When MetroCard Fails

[Kris]

February 1, 2004

F.Y.I.

When MetroCard Fails

By GEORGE ROBINSON

Q. Occasionally my unlimited MetroCard will fail, and there is inevitably a long line for the attendant - or no attendant at all. Am I breaking any laws if I save everyone's time and hop over the barriers?

A. Don't do it. In the eyes of the law, it's still fare-beating. As Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, says: "A police officer who sees you go through doesn't care that you have a monthly card. He's going to give you a ticket."

You should go to the nearest booth and tell the clerk your problem. "The clerk can see that the card is damaged,'' Mr. Fleuranges said, "and either correct it or give you an envelope to send it back, and he can buzz you through the gate legally."

In general, if your MetroCard does not work:

With a regular, pay-per-ride MetroCard, go to a station booth and ask the agent to transfer your money to a new card. If the card is too damaged to read, it will have to be mailed to New York City Transit.

An unlimited-ride MetroCard must be mailed to New York City Transit for replacement. To receive a full credit for time remaining on your card, the envelope must be postmarked no later than one day after the problem occurs or five days for the one-day Fun Pass. Sundays and Federal holidays are not counted.

Addressed, postage-paid envelopes are available at subway station booths and on buses. The envelope comes with a questionnaire that lets you describe the problem.

E-mail: fyi@nytimes.com

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Donh]

I have a LIRR ticket (monthly) that is a "plus2" ticket which has the unlimited subway ride feature on it. A few months ago the subway feature stopped working so I took it to the booth clerk. She tried the card and said it was ok. I tried several times but to no avail. I was told she would take the card and replace it. That was not an option since my LIRR ticket is printed on the other side. She told me to take it to the LIRR. The LIRR clerk told me they couldn't do anything for me since it was an MTA issue. I was fortunate since the card started working again. Seems like all the turnstile readers may have been (dirty)?. This lead me to wonder what recourse I had with a dual purpose card. The MTA and the LIRR pointed to each other and I couldn't give up the card since it was my monthly LIRR ticket. They couldn't seem to understand why giving up the ticket would be a problem. Catch 22. Any suggestions in case of future problems? :roll:

[Ninjahedge]

I understand them saying "no don't jump it" but the problem is, when you are late, standing in line to be helped is the last thing you need.

When are they just going to install the tracking chips in our skulls so we can pay, and be followed, everywhere in NYC? ;)

[Kris]

February 3, 2004

MetroCard Dispensers Breaking Down, Victims of Tampering and Their Own Success

By MICHAEL LUO

Not quite nine months after the orange, yellow and blue MetroCard became the only way to get through a subway turnstile in New York City, transit workers are called to fix the vending machines that dispense them roughly 800 times a day — with 1,637 machines in the entire system, statistics show.

With each muttered curse from a passenger as a missed train rumbles past, the token's flashy, flexible replacement — the centerpiece of an ambitious vision of a 21st-century transit system — is securing its place in the city's landscape as something to complain about.

"It affects everybody," said Rey Labron, 39, a messenger in Harlem, as he stood in line at a subway booth at East 125th Street because all three MetroCard machines in the station were scrolling the red message "Out of Service" on their L.E.D. displays. "It makes you go to work late when you have to wait on a big line."

To be fair, some repairs involve repeated problems at the same machines, and most of the time the machine is not completely out of order. More often, it is not taking bills, or is refusing to dispense single-ride tickets, or is experiencing some other problem that does not make it absolutely impossible to buy a MetroCard - although that may be little solace to the rider whose bill a machine will not take. And often, the problem cannot be blamed on the machine but rather on the scam artists who have tampered with it. With repeats figured in, officials estimate that about one-third of all the machines are getting some type of service each day.

MetroCard machine repairs have nearly doubled since tokens were eliminated in May, and New York City Transit is looking to increase its crew of MetroCard machine maintainers by 60 percent, to 108, at a cost of $3 million, even as many of its other departments endure cutbacks.

Call it the price of change.

The half-century-old subway token was no match for the MetroCard, its high-tech replacement. MetroCards are critical to transit officials' visions of a 21-century subway system, in which riders buy their fare cards from vending machines, follow electronic voices and signs and ride trains that are controlled almost completely by computer. As part of this effort, the transit agency closed 45 subway booths last August, replacing them with MetroCard vending machines. Seventeen more are to close in coming months.

