Swipe and Let Go

Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. Comment The first cards were blue with yellow lettering, instead of the reverse. Photo: Jon Naso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images You will not see the final swipe this weekend. The MetroCard will continue to work for months to come, till the last batch of cards hits its expiration date. But after December 31, you won’t be able to buy or refill one, and a day or a week or a month later, most of those cards will be tossed, recycled, or stashed in a drawer as bits of memorabilia. Yes, the MetroCard, after 31 years, has reached the end of the line. We got a bright-blue commemorative one as a final-days souvenir, a callback to the card’s appearance when it pushed the brass token into obsolescence, and the reliably excellent New York Transit Museum has put on an exhibition. The MTA definitely squeezed every last drop of value out of the IBM mainframe that ran it. Henceforth, the literally frictionless, touchless OMNY fare system will rule the rails. OMNY is surely better at most things than its predecessor. Given the good-God-don’t-touch-that aspect of subway riding, its contactlessness is a big improvement. (Let us pause here for a moment to recall the epitome of subway disgustingness, the token-sucker.) Nobody will miss the swipe, and especially not SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE. Until you developed the knack of that particular wrist-forward gesture, it was frustrating, often baffling visitors and infrequent subway riders. (Remember when Hillary Clinton failed to display the magic touch in 2016? The metaphor can make a person weep.) The turnstile mechanisms were tough as nails, but the magnetic-card reader required a frequent scurry of maintenance. The swipe slots had to be cleaned daily by a station agent, for example, because the heads picked up steel dust from the rails, and they had to be disassembled and deep-cleaned every couple of weeks or so. The only downside for most of us (some gripers aside) is one bit of user experience: an OMNY transaction doesn’t show you whether you got a transfer, as the MetroCard display did. That’s apparently because the fare information on the MetroCard was contained on the card itself; OMNY transactions are recorded elsewhere, like credit-card payments, and retrieving that information would take a few seconds (as it does when you pay at a cash register), an unacceptable delay as people whirl through the old turnstiles and new gates. The OMNY vending machines are less cheery to look at than their predecessors, too, but they work about the same. The Times noted today that 94 percent of riders now use OMNY rather than MetroCard. That should not be a surprise; it’s been gradually rolled out over six years, with a heavy acceleration in the past two, so people have had time to acclimate. But it’s worth noting that this time, people didn’t much need to be incentivized to do it, despite some real glitches. That is sharply different from the grudging, sluggish transition from tokens to plastic cards, which played out from 1994 to 2003. Whether out of technophobia, habit, aesthetics, suspicion, or simple cussedness, people simply didn’t want to make that change. It may have also been that the token, whatever its limits, was understandable, binary, tactile. If you had one in your pocket, you knew whether you had a fare, whereas the card’s contents were invisible until you ran it through a reader. During the I Got Mugged Again Era, there was also some risk to pulling your wallet out in an unbusy subway station, whereas a token could be handled much more discreetly. (I remember surreptitiously sliding a MetroCard out of my wallet while it stayed in an inside pocket. It was clumsy.) A widespread and quite reasonable distrust of electronic storage still existed, too, even among tech-savvy people. After all, this was a time when, if you forgot to hit Save every few minutes, your WordPerfect 3.1 document was at risk of vanishing forever if the lights flickered. The thing that broke through the resistance, back then, was the lure of a good freebie. The card made possible for the first time a weekly and monthly pass, an AirTrain rate, and especially a transfer to or from the bus system. The bonuses were marked by the arrival of a new-and-improved product, MetroCard Gold, which also was when today’s yellow-with-blue color scheme replaced the blue-with-yellow original. Any fool could grasp the value proposition after that, and as soon as those incentives were added, acceptance rose. This time around, though, there isn’t a vast benefit, apart from a different structure for the unlimited-ride pass — yet about 19 out of 20 people made the change without being paid off. Some of that is surely generational: People who grew up adopting and adapting — from PC to laptop to MP3 player to smartphone to whatever comes along next — take these changes in stride. Many of us have already been habituated to paying for everything with a tap; extending the practice to the fare feels natural and even inevitable. (I recently repaid a friend for something with $20 in cash instead of a Venmo transaction, and she looked at me as if I’d done something bizarre. I may as well have handed her some pieces of eight in a little velvet purse bag.) Information encoded on magnetic and electronic media is also less fragile than it was. Despite long-term concerns about bitrot and privacy, you can reasonably believe that if you store something online, whether as a public post or a limited-access cloud file, it’s extremely likely to be there the next time you need it, even decades later. (When was the last time you lost a Google Doc?) There’s an understanding that we can in fact leave technologies behind — cautiously, judiciously — with less risk than was once inherent. In a couple of years, the remaining trace affection for the MetroCard will likely be for the physical format of the thing itself and maybe the odd SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE T-shirt or tattoo. We’ve seen that brand of nostalgia before, too. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.