Stand clear of the closing era, please.
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.
“Goodbye, MetroCard. You served us well,” Lieber said at a Crain’s New York Business event.
“But it’s time to retire you to the Transit Museum, to spend many happy days with your old friend, Mr. Token.”
Lieber promised existing MetroCards will continue to work at turnstiles for “at least six months” after the final date.
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.
“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.
“It did feel like a great leap forward for the city,” Tuttle told The Post. “You could just swipe a card and go.”
But 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 Art for Artists program, Tuttle 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.”
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