MTA Responds Citing Lack of “Infinite Change” for MetroCards | Hacker News Reader

MTA Responds Citing Lack of “Infinite Change” for MetroCards

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63 pointsiquantny49 comments

The author, clearly not a developer, doesn't seem to see the potential for high cost in making a software change. This particular change involves training for all customer-facing employees and making a change to the software on each of the 20-year-old machines. Such a change would also increase the complexity of the software, of which I have the impression is already finicky and less stable than would be ideal.

I don't know how software updates are rolled out, but it wouldn't surprise me if a technician has visit each machine individually.

This isn't some trivial change to a non-essential web app, but rather a significant investment in time, energy and money.

The prudent thing to do would therefore be to roll many changes into releases and minimize the number of releases done.

Given how few people this issue affects, I'm glad the MTA is pushing this off: I'd actually prefer they didn't fix this issue.

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Also, to argue that this affects poor people the most while arguing that an acceptable solution is to make a change exclusively for people who use credit cards illustrates having a minimal understanding of poverty.

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Finally, judging agreement by how many hits you get is an absurd thing to do.

>The author, clearly not a developer, doesn't seem to see the potential for high cost in making a software change

Agreed, one should be fairly close to the dev team before coming up with estimates. Other red flags: "government agencies" & "So the MTA could make a small software change that only applies to the Credit Card Only machines with limited effort"

It's a price change! They don't reprogram cash registers each time a price changes. (On a side note, I do happen to be a software developer!)

It is almost certainly the case that there is no readily available mechanism for easily changing the price on credit card only machines without changing it on cash + credit card machines. Presumably changing the default pricing structure would have to change both, which would cause the problem that either a great many machines would suddenly be providing $0.95 worth of change for everyone paying with a $20, or everyone would need to start carrying around nickels.

Clearly it is more work than a simple price change to create a new user interface that asks whether you're going to be using a credit card or not before displaying the prices.

Uh, look at the screenshots, there's a "single ride" option.

Now figure out why your comment's wrong as an exercise in getting better at gathering requirements. Hint, they have to do something to all the machines every year or two...

Do you honestly think that hundreds of machines capable of authorizing simultaneous credit card transactions and synchronizing mag stripe cards against a central service all receive a price update through direct manual access?

Twenty year old machines? I would certainly believe it.

Also you would want to test every machine that gets the update in either case, so you need some kind of tech to touch every machine.

I was going to ask that as well. Thanks!

I live in NYC. It wouldn't surprise me if these machines require direct access for an update, however these machines are serviced >all the time<. Apart from anything else, they need to collect the cash from the ones that accept it, so it's likely that on a given day you'll see a couple of armed MTA employees with a machine open messing with it.

Maybe they can be fully updated remotely. But let's think about this...is that really such a good idea? Can we trust subway card machine software to be fully secure against malware and remote exploits?

Maybe it's better if the network interactions of these sorts of machines are strictly limited to operational transactions. Maybe it's better if it does takes a human being with a key, guarded by a cop with a gun, to update this software.

Remember this system was rolled out in 1993, meaning any hardware/software combo started development before that. So the question is: do I believe it likely that a system developed before the internet became widespread has an archaic, non-networked way of handling software updates?

My answer is yes.

(Though for the sake of whomever maintains the system I'd certainly hope to be wrong about this! Either way, an update to all of these machines is likely not the trivial change the author presumes it to be.)

I would expect this change to be easier than you say. If they increase fares, I am pretty sure they are able to set the new fares overnight on all their machines and not have a delayed rollout schedule. Imagine the chaos of they couldn't.

Small point, but the MTA vending machines are not 20 years old. They are among the newest most usable touchscreen devices I've encountered. Bright sensitive screens with large touch targets.

> The author, clearly not a developer, doesn't seem to see the potential for high cost in making a software change.

I see this kind of reply often, but I don't think it's the right approach: "We are sorry: what you are saying is correct, but we won't fix it because it's hard to do. Next time, try to complain about the easy fixes".

I don't think the customer should be required to be an engineer before noting that something is wrong, nor the company should be able to use its own deficiencies as an excuse about why they won't solve it. And particularly not in the case when the company is directly benefiting from its own incompetence.

> I don't think the customer should be required to be an engineer before noting that something is wrong, nor the company should be able to use its own deficiencies as an excuse about why they won't solve it.

I think you misunderstood his point. He was calling out "why would you wait for a fare increase to do that" as being naive, not "this is a problem that needs to be fixed".

