The MTA will stop selling MetroCards sometime after 2025 — ending an iconic part of city history and lore, MTA Chair and President Janno Lieber announced in a speech Wednesday.
The transit chief didn’t give a firm date for the familiar yellow-and-blue card’s finale, but this is the first time the MTA has given any kind of time window for the three-decade-old card system to be finally phased out for its much-sturdier and contactless counterpart, OMNY.
The MetroCard’s retirement has been a long time coming — as the MTA started eyeing the contactless method back in 2017, but the project was plagued with delays.
In October, the transit authority finally began replacing subway kiosks with ones that spit out OMNY cards . The month prior, student MetroCards were replaced by OMNY cards.
OMNY, which can be accessed through mobile devices or through a $5 physical plastic card, was introduced in 2021 as a more convenient alternative to the old-school MetroCards.
Plus, OMNY offers free rides after 12 swipes in a single week, making the contactless method more affordable to frequent commuters.
“Why are we doing all of this? The answer is simple, making it easier to pay the fare and making it more affordable means more for paying customers,” Lieber said Wednesday.
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“Contactless fare payment is not only faster and more convenient; it’s going to allow us to do more, much more with discounts and promotions. It’s a much more dynamic system.”
MetroCards have reigned supreme in the Big Apple since its introduction in 1993. The OMNY of its time, the originally blue cards replaced subway tokens, which were only sold in packs of ten, and introduced the city to the world of free transfers.
Much like the OMNY rollout, it also took years for MetroCards to be introduced. Carol Bellamy, the first woman elected to the City Council, floated the idea back in the 1970s, but the MTA didn’t seriously contemplate it until 1983.
The Whitehall Station was the first to get the automatic fare collection (AFC) turnstiles in 1994 — and sold 600 MetroCards on its first day, New York Transit Museum Curator Jodi Shapiro told The Post.
It would be another three years before the rest of the city’s stations and all the buses in the MTA’s flee had their own AFC turnstiles, an undertaking that cost almost $700 million at the time, and was one of the biggest projects in the subway’s then-90 year history.
The MetroCard vending machines were unveiled in 1999, over 2,250 of which are in subways today — but it wouldn’t be until 2003 that token sales finally ceased.
“Let’s be honest. New Yorkers hate change. When the MetroCard debuted, plenty of die-hard token users struggled with the idea. But after a few years, public perception shifted, and I think the convenience of the cards was really appreciated,” said Shapiro.
“That’s the New York way — resist, complain, learn the benefits, and adapt. Not exactly the Kubler-Ross model, but close.”
Despite the initial resistance, the plastic passes quickly became much more than a method of transit and was quickly usurped into the identity and iconography of New York City.
T-shirts, coffee mugs, pins and even Christmas tree ornaments emboldened with the distinguishable Helvetica font can be found throughout the five boroughs — and local artists have routinely turned toward the disposable cards as a form of media to craft their pieces over the last three decades.
The cards themselves have also served as canvases through the MTA Arts & Design program, Lilly Tuttle, Curator at the Museum of the City of New York pointed out. One such piece includes the 7 million cards simply printed with the word “Optimism” in 2009 as part of a mission to inject joy into the transit hubs.
While OMNY also signifies a leap toward the future, Tuttle acknowledged there will be a void when MetroCards become nothing more than a collector’s item.
“I think there will be something lost,” said the lifelong New Yorker, who keeps several subway tokens near the desk at the museum.
“There’s so much nostalgia for the token and people remember the different token styles … At the MTA store, you can buy token earrings and token lapel pins and things like that. I can imagine that in the future the nostalgia for the MetroCard will only increase because it will feel sort of retro — that whole idea of bygone technology that people increasingly have a great, great affinity for.”
