[PHOTO] The MetroCard of New York City versus the Metropass of Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

Last year, on my return from my birthday weekend in Montréal, I a compared the cards offered by the Sociéte de transport de Montréal with those offered by the TTC. The RFID-equipped smart card L'occasionelle, valid for a fixed period of time, really impressed me.

This year, my trip to New York City brought me in contact with the Metropolitan Transit Authority's MetroCard, specifically the seven-day MetroCard on sale for $US 32 at any of the automatic card dispensers. I am glad I bought it, even though, with single fares being $US 2.75 and my travel patterns being what they were, I did not quite travel enough to directly justify the cost. I could have taken the subway more, and more importantly, the psychological ease of knowing that I would have access to unlimited travel if I needed matters.

The MetroCard, introduced in 1993, makes use of magnetically encoded data on its black stripe. The promise, as Adam Clark Estes noted over at Gizmodo, was never quite fulfilled, the technology being somewhat fragile, card-holders sometime needing to make multiple swipes. (This happened to me once.) That said, the amount of data that the MetroCard collects is something that my Metropass just cannot do, and lots of data is surely something that any major transit operation needs if it is to have any idea as to how its services are supposed to evolve.

The MTA is apparently opting to move to a more modern smartcard option by 2023, ending the MetroCard's tenure. May this new incarnation work more reliably than the first, while keeping the first's goals intact.