I Quant a Victory: MTA Adds New Button for No-Left-Over-Balance MetroCards!

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Quantitative Analysis of NYC Open Data: Every data set that the city releases tells a story. This blog is all about telling those stories, one data set at a time.

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March 24, 2015

I’m excited to report a victory for this blog.

At this point, you may have heard of the $19.05 trick I wrote about last year. Basically, under the old fare, if you purchased a card using the default buttons offered by the MTA, you could literally never zero your balance out riding the subway and refilling. But if you instead memorized and typed in your own amount, $19.05, you could get a card with EXACTLY 8 rides on it. Leftover MetroCard balances added $95 million dollars to MTA profits in 2011 alone, and I had no doubt that these hanging balances were playing a role in that. I called on the MTA to make a better purchasing experience for riders.

That blog post, which brought in over a million unique visitors, led to a response by the MTA:

“These machines do not hold an infinite amount of change and the denominations are suggested to insure there is ample change to accommodate customers who pay with cash. That being said, we will certainly look at this as part of the process involved in rolling out the next scheduled fare increase slated for next year”

Now, the fare increase has indeed come. And as promised the MTA “looked at” the problem. That look has availed itself as two important improvements.

First, they have released a new fare card calculator which allows you to determine how to buy or refill a card to get even balances. That is pretty exciting, though odds are that most people, especially tourists, will not be using it day-to-day when they make purchases. Still, it’s a step in the right direction as far as transparency goes.

Second, and more importantly, they added a brand new button to the purchase screen. It may look strange among its more round friends $9, $29 and $39 (or $10, $20 and $40 when refilling) but it is one of the magical things I have been asking for. If you click $27.25, you get EXACTLY 11 rides. Finally, you can get a zero balance using a default button and riding our system. That is why the new button is there. No need to memorize secret numbers anymore. This is true both for refills and for new purchases.

So, if you want the ability to get even numbers of rides, and only pay for what you can actually use, you may want to use that button and only that button to buy and refill cards (assuming you are not using a monthly unlimited).

So we are all good, right? Well, no. Some important outstanding issues remain:

We should be given an option to purchase a predetermined amount of credit or rides. Imagine if you could go to a machine, say “I would like to buy 8 rides”, and the machine charged you the appropriate amount. That is pretty much how the entire world works (I’d like to buy X, it costs Y), but these vending machines work backwards (I would like to spend Y, OK, you get X rides). This should be fixed, though I recognize it may take a non-trivial software change.
When displaying preset buttons, we should have an indicator showing how many rides we are buying. Clicking the $10.00 button gets you a certain number of rides. How many? It turns out 4.036 rides. If that is the case, tell us on the screen. Then you would see that the $20 button buys you 8.072 rides, the $40 button gives you 16.145 rides and the $27.25 button gives you 11.000 rides. Which would you pick?
We should be able to make purchases that are not divisible by 5 cents. The current restriction makes it pretty hard to get back to an even balance, even with the calculator. That’s why the table below shows only two options in green that allow even balances. There is no logical reason for this restriction on credit card machines so I’d like the MTA to fix it. And on credit card machines, they won’t even need “infinite change”.

As much fun as I had seeing people in line at the subway stations typing in $19.05, I’m happy to see this positive step forward. I’m humbled that one small blog and its readers can lead to a change that will affect a system used by millions of people every day. And I do appreciate what the MTA has done here, even if there are more changes that should be made.

So how much less often will people see “insufficient fare” and miss a train because they are a nickel short? Perhaps I’ll have the data to quantify that one day, but from experience I know it’s at least one.

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12:26am

(Notes: 320)