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btw, it seems that no one has mentioned that the metro card system is a mag stripe based card and is over 20 years old. The equipment is starting to reach end of life. For example, the vending machines for metrocard run on Windows NT.

The biggest benefit to all this is never having to use one of those slow-ass, badly-designed machines again. They're not only slow, the UI flow is absolute trash. I find it a lot easier to just hand my local token booth guy a couple twenties and have him put it on my Metrocard. He even did it extra quick the other day when he saw a train was rolling in 🙏
 
The biggest benefit to all this is never having to use one of those slow-ass, badly-designed machines again. They're not only slow, the UI flow is absolute trash. I find it a lot easier to just hand my local token booth guy a couple twenties and have him put it on my Metrocard. He even did it extra quick the other day when he saw a train was rolling in 🙏
The metro card just works imo. But I do have express pay enabled to try out next time I roll through Penn Station.
 
Yeah, the metrocard works great, but the vending machines are so old and so slow.

What? With the exception of the turnstiles at Path Station and JFK-AirTrain, all MetroCard turnstiles are horrific! Yes—We NYers have developed a finesse to swipes, but that doesn’t mean we’ve never been tripped up. Strongly disagree...
 
What? With the exception of the turnstiles at Path Station and JFK-AirTrain, all MetroCard turnstiles are horrific! Yes—We NYers have developed a finesse to swipes, but that doesn’t mean we’ve never been tripped up. Strongly disagree...

LOL, come on. Those AirTrain turnstiles are S-L-O-W. You put your card it, it swishes it back and forth, taking its sweet ass time and then spits it back out -- and all the while you're standing completely still and traffic behind you is stopped. Do you dead stop in your tracks when you swipe your Metrocard? No, you don't (I hope). You take a step as you swipe and immediately the card has been read and the gate is unlocked by the time you reach it. And yeah, sure, you get a bum swipe every once in a while but 99% of the time it's lightning fast. No contest.

Fortunately, the new tech they're putting in keeps the fast, existing turnstiles in place and just replaces the swipe with a tap of a card or phone. I've used it maybe a dozen times and it's almost as fast as swiping a card. There's a slight delay while it's read, but it's nowhere near as slow as those AirTrain ones.
 
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