Goodbye MetroCard! [View all]

[SocialDemocrat61]

The MetroCard Never Got Its Due
A symbol of New York is gone.

By Matteo Wong

On a chilly December morning, I descended a flight of stairs and entered the New York Transit Museum. Housed in a decommissioned subway station in downtown Brooklyn, the museum was packed with elementary-school children on a field trip. All around me, tour guides shepherded groups of them through the various exhibits. Later on, I heard one guide ask if any of the students knew how to pay for the subway. “You tap a phone,” a child volunteered.

For decades, the default answer has been something else: You swipe a MetroCard. Something like a flimsy yellow credit card, the MetroCard has bound together nearly everyone in the city—real-estate moguls and tenants, Mets and Yankees fans, lifelong New Yorkers like myself and new arrivals from Ohio. Any tourist who visited New York inevitably got one. But now the MetroCard era is about to end. Today is the last day you can purchase a card.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the organization that operates the city’s public-transit system, has for years been phasing out the MetroCard in favor of contactless payment—tapping your phone or a credit card, much as you would at any store. The new system, known as OMNY (“One Metro New York”), will bring together the benefits of technological progress: tens of millions of dollars in savings for both riders and the MTA each year, shorter lines, less plastic waste. Many other large metro systems have already fully transitioned to tap-and-go; in this sense, New York is behind the times.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/metrocard-farewell-new-york-subway/685276/