
MTA Responds Citing Lack of “Infinite Change” for MetroCards - iquantny
http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/97027810529/update-mta-cites-lack-of-infinite-change-in-current
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a_c_s
The author, clearly not a developer, doesn't seem to see the potential for
high cost in making a software change. This particular change involves
training for all customer-facing employees and making a change to the software
on each of the 20-year-old machines. Such a change would also increase the
complexity of the software, of which I have the impression is already finicky
and less stable than would be ideal.

I don't know how software updates are rolled out, but it wouldn't surprise me
if a technician has visit each machine individually.

This isn't some trivial change to a non-essential web app, but rather a
significant investment in time, energy and money.

The prudent thing to do would therefore be to roll many changes into releases
and minimize the number of releases done.

Given how few people this issue affects, I'm glad the MTA is pushing this off:
I'd actually prefer they didn't fix this issue.

\---

Also, to argue that this affects poor people the most while arguing that an
acceptable solution is to make a change exclusively for people who use credit
cards illustrates having a minimal understanding of poverty.

\---

Finally, judging agreement by how many hits you get is an absurd thing to do.

~~~
shittyanalogy
Do you honestly think that hundreds of machines capable of authorizing
simultaneous credit card transactions and synchronizing mag stripe cards
against a central service all receive a price update through direct manual
access?

~~~
a_c_s
Remember this system was rolled out in 1993, meaning any hardware/software
combo started development before that. So the question is: do I believe it
likely that a system developed before the internet became widespread has an
archaic, non-networked way of handling software updates?

My answer is yes.

(Though for the sake of whomever maintains the system I'd certainly hope to be
wrong about this! Either way, an update to all of these machines is likely not
the trivial change the author presumes it to be.)

~~~
LammyL
I would expect this change to be easier than you say. If they increase fares,
I am pretty sure they are able to set the new fares overnight on all their
machines and not have a delayed rollout schedule. Imagine the chaos of they
couldn't.

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edent
I don't know the NY Subway particularly well, but why not change it to say
"How many rides would you like to take?" and then display the amount?

And WTH is a "Bonus"?

I got very annoyed after leaving San Francisco a couple of years ago, I had a
few dollars left on a BART ticket and was leaving the country. Apparently, the
only way to get a refund was to post the ticket back their HQ and await a
refund. Yeah, right!

Compare that to London - I just hand in my ticket and get a full refund in
cash. [http://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/replacements-and-
refund...](http://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/replacements-and-
refunds/oyster-refunds-and-replacements?intcmp=1785#on-this-page-2)

 _sigh_ America really does love make things needlessly complicated, doesn't
it.

~~~
covercash
>America really does love make things needlessly complicated, doesn't it.

I'd say it's just another manipulation tactic companies use to squeeze every
cent they can out of their customers - real world dark patterns.

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Guvante
To be fair, handling refunds has a real cost that may not be considered in the
cost of the ticket. Also since most of these are government agencies, the lost
fares are probably counted as part of the money they need to collect.

Thus fixing the issues could require higher fares to compensate.

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dfxm12
Do people use their metro cards _only_ on the subway? How common is that? The
one thing to keep in mind is that a metro card acts as payment for all of
these modes of public transportation:

    
    
      MTA Staten Island Railway
      MTA Bus Company
      All PATH stations
      JFK-AirTrain
      Westchester Bee Line Buses
      Roosevelt Island Tram
      NICE Bus (Nassau Inter-County Express)
    

You can't really say that the MTA is out to steal money from you or hiding how
to optimize your top ups, because not all of these cost an even $2.50, and MTA
doesn't even set prices on all of these. Maybe you can write it off as paying
for convenience, but the 5% bonus adds up since cards can last over a year.
You only really have to worry about the amount on your card the _last_ time
you top up.

Even if you only take the subway, if you put at least $50 on the card, you're
playing with house money including the bonus. A group of tourists can easily
reach this over a four day weekend.

~~~
gergles
> you're playing with house money including the bonus

No, you are never doing this. The prices should just be 5% cheaper and there
should be no 'bonus'. The fare is obviously set taking the bonus into account,
so it makes more sense to just drop the prices and to drop the bonus.

~~~
dfxm12
There's more to it than that. MTA is competing with, for example the port
authority's SmartLink cards when it comes to paying fares for the PATH trains.
That 5% bonus is also a carrot to get people to get the metrocard.

...and MTA doesn't set PATH fares.

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Cyykratahk
What exactly is the problem with the prices? Because the issue here seems to
be only for a very small set of users who have purchased a new card (starting
with zero balance) and do not intend on topping up later on (do they just
throw the card away?). What's the difference between a leftover of $0.01 and
$2.49? You're still not going to make that train. And after topping up even
once, the remainder will be some other random amount less than a whole fare.