But by now, most New Yorkers are deeply familiar with occasional MetroCard frustration: entire rows of machines out of order; long lines behind the only working machine or the only one that will take cash; getting to the front of the line to have a machine eat your $5 bill or to discover that it will not take your credit card.

"Just give me my token and let me use it," said Darryl Gates, 39, a journeyman at the Fulton Fish Market, looking to buy a single-ride card from a machine that was being fixed on a recent morning.

The root of the problem, officials said, is not the machines themselves but vandalism and the demands of a 24-hour transit system. Over all, they said, the MetroCard system is a huge success. "There's always going to be issues," said Steven Frazzini, vice president of MetroCard program management and sales, pointing out that the machines processed more than 101 million transactions last year. "They're getting a lot of use."

The nation's second-largest municipal rail system is Chicago's, which carries 1.5 million riders a day, compared to more than 4 million in New York. In Chicago, fare cards are sold only through vending machines, and repair crews respond to about 60 calls a day for 340 machines, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Transit Authority said. In Washington, whose subway system transports 650,000 riders a day, fare card machines work 99.6 percent of the time. But Washington's system and parts of Chicago's shut down overnight. All three cities use machines made by the same manufacturer, Cubic Automated Revenue Systems.

After the vending machines' initial rollout in 1999 in New York, they were failing far more often than transit officials had promised - once every 2,000 transactions, instead of every 10,000 transactions. But after some adjustments, the machines now fail at a rate of about once every 12,000 transactions. The number is deceptive because it does not take into account common headaches like the bill handler getting jammed with an old bill.

"A customer has five one-dollar bills, two fives and a ten," said Paul Korszak, assistant vice president of MetroCard sales and customer service. "It just takes one of those out of a sweaty pocket to introduce a jam."

The problems have created more than a few busy days for the mobile teams responsible for keeping the machines running. Louis Maldonado, 39, and his armed partner, Michael Hickman, 61, were camped the other day in front of two machines at the William and Fulton Streets entrance of the Broadway-Nassau subway station. After fixing a half-dozen machines at another station earlier in the morning, they arrived to find the two machines not taking bills.

The problem turned out to be vandalism: Mr. Maldonado reached into both machines and fished out MetroCards stuck in their bill-handling units.

Of 25,382 repairs in December, 16,936 involved the bill-handling unit. About 45 percent of these - or 30 percent of all repairs - were caused by tampering. The tamperer's goal is to break the machine so that riders will be forced to use the services of a person who just happens to be waiting nearby with a handful of unlimited-ride day passes offering to swipe people through for $2.

"They start a transaction," said Antonio Suarez, chief officer of automated fare collection equipment maintenance for the transit agency. "Instead of money, they introduce a card or a foreign object."

"What these guys will do is they will purchase multiples of those cards and just switch them as they're swiping people through and charge them two bucks apiece," said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York City Police Department.

The scam was in full view on a recent afternoon at the station at 125th Streeet and Lexington Avenue, where a group of men jostled to swipe riders through the turnstiles. All three MetroCard machines in the station were out of commission.

Officials say the scam represents an evolution of the extinct art of "token sucking," in which a person would clog the token slot with a matchbook or even glue. After the stymied rider walked away, the token sucker would clamp his lips over the receptacle and suck the token out, then turn around and resell it. The scam produced repair headaches similar to those the transit agency is experiencing with MetroCard. Repair crews used to fix turnstiles at a clip of about 250 a day, about 60 percent of them because of paper stuffed in the token slots.

Some of the swipers of today, as they are nicknamed, have stumbled upon a MetroCard quirk in which someone can bend a discarded card a certain way, then swipe it through a card reader three times quickly and somehow end up with a $2 credit.

A man who called himself Charlie and said he was 31 demonstrated for a reporter at the station at 103rd Street and Lexington Avenue.

"I can make $200 or $300 a day," he said. "This morning, I got here at 11. By 11:30, I made $25. Then I went to 125th Street. Up there, I made $30 in 15 minutes."

"The most I ever did was $250," he said. "That day I worked from 9 in the morning until 5."

Transit officials confirmed the problem but said it had not been fixed because that would make it harder to swipe legitimate cards through the turnstiles.

Officials for Washington's Metro said that their fare card dispensing machines were almost never tampered with and that fare swiping was not a problem, largely because riders were required to insert their fare cards when they went through the turnstiles to the subway and when they exited. Officials in Chicago reported a similar lack of vandalism.

