. Even that is unnecessary in the US. The best payment system for public transportation is no payment. In the US it doesn't cover much of the fare anyways but has so much overhead for the MTA. People who try to dodge the fare are actually poor and the most deserving of not paying anyways.

bergenty 4y ago
What nonsense. I was in Berlin last month, the ticket buying experience is abysmal. The machines don’t work. Sometime (don’t know when) you can only buy tickets on the train since they don’t have ticket machines at every station. When you do try to use the machines it’s some ridiculous combination of zones and unspellable names you have to type out to get your ticket that isn’t intuitive at all. In NYC, buy ticket on machine -> works for one trip wherever you’re going in the city. Outside the city? Just talk to the person at the ticket window and they tell you what to get.
- msoad 4y ago
  The 9 Euro ticket was super easy to buy for me. I bought it in the airport. Not sure why it was so hard for you. I don't speak a single word of German either.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Isn’t that like a limited time thing? Try starting at a random station and navigating from there. I was at seegersfeld trying to get into Berlin and it was ridiculous. Also getting back there at the end of the night. It also had nothing to do with speaking german, everyone I spoke to in Germany seemed to somehow know English.
    - Lacerda69 4y ago
      You are correct, it was limited thing from july to august this summer. unfortunately it's over now. it had a lot of benefits, making public transport really easy for everyone was just one. it also saved a ton of co2 and enabled a lot of people to travel around the country, who werent able otherwise. RIP 9€ ticket, you will be sorely missed:/

yieldcrv 4y ago

My friend's phone died while we were out in NYC, during one of the times with partial Covid restrictions. It was funny at first but then it stopped being funny because we really couldn't do a single thing together! Charge phone at a Starbucks? Can't enter, his vaccination card was on his phone! Slightly better now, but this is really an over reliance and the ubuiquity of having a phone. I get they are doing some sort of fallback with the OMNY machines, but I know how these contracts are cut.

HeavenFox 4y ago
You could just tap a contactless credit card.
greenyoda 4y ago
On an OMNY machine, you have three payment options: 1. Contactless credit, debit, or reloadable prepaid card. 2. Smartphone app. 3. OMNY card. Source: https://omny.info https://omny.info
- noirbot 4y ago
  Yea, using a contactless debit/credit card seems like the way to go anyway. Much less annoying than mashing your expensive phone on the panel until it works. Even my basic local credit union has contactless cards these days.
noirbot 4y ago
I'm not sure the "reliance" on having the phone was as much on businesses as on your friend though. Every time I've been in NYC in the last 2 years, I've made 2-3 paper copies of my vaccination card for exactly the reason, and have been rewarded a few times when places wouldn't accept a photo of a card, and only a physical paper one. Obviously it sucked for you and your friend to have to deal with that, but it seems wrong to blame the city and its systems for it. If anything, NYC had plenty of room for you to have a non-phone fallback that you just didn't have. Compared to SF especially, NYC is, if anything, one of the more analog big cities in the US. There's tons of cash-only stores and restaurants, and they're seemingly the last city in the US to now be moving away from mag-stripe for their public transit.

twiss 4y ago

I'll forgive it for being designed a long time ago, but as a tourist I found the MetroCard machines very frustrating because they insist on a 5-digit postal code when paying by card, but I have a 4-digit one. I tried left- and right-padding it, and entering all zeros, but it wouldn't let me pay. It reminded me of "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses".

grishka 4y ago
I don't remember the vending machines, but I do remember the frustration from having to make several attempts at swiping that thin magnetic stripe card at the turnstile at just the right speed.
- acomjean 4y ago
  You are not alone. 2 minutes of new yorkers doing the double metrocard swipe. (Contains opera) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic. And a few going over/under…
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It’s how the tourists are sussed out.
  - grishka 4y ago
    I think I got good enough at it by the end of the week I was in NYC.
- relyks 4y ago
  I had the same issue, but for me, now it’s trying to get close enough to the OMNY terminal without actually touching the terminal lol
rexf 4y ago
As a former NYC resident who primarily walked & took the subway, I have no fondness for the MetroCard machines. Using the machines to refill my balance was a clunky (or at best adequate) experience. Seems like the author is nostalgic since the machines are being replaced.

