On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Steve Fitzgerald wrote:

In message , Paul Corfield
writes

For most journeys, though, it's like New York - you just buy tokens
from the booth and it's one token per trip, no matter how long or
how short.

The New York City subway stopped accepting tokens in 2003.

Really? I was last there in 2001 so didn't know. Why did they do
this? What do they now accept instead?

They replaced it with the magnetic stored value / unlimited ride pass
called Metrocard. A great step forward in my view - once you've learnt
the correct swipe speed through the top mounted reader on the turnstile.

http://mta.info/metrocard/index.html

The only downside I found when I was there last year... I bought a
Metrocard with a 1 week 'travelcard' loaded the first week. Then I
realised as I was staying in Downtown Manhattan I was walking virtually
everywhere, so I thought I would just load some prepay on it the second
week like Oyster. No, you have to get a whole new card even though it
looks exactly the same and comes from the same machine. I think they're
missing a trick there as there were loads of dead Metrocards lying about
the place.

Is that such a big deal? Since the cards are flimsy little bits of
plastic, it's no worse than people binning paper tickets here. I'm sure
they will adopt non-contact reusable smartcards soon (and are trialling
it, as has been pointed out), though, for the same reasons we have.

The really dopey thing, i found, was that the ticket machines didn't sell
unlimited ride cards, only the carnet-like cards. And had a 6 USD limit to
the amount of change they'd give you, which, given that a six-ride card is
ten bucks and ATMs all give you twenties, is bloody annoying!

tom

--
They didn't have any answers -- they just wanted weed and entitlement.