After finishing with the two machines at Broadway-Nassau, Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Hickman moved on to the Chambers Street station of the C and E lines, where swipers had struck as well. Mr. Maldonado had planned to start on the southern end, where one machine was out, but after calling in to his headquarters, he learned of an "all out" condition on the other side. When he arrived, he found three broken vending machines, two of them unable to accept bills and a third unable to accept bills or dispense single-ride cards.

Swipers can be charged only with a transit violation, "unauthorized fare media," which carries a fine of $65 or occasionally a jail sentence of one to two days, Mr. Browne said. Because the crime does not rise to the level of a misdemeanor, he added, an officer must see the fare swiper in the act more than once to make an arrest.

Legislation is pending in Albany to elevate the crime to a misdemeanor. Even so, police officers made 2,033 arrests for fare swiping last year, with the monthly arrest average jumping from 134 to 194 after tokens were eliminated. Officers also issued 1,600 summonses for fare swiping.

Another frequent problem is with what officials call the "fare card transportation module," which processes, encodes and dispenses MetroCards. Problems with the fare card system account for about 13 percent of repairs. The rest are typically for the single-ride-ticket dispenser, the coin-accepting mechanism or the receipt system.

Officials said they had tried to build redundancies. If the bill accepter is not working, customers can use credit cards. If the MetroCard dispenser does not work, they can buy single-ride cards. In the rare case when a machine is completely out of service, they can go to a station agent, or try one of the 600 express machines throughout the system, which take only credit and debit cards and seldom have problems.

But the problems with the bill handler are clearly a concern because about three-quarters of transactions at MetroCard machines are in cash. The best they can do, officials said, is to get to the problems more quickly.

The turnaround time for fixing a machine has improved. Machines were out of order anaverage of 15.7 hours in June, a month after the token was eliminated. That dropped to a low of 10.4 hours in November, largely because officials switched to an overlapping shift system that made sure workers were on hand at busy hours. They also asked their workers to work overtime and added extra weekend crews.

Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Hickman finished up with the three machines at Chambers Street and headed south to the World Trade Center station. Swipers regularly position themselves at the unsupervised entrance, so they decide they should check it before they move on.

Sure enough, five out of six machines had error messages.

"They were here," Mr. Maldonado said.

He set down his bag and got to work.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/02/03/nyregion/metro2.jpg

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Schadenfrau]

Doing away with the tokens seems to be the worst idea the MTA ever had. I encounter so many machines that either aren't giving single rides, aren't accepting bills or simply aren't working at all.

If the machines aren't giving single rides and someone only wants to purchase one fare, there are just no other options.

[Kris]

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/02/03/nyregion/03cnd-metro.1.184.jpg

The look is somewhat cartoonish.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/02/03/nyregion/03cnd-metro.2.650.jpg
Michael Hickman, left, stood watch as Louis Maldonado repaired a MetroCard vending machine at the Broadway-Nassau station in Manhattan.

Do the smaller machines have a different or reduced function?

[Schadenfrau]

The smaller machines only accept credit/debit cards. Yet another step towards chasing the non-wealthy out of the city.

[Ninjahedge]

It isn't a step to chase the poor and downtrodden out of the city!!!

If you want to be nihilistic and Orwellian, you will say that this is yet another way Big Brother is going to track us!!!

if you are going to be pessimistic, put a little more effort into it Schad!!!! ;)

BTW, I think the system would work a bit better using the Path train system for feeding the cards, but that is just my opinion.

As for the machines, it is not the machines that suck, but the people that are trying to get something for nothing. Agreed, it is harder to get something from one of them than from a token booth, but if half of the problems are coming strait from people farqing up the system....

Question though, are these machines networked? Do they know when one isn't working? Do you think it would be good or bad to install things like cameras on the machines to take pictures of the people any time they are used, and store the last 5 that used then machine sucessfully. (IOW, keep taking photos until it has problems to find the ones jamming the system...).

I am just wondering when they are going to do the human version of EZ-Pass. You can use it for yourself, or double swipe it for a friend depending on what plan you get.

Replacing and repairing cards might be a PITA, but this would probably be better than carrying around a bunch of cards with you (those things get nice and crinkley in my pocket if I am wearing jeans...)

[Schadenfrau]

How are people "farquing" up the system?

I live in a neighborhood with a lot of poor residents, most of whom do not have access to credit and debit cards. There are four MetroCard machines in my local station. Every day, at least one of them won't accept bills.

In case you haven't noticed, Ninjahedge, the machines are already equipped with cameras. Yet somehow this hasn't put a stop to those legions of people you're convinced are toying with the system just to mess things up for the good people of New York.

