Subway Stories
subwaystories.nyc
subwaystories.nyc
> Subway Stories is a series of vignettes that analyze open data to understand how New Yorkers work, enjoy themselves, and stay connected. The interactive visualization allows users to explore how different groups in NYC travel and effectively uses a complex dataset to glean insight into how folks move about the city
An article: https://www.untappedcities.com/new-map-of-one-billion-nyc-su...
You'd just have to find an empty value Metrocard (that wasn't previously bent for this trick), make a partial vertical bend in the magstripe track in a certain area, then swipe a few times and the turnstile would let you in on the swipe following display of the "Swipe again at this turnstile" message.
I think it had something to do with causing difficulty writing to the magstripe track, and the system generously allowing entry if it couldn't determine the last write state of the card, before the whole card got revoked? Or something along those lines.
Apparently the catch was you had to have a "two-trip" card. The other catch was these were not that readily available and were only distributed by specific social agencies. My buddy got one when he applied for SNAP benefits and said he needed the card for transport to his gig.
Once he had the card, he had his co-worker bend it for him and he said in the year he was working there, he never had to buy a metro card and saved quite a bit with the hack. Apparently it was still working as late as 2017 (The MTA never fixed the issue) but Metrocards were completely phased out last year as OMNY took over completely after starting in 2019.
The trick did work on regular cards that you could just pick up off the floor - but at some point they fixed the general glitch. It's interesting that it continued to work on only certain types of cards though!
It didn't return after the pandemic.
Even as someone that's been in the city a long time I found something new to learn, like the number of people commuting from outside Brooklyn to downtown Brooklyn every day. Fascinating.
The site is back up now. Thanks so much to anyone who left a kind word, and my apologies for the downtime. Ironically, some server-side logic that was supposed to make sure I don't run up a huge Mapbox bill got into an unexpected state somehow.
If folks are curious about how it was built, maybe I'll write up a blog post. I also want to take this opportunity to plug our talk at the NY Transit Museum next week! It's not too late to get tickets here: https://www.nytransitmuseum.org/program/opendata/
https://subway-stories-sql-server.fly.dev/mapbox-load
Error checking mapbox load: Error: HTTP error! status: 500E: I can't even load the fly.dev website, it keeps timing out. I guess they forgot to pre-provision/under-provisioned it
However, it's understandable that some people wouldn't necessarily want to pay for high amounts of max machines.
Apparently it doesn't auto-scale automatically either, you have to opt into it.