donohoe 4y ago

So with MetroCards going away the privacy implications of this are pretty big. Check out this thread on Twitter with more info: https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1565734877957394434 https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1565734877957394434 Highlights: OMNY is not a project of the city. It is a system operated by the private organization Cubic Transportation Systems. Cubic has quietly taken over the monetization process of the majority of major US and western EU cities OMNY says they won't disclose your data except for potential sharing to law, "safety", and anti-fraud related entities, "affiliates and subsidiaries". OMNY is owned by Cubic subsidiaries include military service providers, & cos that serve the international intelligence community Cubic is owned by Veritas Capital. Veritas Capital, among other things, helps run the DHS's biometrics database. Their CCPA statement says they collect and share information collected from "portfolio companies" that includes Identifiers. Twitter thread has much more specific details.

googlryas 4y ago
You can still buy a physical card with cash, eventually at vending machines in stations, but also at places like target
- tetromino_ 4y ago
  But then, once you have the physical omny card, how do you refill it with cash? Go back to Target?
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Yup - you can reload it with cash at the same stores that sell it. You'll eventually be able to put money into a vending machine to reload it as well. Or, you could not refill it, and just buy another omny card. I'm not sure what the surplus above fare costs is for a new card, but it's probably only a few bucks. If you're concerned about privacy, it might be good to not have a very long travel history all associated with a single omny card.
  - derefr 4y ago

tedunangst 4y ago

Machines are so well designed, yet other cities refuse to copy them. Septa in philadelphia finally switched to smart cards a few years ago, but the card machines are not nearly as responsive or easy to use as metro card machines. All they had to do is buy the same machines and change the label, but no. In particular, metro card touch screens actually respond when you touch them. Quickly, accurately, reliably. The septa machines, despite being many years newer, consistently miss touches and take several seconds to process each input.

knorker 4y ago

A metrocard machine once just ate a $20 from me, and then gave me an error message saying it was unable to charge by card, or hand back the $20. And if I wanted my $20 back then I should send a letter to some address. I did, but I guess they just saw "oh, doesn't even live in NYC. Fuck him, and thanks for the free $20". I'm still bitter.

citiguy 4y ago
That happened a lot. Even worse, you'd buy a metro card, lose it, and find it only after it's expired. Why they would expire I don't know. Once it's expired it no longer works. You could mail it back to them and ask for a refund, but seeing as you aren't sure how much money was on the card, most people just ate the loss. I for one, am not sad to see this whole thing go away.
- bsimpson 4y ago
  As someone who traveled to NY for work just-often-enough for my MetroCards to be constantly expiring, this felt like an intentional grift to fleece visitors.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It’s perfectly incentivized to never be fixed.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Really? In my memory the cards last for 2 years. I've got one I got last year that will work until 2023. That seems like a fairly reasonable amount of time for a paper card to last for. I don't live there, but I regularly get 2-3 uses out of my $1 metro card before it expires. If you're in from out of town, why are you leaving a ton of money on your card and/or not buying the $33 unlimited pass for 7 days that essentially pays for itself if you take a single trip each day? There's no minimum value you have to put on it either, so you can just put $5 on before every round trip or such and worst case you're out $2.50 if it expires before you use the return trip if you're trying to be that cautious. I've got my issues with the MTA, but it seems far from an intentional grift.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Congratulations, New York City has finally caught up to Hong Kong in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card ...are they still using OS/2 or have they finally upgraded to Windows NT 4?

phist_mcgee 4y ago

One of the most interesting/unique user interfaces for a train ticket machine I have used in a long time are ones you still occasionally see in French train stations [1]. Rather than a touch screen or buttons, you use a wheel much like the original ipod. To select an item you rotate the wheel, and then to confirm that selection you press the center button. After a few times using it, I actually came to love its simplicity, you could scrub through train stations incredibly quickly, and with just those buttons (and a cancel button) you could complete the whole process of buying a ticket in less than 30 seconds. Sadly, I think these machines are on the way out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdjdsD1lWS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdjdsD1lWS8

qwezxcrty 4y ago
I agree it's a nice interface after getting used to, but it was confusing like hell when it's my first time...
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  You see every single person press the screen at least once if they've never used it. Dominant ux pattern and all.
jtvjan 4y ago
In Paris, they had machines with a large vertical bar that you could roll to make a selection[1]. I found them much more comfortable to use than the newer(?) machines with a touch screen. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk5m3g-4Wqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk5m3g-4Wqk
bradlys 4y ago
The ones I’ve seen in Paris don’t use a wheel but instead use a hefty metal roller. It’s a bit unintuitive at first because it looks so weird.

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]