[Ninjahedge]

SF, look at the stats. Half of the problems stem from vandalisim. That is how the "people" are "Farqing up the system".

Also, the article does not mention once that ANYONE was caught vandalizing the system through pictures taken.

I think that these cameras may only work to take a picture of the person during a transaction. I am not sure how well indexed the pictures/data is and how effective it would be to find anyone.

If it is just a stack of photos, it will not do us much good.

And I never said legions of people. I never said hoards. I said people.

Meaning more than one. Unless you think that the "people" they are referring to doing all the card jamming and unlimited pass swiping are all just one man who runs really fast..... ;)

[Schadenfrau]

I'm suspicious of the idea that so many of the repairs are made as the result of vandalism. In all my time in New York, I've never seen a single person attempt to break a machine. However, I see the machines messing up on at least a daily basis.

[Ninjahedge]

Thing is, have you ever seen one break? Or has it only been broken when you get there?

They also say that they have a larger occurance of brakage than places like DC where the system does not run at night.

These things are bing jammed up when there is noone around to look after them.

If you were a vandal, would you want anyone seeing what you were doing?

[Schadenfrau]

If I was a vandal, I imagine I could find more interesting things to damage than a MetroCard machine. Why do you think people are so interested in jamming them?

I've been present for plenty of machines breaking down.

Do you not find it the least bit alarming that no one is around to witness the machines being broken? I'm of the opinion that token booth clerks are more valuable than yet another machine. A machine can't answer questions about service, it can't keep an eye on activity in the station and it can't phone the police if someone is attacked.

[krulltime]

:roll: So you think token booth clerks are reliable? I had a different experience.

[Schadenfrau]

I'd trust them if I was stabbed in a subway station more than I would trust the MetroCard machine.

Many people in my subway station aren't capable of using the machines. I've been asked on quite a few occasions to conduct the transaction on someone's behalf. Why, I'm not sure. I would guess that some people are more comfortable dealing with a human being than a machine. Perhaps some people are illiterate and incapable of reading from the machine. In any case, it's upsetting to me that these people aren't taken into consideration when the MTA makes decisions.

[Ninjahedge]

Schaden, the crime rate in the subways has gone down recently.

In case you have not been to a lot of the stations in Chinatown, Brooklyn or other areas, the token booths are QUITE a bit away from the platform.

Agreed, I do prefer having a person there, but sometimes I think I would prefer a subway map and a working machine than a depressed pissey clerk that is just counting the hours before they get off.

It is kind of scary when you smile and say thank you to these guys and all you get is a cold look and your change.

Now, as for the Vandalisim, are you implying that there is some sort of conspiracy here? That they are trying to break the unions by way of these devices? Why do you find it so difficult to believe that there may be a hundred or so people, out of the millions that ride it daily, that might be jamming these things up regularly?

[Schadenfrau]

What would they get out of jamming them? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be possible to get money from the machines.

I'm not saying that NO ONE would vandalize the machines, but I do think the 45% number is on the high side. More likely, the so-called vandalism is the result of a malfunctioning machine or someone unfamiliar with the system.

[Ninjahedge]

The jamming itself could be for a number of reasons, but most of what they SAID 9note this is just what was given as public information) was that things like metrocards were crammed up into the bill slot.

Agreed a few of them may have been from technical idiots that even after the slot would not take the card INSISTED on forcingthe machine to take it, but most were probably for reasons outlined in the article, such as individuals buying an unlimited day pass, jamming the machine, then "offering" their service for $2 or less (say $1.50 as a "discount").

Sometimes it is just kids trying to break or jimmy a machine the way they heard a friend do it. Not all vandals are Scratchiti efficianatos....(sp).

[Schadenfrau]

Clearly, if the technical issues are such a problem, single rides should be sold through the ticket booths.

[Ninjahedge]

That could be a way, but it gets difficult to do that in some areas. NYC has a HUGE system in effect. There are simply too many stations to have people sitting around waiting for the 3 people to come in to buy single rides at 3am....

Maybe we need to just permanently shut down some of the stops in the system. the 1 and 9 have a LOT of stops that are only 4 or 5 blocks away (5 min walk to all but the most incapacitated). I think we should stop trying to make a stop at every corner and see if we can make the NEED for these booths and machines less without substantially restricting the service provided...

[Dulcinea]

I think there's a conspiracy by the booth clerks to sabotage the machines so they can keep their jobs. hehe...

