Inside The MTA’s Money Room

https://www.curbed.com/2021/04/al-putre-mta-money-room.html

by js2 • 5 years ago

105 49 5 years ago

I found this interesting:

[Al Putre] firmly defends the MetroCard system and its awkward swipe, on the grounds that it was far easier to maintain and thus cheaper than its alternatives: ”We got a lot out of that — the technology is 25 years old, and we’re still running it on an IBM mainframe.”

krallja• 5 years ago

Previously seen in “The NYC Subway System Runs on OS/2” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181866

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

awkward swipe

Why is swiping considered awkward? I lived in NYC for several years and never had much of problem with it. Every now and then you have to re-swipe, but not often enough for it to be a major inconvenience.

It's also one of those UI things that may not be perfect, but because people adapt to it, it doesn't need reworking. Like QWERTY, or Amazon.com. In fact a rework may even be counterproductive, and certainly expensive.

fastball2• 5 years ago

I have no idea what kind of costs were avoided, but what I can say is that I 10x prefer the UX of the Tube in London to the Metro in NYC. Contactless means I can use: a dedicated transit card, my credit card, my iPhone, or my Apple Watch to tap in.

I also much prefer the sliding gates rather than the turn-style, but that's a different consideration.

Also with regards to cost, I bet they would make a significant amount of the investment back with increased fare-paying if they did the sliding door style gate (that much harder to jump over) and the contactless entry (that much easier to pay for it).

deathanatos• 5 years ago

So, I looked up a video to see what it looked like, and hit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic

This is of course cut to only show failures. But, e.g., in Boston, the MBTA uses RFID cards. One big benefit is that I don't have to take the card out of my wallet: I only need to pull the wallet out of my pocket, and tap the entire thing against the sensor — it can read the card through the wallet.

I'd wager it's easier than that swipe. Probably lasts longer, as there isn't any physical contact.

(Now, the MBTA also still has a paper-card variant, and that isn't RFID: you have to feed the card through the machine. Tourists might encounter that, but the locals use RFID cards.)

Similarly, Caltrain in the Bay Area uses similar cards. (Not quite as nice, though, to reload…)

porknubbins• 5 years ago

I took that to mean that the manner of swiping required is awkward. If you are only used to credit card swiping its a very different feel- slightly slower and different friction. When I first moved it took me several swipes to the frustration of many experienced NYers behind me.

ookblah• 5 years ago

its awkward until you get the hang of it lol. when i lived there the first few weeks i would have to repeatedly swipe it.

hardwaregeek• 5 years ago

A lot of people are really bad at it. They start slow then speed up which confuses the machine.

shalmanese• 5 years ago

One big thing allowing NY to keep its legacy system is that you only swipe upon entry but not exit (since all fares are flat rate). Entry into a subway system is uniform but exit is lumpy so RFID systems have to be put into place to get enough people out through a limited set of gates without excessive waiting.

The upgrade to the NYC system is mainly so that it can introduce distance based pricing but nobody is willing to say this bit out loud.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

Pretty much the entire rest of the world has long since moved to tap/RFID solutions, which are faster and less fiddly. In fact off the top of my head I can't think of any other major city still using swipe cards, even in developing countries.

nemo44x• 5 years ago

Ha, I think you’ve just mastered it unconsciously. First time users tend to struggle with the timing of it (not too fast, not too slow) and don’t always realize it has worked or not. I’ve seen countless people walk into a turnstile that isn’t open as well as stand there with the card in their hand waiting for someone unaware that the beep (of which there are often many going on at once) signals they can pass, as well as the little click sound or in many cases the green light or the little LED lights that say “Paid”....

narraturgy• 5 years ago

It's awkward because people who are new to the city don't intuitively understand the necessary cadence of the swipe. Every time I bring a friend to the city for the first time and hand them a card, they struggle to get the machine to read their swipe. First, they swipe too slowly, I tell them to speed it up. They swipe again, too quickly this time, and I tell them to slow it down. They look at me, exasperated, and I take the card and swipe myself through to show them the rhythm. They usually mess it up one or two more times before they get it right.

Furthermore, I would argue that the cards are shaped incorrectly--the cut edge of the card is on the trailing edge of the swipe, which seems unintuitively for something meant to be pushed forwards.

bschwindHN• 5 years ago

The swipe is so awkward they made a mini-game out of it in Among Us (not sure if this is true but the experience is the same, too fast, too slow, etc.)

