“On Monday, the city’s system took a significant step toward a more modern way for passengers to pay their fares. Starting late next year, they can do it the way Londoners already do, by waving cellphones or certain kinds of credit or debit cards at the turnstiles in the subway or the fareboxes on buses.
“A committee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved a $573 million contract for a new fare payment system adapted from the one in use for several years on the London Underground and London’s commuter railroads. New electronic readers will be installed in 500 subway turnstiles and on 600 buses in New York beginning late next year, and will reach the rest of the city’s subway stations and buses by late 2020…
“It will certainly change riders’ habits. No longer will they have to endure frustrating waits in long lines at card-dispensing machines in subway stations, though there will still be machines for people who do not have cellphones or credit or debit cards.
“Nor will passengers have to refill their fare cards week after week or month after month. The new system can keep track in an account that riders can check online…
“Officials see the new payment system as a way to make getting into subway stations and onto buses faster, though that could bring more passengers into a system that is already straining to handle the millions it carries every day…”
Several interesting things arising from that article and then reading the official MTA Board paper.
The scheme concept is not very far removed from Oyster in London. While the big media emphasis is on contactless payments the scope also includes a MTA PAYG smartcard (presumably for those who can’t/don’t have bank accounts), modified ticket vending machines and also equipping MTA railroads with new ticket office equipment. There is also a proposed use of optical readers at stations and on buses for bar code tickets via smartphone apps. The scheme is based on getting contactless payments in first as a trial, then system wide alongside Metrocards. There is then a phase to introduce the MTA smartcard and then Metrocards and the associated kit will be decommissioned and removed. Cubic’s experience with London’s system has put them in very good stead to win this New York work as their technical rating in the evaluation was way ahead of the other bidders.
The other significant point of interest is the very detailed MTA Board paper which includes all the financial aspects, all the bidder names and who was rejected at which phase of the procurement process and why. Vastly more information is released in New York than we ever get to see in London where everything is clouded in “commercial confidentiality”. It’s interesting to see that you get far more disclosure in both New York and Hong Kong than we ever get in London. A lesson there for TfL’s “transparency”. What there isn’t in NYC is a fancy business case with non passenger benefits etc. It’s all presented as a simple system replacement and catching up technological developments. I do wonder, though, what happens at the end of 6 years of project implementation as technology will, no doubt, have moved on yet again.
At the moment, few US issued cards include contactless functionality. American Express is the leader, all their cards use it, but many other banks are still issuing “old” type cards.
I was surprised on a visit to NY (couple of years ago) that I was the only person in a large store who paid by contactless, everyone else used that prehistoric swipe and sign process.
Wonder if this transit roll out will improve the take up of contactless cards in NY…..
Similarly, I laughed out loud when visiting the States a few years ago and I had to swipe my credit card. I hadn’t done that in years in Canada…
Just to spell out. In Europe at least, “swipe” does not necessarily imply “sign”. To probably oversimplify, the first generation uses a zip-zap machine, and then requires signing. Second comes swipe and sign, third is chip and pin, then most recently (for amounts below some threshold) just wave the thing around somewhere near the machine.
If the US has not moved to chip-and-pin, it is not one but two generations behind. (I last used a zipzap a few weeks ago, but this is pretty rare!).
Slightly off topic, but has anyone noticed that the lifts in St. Pancras down from the domestic HS1 trains, describe the -1 level as “Subway” (both in writing and spoken by the lift). I have absolutely never come across this in London, where the whole TfL/mainline train universerve seems to universally refer to the Underground as just that!
@IG
In British English subway means “pedestrian footway under a road” rather than the US English meaning of “subterranean train service”.
Which makes the choice of name for the sandwich chain a bit strange to my ears, even after decades of occasional use!
Briantist,
True, but where did the American’s get their idea to call their underground a ‘subway’? From the British!
Various parliamentary bills had the term ‘subway’ in them to mislead parliament into thinking they weren’t approving a railway (with all the established rigmarole that would entail). These tended to be ones that were intended to be cable-hauled.
So we had the Tower Subway and the Glasgow Subway and at one stage the City & South London was referred to as a ‘subway’ and not as a railway. It is not surprising the Americans were confused. I don’t know when we started referring to pedestrian underpasses as subways but I suspect that they were few and far between and, when they became more common, we utilised the American word for the an underground railway.
@POP
I did an ngram view of subway, metro and underpass…
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=subway%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Csubway%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cunderpass%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cmetro%2Cmetro%3Aeng_us_2012&year_start=1880&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csubway%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csubway%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cunderpass%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmetro%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmetro%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0
It’s quite interesting that subway took off in the US in 1905, and metro in the UK has been on the decline since 2000. And underpass… is rank outsider.