[Kris]

February 6, 2004

Subway Complaints, as Old as the Subway (2 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Subway Headache: MetroCard Devices Often Need Repairs" (front page, Feb. 3):

Charming as tokens (particularly the old cutouts) were, the idea that MetroCards are less efficient than their minted forebears makes little sense. A line is a line, whether it's for a token or a card.

Even in the numismatic halcyon days, if you had no tokens when you got to the station, you had to wait in line and miss your train.

And how many buses did we miss because those vitamin-colored transfer slips vanished into our back pockets, were chewed up by our keys or melted in the rain?

None if we'd just taken the subway, because subway-bus transfers weren't possible.

You report that there are 1,637 MetroCard machines: that's 1,637 new places to buy subway rides. Even if we take into account the 800 times per day that transit workers are called in for repairs, and the 45 shuttered token booths, there are still many more places to buy rides now than there were pre-MetroCard.

This is further proof that the urge to carp predates both the token and the MetroCard as a staple of New York straphanger culture.

ALEX KLIMENT
New York, Feb. 3, 2004

To the Editor:

Re "Subway Headache: MetroCard Devices Often Need Repairs" (front page, Feb. 3):

You quote a passenger at a station where all the MetroCard vending machines are out of service: "It makes you go to work late when you have to wait on a big line."

Where have individual planning and individual responsibility gone? Why don't people refill their MetroCards at their leisure rather than when they're on their way to work?

GEORGE PRANS
Bronx, Feb. 3, 2004

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

February 10, 2004

NYC

If Turnstile Balks, Who Is Fare Swiping?

By CLYDE HABERMAN

FOR New York subway riders, they are three of the most irritating words in the MetroCard era: "Please swipe again."

They popped up for Jeremy Boyd last week at the 86th Street station on the Lexington Avenue line. That is an extraordinarily crowded station, one of the worst in surveys done by the Straphangers Campaign, the riders' advocacy group. At 8:40 a.m., when Mr. Boyd arrived there last Tuesday, people on the downtown side are typically backed up the stairs all the way to the street.

It is not a good place, and 8:40 a.m. is certainly not a good time, for things to go wrong.

But they did for Mr. Boyd, 34, an analyst for a communications company in Lower Manhattan. He swiped his 30-day MetroCard, bought for $70 on Jan. 28 and valid for unlimited riding until Feb. 26. "Please swipe again" appeared on the turnstile screen. So he swiped again. Then again. And again. And again.

He noticed the same problem at other turnstiles. Ordinary New Yorkers trying to get to work could not get MetroCards to function. Behind them, the lengthening lines began to be reminiscent of Bulgarian food shops in the communist days. Wading through the crowds to seek help from already-burdened booth clerks did not seem a sensible choice.

Frustrated, some went over or under the turnstiles. Mr. Boyd was one of those who went over.

He landed in the arms of waiting police officers, one of whom wrote a summons carrying a $60 fine. Nearby, Mr. Boyd said, some of his fellow jumpers were also being ticketed. It seemed "like a sting operation" to his wife, Sabrina, who was on hand.

"Fare evasion," the summons said. The officer wrote that he had seen Mr. Boyd "jump over the turnstile to avoid paying fare." The flaw here is that Mr. Boyd did pay his fare - in advance. He says he even proved it to the officer by running his card through a scanner at the station. "I've never gotten on a train without paying the fare," he said.

The position of New York City Transit is that turnstile jumping, by definition, is fare evasion; if something goes wrong, you should appeal to the fare booth clerk.

That definition may have made absolute sense with the old subway token. Clearly, if you jumped the turnstile, you did not pay. But with prepaid MetroCards, and inevitable computer malfunctions, might new definitions be in order?

"If they charged him with turnstile jumping, that's one thing," Mrs. Boyd said. "But they charged him with fare evasion, and he didn't do that."

The governing regulation is Section 1050.4a of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's rules of conduct. It says in part: "No person shall use or enter the facilities or conveyances of the authority, for any purpose, without the payment of fare or tender of other valid fare media used in accordance with any conditions and restrictions imposed by the authority."

Don't feel bad if you had to read that a few times to get it. Bureaucratese is what it is. The rules also warn that violators could face "ejectment" from the system.

"Other valid fare media" turns out to mean items like the MetroCard. As for "conditions and restrictions," the transit agency says that this language covers the turnstile-jumping ban and the requirement that riders with card problems should go to a booth clerk.