RFID solutions are just vastly superior. Go to Tokyo and ride around the trains there. You can hover your card over the reader, tap your phone, your watch, whatever, and it reads it reliably 99.9% of the time (another made up fact but yeah, it's reliable).

bobthepanda5• 5 years ago

It is worth noting that the same year the MetroCard became usable on the entire system (1997) Hong Kong launched its Octopus smartcard, which is just tap and go and works even if, say, your card is in a wallet inside a handbag.

WMATA in DC would introduce a smartcard in 1999, so New York mostly bought a technology at the tail end of its life and had to pay the increasing costs of maintaining it.

c6400sc2• 5 years ago

I worked at the MTA for 6.5 years.

Al Putre is a guy with a friendly smile, a classic New York accent, and is not afraid to show you he's always carrying a revolver.

Oh, and a hatred of the dollar bill.

edit: formatting

Scoundreller4• 5 years ago

I remember buying a $3 trip on Atlanta’s public transit system and the machine pumped out 17x $1 coins at me.

The Canadian in me was very disappointed.

c6400sc2• 5 years ago

Ideally, you would have gotten bills back from the machine (if configured with something called a cash recirculator), but those aren't common.

And as a Canadian, I thought you'd be used to dollar coins ;) . The USA is pretty much the only developed country that uses bills for amounts that small-- which is a thorn in the side of the cash operation of places like NYC Transit.

computator• 5 years ago

Right now, those cubicles are idle, because during the pandemic, token booths are not taking cash.

Is there some other option for people who have only cash?

Besides, I thought it was established a few months into the pandemic that fomites[1] are not a likely route of transmission for coronavirus.

[1] An object like a doorknob that may be contaminated with infectious agents (such as bacteria or viruses) and serve in their transmission.

tialaramex2• 5 years ago

As I understand it, if you only have cash, you buy a MetroCard, with the cash, and then you refill the MetroCard (with cash) as necessary.

You are correct that fomite transmission appears to be fairly rare, it's hard to be sure exactly how rare, but New Zealand, which has few enough COVID-19 cases to actually care about the finer details (they're headline news!), has two cases which they originally suspected were fomite transmission but now think were as likely droplet suspension in the air. A person who boarded an elevator that had been used by an infected person got the virus, but perhaps there were droplets left in the air of the elevator cabin for a few minutes, and a person who used the same trash can as an infected person also contracted the virus, again perhaps instead of fomite transmission via the trash can the shared area where it was located somehow still had the suspended droplets.

pc862• 5 years ago

And not to get too deep into what-kind-of-trash-can-was-it stuff, but just about every trash can I've ever used has had the opportunity for pretty significant airflow depending on what you're dropping in. The lid movement on the hands-free ones may even be worse in terms of airflow.

bobthepanda5• 5 years ago

At least on buses, you dump them into a coin slot next to the card reader, so no one else is touching your coins, with the slight caveat that you are not getting change back.

lostlogin• 5 years ago

Besides, I thought it was established a few months into the pandemic that fomites are not a likely route of transmission for coronavirus.

The virus has been shown to last for three days on bank notes (see below), though how easy it is to catch from the notes isn’t mentioned. If my job involved touching bank notes from NY public transport last year, I’d sure as hell have been nervous, as small chances presumably add up. Those machines appear to move fast too, so maybe airborne spread could be possible?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

pc862• 5 years ago

...the MTA is an organization where few people ever leave: “Our turnover is so small,” he says. “From the top to the bottom, 600 people in this organization, every single person, I signed off on their paperwork. These are my troops. These guys have supported me over the years. All my managers, I think my most junior manager might have 15 years.”

This seems great from a sentimental standpoint but perhaps it's part of the problem with the MTA in general. You don't want the same people with the same ideas for decades. That's how you end up with government agencies running IBM mainframes in 2021, which this guy seems to say as a point of pride rather than shame.

Edit: Not that running an IBM mainframe itself is necessarily shameful (although the default certainly leans that direction). But as others pointed out this guy purchased expensive-to-maintain systems at the tail end of their life with seemingly little or no regard to how it affected the users as opposed to just how easy it was for the operating agency. Not exactly something to celebrate.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

How much of this stability and lack of turnover is due to unions and their rules, or similar policies that favor current workers? How much of it is enabled by the lack of competition government agencies face?

Inside The MTA’s Money Room

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