MTA Plans To Phase Out MetroCards

NEW YORK CITY — MetroCard swipes will be tapping out soon enough. The MTA plans to phase out the staple of New Yorkers' wallets over the next six years, replacing it with a "contactless" system like those long used in other big cities.

The new system will let straphangers pay fares by just tapping their credit card, smartphone or new MTA-issued fare card at the turnstile or bus door, according to the MTA contract proposal. And commuters will be able to reload their cards online or at local shops rather than having to find a subway station to top up.

Cubic Transportation Systems, the San Diego-based firm that designed the MetroCard more than two decades ago, will install the new machines at some subway stations and buses within the next 18 months. The MTA's Finance Committee on Monday approved a $573 million contract with Cubic, which will go to the full MTA Board on Wednesday.

Watch: MTA Plans To Phase Out MetroCards

The MTA plans to introduce the new contactless turnstiles alongside the existing ones at every subway station and bus within the next three years. MetroCards and the machines that read them will be gone by 2023. The New York Post first reported the details of the plan.

(For more on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

"It's the next step in bringing us into the 21st century, which we need to do," MTA Chairman Joe Lhota told The New York Times.

Suburban commuters will get to use the new system starting in 2022, when it becomes active on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad.

The plan will let New York City catch up with transit systems in cities like London and Washington, D.C., where Cubic has also designed and introduced so-called near field payment systems. The MTA first tested contactless cards in 2006 and 2007 and sought proposals for a widespread system a decade later in 2016.

It'll also give straphangers more flexibility by doing away with the MetroCard as the sole method of paying a subway fare. The new turnstiles will accept payments from smartphone apps such as Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay. The MTA plans to start selling new swipe-less fare cards about three months after installing new collection machines in every station, the proposal says.

"There are so many good reasons to do this, I don't know where to start," Andrew Albert, chairman of the New York City Transit Riders Council and an MTA board member, said at Monday's Finance Committee meeting.

The $573 million contract with Cubic will pay for the design, implementation and maintenance of the new system for 12 years and nine months, said Alan Putre, the MTA's chief of revenue control. Cubic's total proposal costs more than $1 billion, with the rest to be paid at the end of that nearly 13-year period, Putre said.

The new system could save the MTA some money by reducing its need to carry plastic fare cards and handle cash, Putre said. The Cubic contract will also cut the cost of maintaining railroad fare vending machines by about $1 million a year, he said.

The gradual introduction of the new system mirrors the MetroCard's rollout in the 1990s, which eventually led to an uptick in subway ridership, according to the Regional Plan Association. The swipe cards were first introduced in 1993, but the MTA continued selling and accepting subway tokens for another decade before finally killing them in 2003.

"Moving to an open payment system has the possibility to be just as transformative by speeding up buses, improving fare enforcement, reducing congestion and improving accessibility and affordability of the system," the Regional Plan Association, a major urban planning group, said Monday in a statement.

(Lead image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)