BUT how is one supposed to know any of this? Nowhere is it spelled out, surely not at fare booths. True, the convention has long been that you don't jump turnstiles. But we are in a new computerized world. Riders might be forgiven for believing that they kept their end of the bargain by handing over as much as $70 upfront. They have indeed paid their fare.

There is also a common-sense question for the police. When machines become balky and presumably law-abiding people behave out of character - especially at a station as packed as the one at 86th Street - should an officer's first instinct be to reach for his summons book?

"If you're a traffic cop and the light's not working, you'll go and direct traffic and have an orderly flow, not hide out and wait to give people tickets," Mr. Boyd said.

He has until March 2 to answer the summons. If it is any consolation to him, a university student named David Palmer found himself in almost an identical situation last spring. Mr. Palmer went before the authority's Transit Adjudication Bureau, in Brooklyn, and explained what happened.

Before you could say ejectment, the hearing officer said he'd heard enough. He tossed out the ticket.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

July 18, 2004

Subway Riders Master the Art of the Swipe

By MICHAEL LUO

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/07/18/nyregion/swipe.large4.jpg
"You have all these dirty, filthy cards going through the turnstiles," said Tom Dzikas, who repairs subway turnstiles.

By now, the motion is ingrained in the psyche of most New Yorkers, that quick, fluid flick of the arm and wrist that results in the cheerful beep and thunk signaling successful entry into the city's subway system.

But like a pitcher who suddenly cannot find the plate, or a golfer who develops a slice, even the most experienced MetroCard swipers have times when the same practiced movement that has worked for them day after day inexplicably betrays them.

"It's like a karma thing," said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit advocacy group. "Some mornings, you get up on the wrong side of the bed, and part of the rotten day is that the same swipe you've done always doesn't work."

The exasperation begins with a polite message on the turnstile's electronic display: "Please swipe again."

The rider tries it again. Same message. And again. Now the display changes to say, "Please swipe again at this turnstile."

At this point, any pretense of subway gravitas is lost. The shoulders slump, while the rider focuses on the card, running it through again and again. Impatient commuters pile up behind. Once more, really slowly, then really quickly. All to no avail.

"I keep having to swipe, four times sometimes," said Christine Lee, a Manhattan resident, while trying unsuccessfully to swipe at the 51st Street station on the Lexington Avenue line the other day. "It's a big pain in the posterior."

As it turns out, the number of swiping problems at turnstiles had crept up in the subway system after the elimination of the token in May 2003, statistics show. But New York City Transit officials scrambled to address the issue, and their efforts seem to have borne fruit, with the number of service calls to turnstiles hitting historic lows lately.

Officials attribute the recent improvement to several factors, including a systemwide software upgrade, continued vigilance in cleaning the devices that read the MetroCards, and a last group of New Yorkers finally getting the hang of that simple little motion that has become a part of the city's DNA.

When the token was eliminated, about 93 percent of riders were already using the MetroCard. Still, with more than 4.7 million daily riders, a sizable number of holdouts continued using tokens until the very end. Many of them had to learn for the first time the carefully calibrated motion that most New Yorkers learned in the late 90's, when the orange, yellow and blue cards went into widespread use after being introduced in 1994.

But technological upgrades bring their own headaches. The key to the MetroCard is the black strip that runs along its bottom and contains computer-encoded information. That strip is what enables the MetroCard to be so flexible, offering unlimited ride options, discounts and free transfers, but it can also bring problems.

Every turnstile reader has a series of magnetic heads that read the information on the card and deduct a fare. A small screen on the turnstile shows that the deduction has been made.

If the rider lifts the card even a little, or swipes too fast or slow, the heads will not properly read the information on the card.

"You have to swipe between 10 and 40 inches per second," said Antonio Suarez, assistant chief officer of automated fare collection equipment maintenance for New York City Transit .

Sometimes, one of the magnetic heads - for example, one that verifies that a fare has been deducted - is unable to properly read the card, while the others work perfectly.

In these cases, the electronic display tells the rider to swipe the card again at the same turnstile. But if the rider ignores or does not see the instruction and moves to another turnstile, the display may blink back perhaps the two most deflating words in the subway lexicon: "Just used."

Turnstile service calls are usually prompted by rider complaints, Mr. Suarez said. Sometimes, nothing is really wrong with the turnstile, he said, but "one irate customer will complain, and the station agent is going to call it in."

As a result, officials attribute at least a portion of service calls after the token was eliminated to the adjustment process of those subway riders who were the last to switch to the MetroCard. Steve Frazzini, chief officer of automated fare collection program management, said that after the token was eliminated, the transit authority began selling three million single-ride MetroCards per month, up from 700,000.