The public transport where I live in QLD, Australia, (TransLink) has pricing
based on distance (zones) travelled, so you'll almost never have a perfect
leftover amount. Even so, the auto top-up system removes the need to even
think about how much money is left.

~~~
yebyen
The article which this was a follow-up to showed that by spending $19.05 you
can get one more full ride than if you spend $19.00. The charge for a new card
is a dollar, so if you show up with $20.00 and get a new card, you wind up
with $2.45 left on your card when you've used as many rides as you can use
without refilling the card.

I think it was also said that the cards are really flimsy and won't be likely
to make it through more than one or two "top-ups" unless you handle like eggs.

Every trip is $2.50, so getting stuck with $2.45 in credit when you followed
the default purchasing options is at least a little slap in the face when they
are already purporting to give you a "bonus". They are in reality probably
going out of their way to sell you an uneven number of fares.

If you are seriously asking what's the difference between $2 and $0.05, I
suggest you contact the MTA and see if they are willing to adjust the bonus
percentage to give away $0.05 to card payers (where making change is not an
issue), as extra on top of the existing 5% bonus on $20 purchase, so it comes
out to a round number. (Hint: they won't.)

If you refill with $20 and use all of the fares, you wind up with a balance of
0.95, then next time it's $1.95, then $0.45, then $1.45, and finally $2.45
again, rinse and repeat. If I've done the math correctly, it's not a case of
"almost never" having a perfect leftover amount. You will never get all of the
value out of your card unless you do some math and make it happen for yourself
every time.

Granted I'm sure this is not the first time in history people who won't sit
down and do some math are getting screwed, or for that matter the largest
amount ever.

~~~
rgejman
I really don't think this is a big deal. I've had the same MTA card in my
wallet for over a year (and a previous one like it for a year before that). I
just top it off with $50-60 a month and there's no issue.

I appreciate that this might be bothersome to some tourists, but my experience
is that most tourists who buy MTA cards don't calculate exactly how many rides
they're going to take in a several day visit to NYC.

~~~
yebyen
I don't think it's a big deal either, but it's harder to argue that it's not a
dark pattern at all. I promise you there is a non-zero number of people who
are filling up with cash and throwing their cards away when they reach the
error "insufficient funds". At least there is some transparency about the fact
that those people are really throwing away $1 because the cards themselves
unambiguously cost $1.

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akgerber
The MetroCard system is pretty old, and the MTA is probably doing the minimum
possible maintenance since it was planning on phasing out the system 2 years
ago: [http://secondavenuesagas.com/2013/02/24/a-rudderless-
project...](http://secondavenuesagas.com/2013/02/24/a-rudderless-project-to-
replace-the-outdated-metrocard/)

And this leftover-money pattern will probably disappear once the base fare is
raised, anyway.

People who live in the city generally just repeatedly reload their Metrocard,
especially since the MTA added a $1 charge for a new one, anyway.

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nimblegorilla
> So the MTA could make a small software change that only applies to the
> Credit Card Only machines with limited effort.

The previous post had some good points, but I doubt a government written
software system can support that type of change with only "limited effort".

~~~
iquantny
Ahhh, government software. The change would be in the numbers displayed...
Seems pretty straightforward given how often they raise fares.

~~~
rtkwe
Well to change the fares they just change the amount deducted from the card.
For this change they'd have to make a change that only applies to some of the
machines. In a reasonable architecture that's a few lines in a config file
plus some way of managing which machines get that file (possibly cumbersome if
they didn't plan for this).

~~~
madeofpalk
You're making a lot of assumptions.

~~~
rtkwe
Any comments on how easy or hard the change would be are.

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rayiner
What a myopic follow-up to what was originally a myopic blog post. Of course
the denominations are a result of trying to minimize change for people who pay
in cash. And tons of people pay in cash, especially since a lot of lower-
income people rely on public transit. Getting cash into and out of a credit
card is not cost-free for people who might not have checking accounts, get
paid in cash, etc. The author needs to get out of whatever bubble he's living
in.

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scrumper
I'm not sure I want the MTA to fix this. It seems that to some degree the
large float the MTA gets from people who don't optimize their Metrocard
balances helps to subsidize fares. Certainly if they _don 't_ have the float,
it'll be a fine excuse to raise fares even more.

~~~
mason55
This generally only hits tourists but there is one place that' it's super
annoying. If you take the AirTrain from JFK to Jamaica you have to pay $5. The
issue is that you can't load that $5 onto an unlimited Metrocard (the kind
that most locals use) so you have to get a new one with the associated $1 fee.
Then you get your bonus on top of the $5 so you have a $5.40 Metrocard or
whatever it comes out to but you've paid $6 for it and now have 40 useless
cents on it once you come out of the Airtrain.

~~~
gergles
You can add cash to an unlimited MetroCard now and have been able to do so for
about a year. More annoying is that you can't use the auto-refilling
MetroCards on PATH.

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tsuyoshi
Most of the people using pay-per-ride cards don't have credit cards (or debit
cards). The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly
unlimited cards. And most tourists in New York, believe it or not, don't even
use the subway. So this is really a problem that affects a small minority of
people.

~~~
JackFr
> The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly unlimited
> cards.

That's not true.

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diminoten
This is the wrong way to respond to something like this. It's treating the
issue as if it's the single most important problem facing our time, and is
very clearly getting emotionally involved, and worked up by the bureaucratic
nature of the response.

This should have been an, "Well this is interesting and weird, they could be
more efficient in this way." kind of thing and that would be that. The MTA
responds with their incompetence and that's that. No surprises.

But to pretend like this is an actual social justice issue is taking the whole
thing way too far, and the writer has gone from "someone who found something
strange and interesting" to "someone who is trying too hard to make this
moment last".

Just let it go, it's hardly a big deal.

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joelanders
I'm going to get downvoted for being a grammar nazi, but this disingenuous
"spokesperson" should know the difference between "insure" and "ensure."

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josephschmoe
I feel like this could be easily handled. Does anyone want to print out the
three important values and tape them to machines/nearby walls so everyone
knows?

(I don't live in New York.)

