The MetroCard, New York City’s finicky transit fare payment system, died on Thursday after years on life support. It was 34.
The MetroCard’s parent, the MTA, spent eight years slowly killing it, with the ultimate goal of replacing it with a new system called OMNY, short for “One Metro New York.”
MTA spokesperson Aaron Donovan said, “We seem not to have a huge appetite for this” when asked for comment, indicating the agency needed space to grieve.
The MTA said it will no longer sell MetroCards as of New Year’s Day, ending a run that frustrated New Yorkers of all stripes.
The card became a New York icon, as well as a test of a New Yorker’s street credibility. Successfully swiping the MetroCard at a turnstile, which required a specific angle and speed mastered only through muscle memory, proved whether someone actually frequented the city’s subway system.
The swipe famously foiled Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and ex-New York senator, when she attempted to take the 4 train in the Bronx in April 2016 during her presidential campaign. It would take her five swipes before she got it right. She lost to President Donald Trump, another well-heeled New Yorker with questionable swiping skills.
The Clinton episode represented the apogee of the MetroCard’s cultural relevance, said Mitchell Moss, an urban planning professor at NYU.
“It’s fading away, where it belongs, like other pieces of plastic,” Moss said. “It had a short run, no one will miss it, no one will remember anything except the Saturday night incident where Hillary Clinton didn’t know how to use the thing.”
Hillary Clinton simply couldn't figure out how to swipe a MetroCard while she was running for president in 2016.
The MetroCard fundamentally changed how New Yorkers use the subway system. A 2017 report written by Moss highlighted how the seven- and 30-day unlimited passes implemented through the card led to huge spikes in transit ridership.
“The MetroCard really transformed the system. It didn’t happen right away, but only a few years after it arrived, the MTA started offering free transfers between buses and subways,” longtime New York City transit advocate Joe Rappaport said. “The MTA started offering weekly and monthly passes, really fueling a significant increase in ridership and saving New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The MTA was the MetroCard’s adoptive parent. The fare system was born to the San Diego-based company Cubic in 1991. New York transportation officials hired the company that year to build a new fare payment system to replace the subway tokens. The company was also hired to build OMNY.
For generations, New Yorkers used tokens purchased at booths in subway stations or at retailers to pay for every rapid transit ride. But in the 1980s, the MTA looked to follow other cities' phasing out of token systems for reloadable magnetic stripe fare cards.
The MetroCard, bearing a shiny yellow background and its own name in slanted blue letters, was first tested in the subways in 1993. That year, the MTA began marketing it as the future of fares in the subways. The agency created an oafish cartoon aardvark to represent the new system called “Cardvaark,” which was panned by Newsday at the time as "the MTA's dumb-looking, snout-nosed, bug-eyed, card-pitching mascot."
MetroCards became available for purchase in 1994. But they could only be reloaded at certain retailers, token booths and MTA customer service centers. For years, riders spurned the cards in favor of trusty old subway tokens.
In May 1997, fewer than 19% of subway riders paid their fares with the MetroCard, according to data published by the MTA at the time. But a shift happened that year after the MTA began offering free transfers between the subways and buses for MetroCard users — an option not offered to the token-toting masses. By May 1998, more than 70% of subway riders used MetroCards. More token holdouts switched over to save money on their fares in 1998 when the MTA rolled out unlimited passes.
MetroCard vending machines first appeared in stations in 1999, allowing New Yorkers to automatically reload their fare cards with cash or credit cards. The subway token was retired in 2002.
The MetroCard vending machine debuted in the subway in 1999. The MTA has now removed all of them.
The MetroCard’s replacement of the subway tokens spelled permanent changes for the MTA’s workforce.
MTA officials in the mid-1990s touted the new fare system as something that would save taxpayers money because the agency would be able to get rid of the hundreds of transit workers who manned token booths in the subway.
Those workers handled heaps of cash and tokens every day, and the agency planned to reassign them as “customer service” workers. While many of those token booth jobs have been slashed, the powerful Transport Workers Union Local 100 has forced the MTA to retain hundreds of them across the subway system. Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, those workers have been barred from any hand-to-hand transaction with riders.
Transit officials say riders will still be able to use old MetroCards with remaining value on them until June. But now, the agency is fully converting to its digital tap-to-pay OMNY system, which does not offer 30-day unlimited passes like its predecessor.
The MTA celebrated the milestone. The agency contracted “Sesame Street to voice public service announcements across the subway system, with Oscar the Grouch telling the MetroCard to “scram!”