"Everyone who used a token now had to learn how to swipe," he said.

But even if a person swipes perfectly, an equipment malfunction can still keep him or her out, especially with the system absorbing thousands more swipes a day.

Between 65 and 70 percent of the time, repair workers who are called on a turnstile complaint find some problem with the heads, statistics show. Like the heads in a VCR, the ones in card readers can wear out. After all, they are reading cards at an extraordinary rate. The busiest turnstile in the subway system, turnstile No. 10 in the middle array by the escalators in the main entrance to the subway below Grand Central Terminal, reads a whopping 236,000 cards a month.

More often, however, the heads do not need replacement, but are just dirty.

Tom Dzikas, 44, who is among about a hundred workers sprinkled throughout the system to repair turnstiles and other equipment, said a major contributor to the problem is scam artists who root through the garbage for discarded cards or pick them up off the floor. They then bend them a certain way, taking advantage of an anomaly in the MetroCard software, to gain a $2 fare. Transit officials are aware of the problem but have not fixed it because it would make the readers less sensitive for regular riders.

Many people who are using discarded cards are the same ones who have been wreaking havoc on the MetroCard vending machines by jamming them, forcing riders to ask those people to swipe them in with a manipulated card in exchange for $2.

"These cards are filthy," Mr. Dzikas said. "You have all these dirty, filthy cards going through the turnstiles."

Sure enough, as Mr. Dzikas inspected a turnstile at the 51st Street station on the Lexington Avenue line recently, a disheveled man dug through the garbage nearby, emerging with a handful of cards and shuffled off.

But the turnstile readers also collect plenty of grime from everyday use. Steel dust from the friction between the subway wheels and the tracks settles into the slot. Paper single-ride tickets leave behind microscopic fibers. And people store their MetroCards in all sorts of strange places, where they accumulate dirt and other unfriendly substances.

At the beginning of each shift, station agents are supposed to clean the slots with felt-sheathed cards saturated with alcohol. Sometimes, though, over the course of a busy eight-hour shift, the slots need to be cleaned again, but the agents are unable to leave their booths to do it. Transit officials are experimenting with a new program in which customer service representatives roam around busy stations, instead of being confined to the booth. One of their jobs is to regularly clean the turnstile slots.

About 10 to 15 percent of turnstile problems have to do with the circuit board that functions as the brains of the turnstile. And 5 to 10 percent involve another circuit board that connects to the magnetic head assembly.

Turnstile repairs occurred much more frequently during the token era, because of all the mechanical parts that could break down, officials said. Scam artists would jam the receptacles with glue or paper, and would suck the tokens out after the stymied rider had walked away.

Mis-swipes were also a much bigger issue earlier in the life of the MetroCard. A study by Hunter College graduate students in 1998, a year after MetroCard went into systemwide use, found that a third of the riders had to swipe at least twice to get into the system. Half of those riders who were unsuccessful the first time had to swipe three times or more to get through the turnstiles, the study said. But a move to a different type of magnetic head that began in 1999 and was completed in 2001 seemed to reduce the problems significantly.

After token use was eliminated, the number of service calls on the system's 3,160 turnstiles dropped to 1,392 in May 2003 from 2,285 in April.

Soon, however, problems began picking up again, although at a lower volume than before. Service calls were hovering around 1,500 to 2,000 a month. Although the figures pale in relation to repairs on the system's 1,637 MetroCard vending machines, which take place at a rate of 800 a day, the trend still worried transit officials.

"I can't say I am happy when any customer is denied access to the system," Mr. Suarez said.

With fewer calls overall after the elimination of the token, more workers were free to do preventive maintenance work, like disassembling the card readers and cleaning the heads with alcohol and a brush. The transit agency's policy is for the heads to be cleaned at least every 15 days. But officials tried to make sure busy stations had maintenance more often. Records on some busy stations on the Upper East Side over the last year show that maintenance workers sometimes returned to the same station more than a dozen times a month.

While trying to sort out the reason for the increase, transit officials stumbled upon a software glitch that was causing errant error messages for riders.

The glitch occurred when someone tried to use a card that had been reported lost or stolen and was, therefore, barred from the system. If the person trying to use that card mis-swiped in a certain way, the person who came next was often denied entry after an initial failed swipe.

Transit officials got the company that manufactures MetroCard equipment, Cubic Automated Revenue Systems, to reprogram the turnstiles to fix the problem and rolled out the upgrade last April. The results were immediate. In May, the number of service calls for turnstiles fell to 738. In June, 740 service calls were made. And the first half of July has brought 240 calls.

Although some of the decrease may be seasonal, Mr. Suarez said he believes the numbers will hold. "I think we are on a downward trend," he said.

Mr. Dzikas's shift the other day was representative. After handling calls for problems at 51st Street on the Lexington Avenue line, then at 34th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, and finally 23rd Street back on the Lexington Avenue line, he called in to his boss to find there were no more repairs for him to handle. Instead, he was told to break out his brush and do some cleaning.

Beginning in January, transit officials plan to replace the reader unit on every turnstile and test out new ceramic base plates for them. The cards were wearing grooves into the old steel plates. If the groove became too deep, cards were misread.

But the ultimate solution to the MetroCard frustration lies in new technology. Even transit authority officials concede that mis-swipes are inherent in a system that is now more than a decade old. Critics argue it is time for an overhaul.

Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have all recently begun introducing "smart cards" to their transit systems - passes with embedded computer chips that require riders only to lightly tap them over a target on a reader. New York City Transit officials say they are studying the technology, but are nowhere close to making the leap.

So, for now, riders will have to keep swiping.

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Ninjahedge]

You think maybe if they used a system like what they have for the PATH trains, it would work better?

More mechanical parts, granted, but it is swept across at a constant pace.

Also, when the card is empty, it collects them, which could help a bit with the card chuckers.

[Kris]

July 21, 2004

Me and My MetroCard: A Daily Pas de Deux (4 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Subway Riders Master the Art of the Swipe" (news article, July 18):

Now that the token has rolled off into the sunset, New Yorkers are being challenged to master the time-sensitive art of swiping a MetroCard.

Pity, then, the left-handed among us who must perform this daunting exercise at right-hand-oriented subway turnstiles. Either we become instantly ambidextrous or risk the wrath of the multitudes piling up behind us ("Let's move it, O.K.?!").

Ah, but take heart, fellow portsiders. Our moment comes at the highway toll booth, where we can revel in depositing our tokens or coins with a sweeping southpaw flourish.

Ed Grimm
New York, July 19, 2004

•

To the Editor:

Like the majority of subway riders, I finally got the knack of the swipe. Yet from time to time my trusty Mail and Ride plastic card won't cough up the "go" command.

When that happens, I've learned that I can often fix it myself by simply wiping the magnetic stripe on my card several times against whatever clothing I am wearing.

Janet Schulman
New York, July 18, 2004

•

To the Editor:

Your discussion of the MetroCard system doesn't mention the fact that the "beep" one hears when the card is swiped successfully is the same as the "beep" one hears when it is not.

Famously impatient New Yorkers trying to catch a train could use an audible cue that tells us we can sail on through. Instead, every turnstile user has to squint at the readout to determine if "beep" means stop or "beep" means go. This adds to congestion and frustration.

Since turnstile software is being upgraded to make MetroCard swipes more reliable, how difficult could it be to change the beep, too?

Alex Yourke
New York, July 18, 2004

•

To the Editor:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has many excuses. The bottom line? Card readers at the turnstiles must be clean to work properly, and they inevitably get dirty from thousands of swipes a day. Enough workers have to be hired to clean the machines. Card sellers can't be machine cleaners, too.

Clearly, the system is badly mismanaged at the daily expense of millions of New York City Transit riders. It's past time for public officials to take corrective measures.

Sam Leff
New York, July 18, 2004

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Ninjahedge]

The beep thing is a good comment.

As for Lefty, GMAB. So for the 10% out there that are lefties we have to go out of our way to make special turnstiles so that they can swipe w/o switching sides?

Also, if you had them on both sides, could you see the confusion?

maybe they should start doing these things more like EZ-Pass. Charge $5 or $10 for a card, just like your ID card, then sweep it over a sensor.

It would require some networking though, which would be difficult, and I see a 1-2 year "beta" period needed to get all the bugs out. but with it you could charge different for different stations, different times of day, etc etc.

[Schadenfrau]

I'm still missing the tokens.

I've been using public transportation in a spotty manner since breaking my leg, and more than once I've had to hand the bus driver crumpled dollar bills because my MetroCard had run out and I didn't have change.

[Ninjahedge]

Don't you love the fact that they can't make change anymore?

And that is another weakness of the system, it is difficult to tell how much you still have on it unless you go to a reader at the station (and they are not always easy to get to.)

A debt card might work better. Again, EZPass....