Nothing wrong with calling out the problem as needing to be fixed, just saying that making two changes at once is vastly superior to trying to make two sets of changes in these situations.

Absolutely 110%: people can should raise concerns without knowing their complexity.

The problem comes in when these same people make uninformed proclamations of how easy or simple things are to fix.

I find it very hard to care about what author is trying to say because he sounds so condescending. However, I do understand his confusion somewhat.

It had been a longstanding pattern in software engineering to gradually simplify UI. As a result a lot of UI's are simple and people are assuming underlying systems are simple as well. In majority of the cases that is not true and simple UI is produced by highly complex underlying software. Confusion comes from the fact that people look at the UI and think this is simple, you just need to change this number there. When in reality you need to change an underlying system and that change could range from trivial to rewrite entire system in complexity.

visiting every machine is trivial; it occurs daily/weekly for all cash-accepting machines in order to get the cash. This is also not performed by just one low-paid employee; it is typically performed by two people, one of whom is armed and has his weapon drawn. So there's no issue sending out trained personnel to every machine, it happens every day.

Where there is an issue here is that if the software change only applied to credit card sales, there would be an accusation that the machines now favor more affluent customers who can afford to own credit cards.

The people who collect the cash are probably not the people who install, test, and verify software updates.

I don't know the NY Subway particularly well, but why not change it to say "How many rides would you like to take?" and then display the amount?

And WTH is a "Bonus"?

I got very annoyed after leaving San Francisco a couple of years ago, I had a few dollars left on a BART ticket and was leaving the country. Apparently, the only way to get a refund was to post the ticket back their HQ and await a refund. Yeah, right!

Compare that to London - I just hand in my ticket and get a full refund in cash. http://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/replacements-and-refund...

sigh America really does love make things needlessly complicated, doesn't it.

>America really does love make things needlessly complicated, doesn't it.

I'd say it's just another manipulation tactic companies use to squeeze every cent they can out of their customers - real world dark patterns.

To be fair, handling refunds has a real cost that may not be considered in the cost of the ticket. Also since most of these are government agencies, the lost fares are probably counted as part of the money they need to collect.

Thus fixing the issues could require higher fares to compensate.

To use your example though, as many transit agencies like this dark pattern: BART fare isn't a flat per-ride fee, it's based on distance. You could have a Caltrain-esque system where you put in your destination to get an exact ticket from the machine, but it's confusing to tourists and would make lines even worse I bet.

I assume you ended up with $3.80 on a card after paying $20 and using it twice? I would love to see them end this dark pattern and offer a "Downtown SF-SFO ticket" from SFO at least, maybe one at Powell too for people that lose their tickets, so no need to get a refund. Before Clipper cards were a thing, I used to lose the $3.80 (now $2.70) BART tickets so often that I got into a habit of just giving it to someone on my way into the airport.

SFMTA did away with their "10 ride booklet" to just tell people to add cash that you can use anywhere, I wonder how that works out. Then again the amounts you get at the ticket machine are sane (single ride, $5, 10, 20, 40, 50, monthly pass, etc.) and you pay extra for reloadable cards on top of that, instead of doing this $9+extra fee thing, so...

The needless complexity is just a bonus, the point is to make sure the balance of cash always flows away from the consumer.

Do people use their metro cards only on the subway? How common is that? The one thing to keep in mind is that a metro card acts as payment for all of these modes of public transportation:

  MTA Staten Island Railway
  MTA Bus Company
  All PATH stations
  JFK-AirTrain
  Westchester Bee Line Buses
  Roosevelt Island Tram
  NICE Bus (Nassau Inter-County Express)

You can't really say that the MTA is out to steal money from you or hiding how to optimize your top ups, because not all of these cost an even $2.50, and MTA doesn't even set prices on all of these. Maybe you can write it off as paying for convenience, but the 5% bonus adds up since cards can last over a year. You only really have to worry about the amount on your card the last time you top up.

Even if you only take the subway, if you put at least $50 on the card, you're playing with house money including the bonus. A group of tourists can easily reach this over a four day weekend.

> you're playing with house money including the bonus

No, you are never doing this. The prices should just be 5% cheaper and there should be no 'bonus'. The fare is obviously set taking the bonus into account, so it makes more sense to just drop the prices and to drop the bonus.

There's more to it than that. MTA is competing with, for example the port authority's SmartLink cards when it comes to paying fares for the PATH trains. That 5% bonus is also a carrot to get people to get the metrocard.

...and MTA doesn't set PATH fares.

What exactly is the problem with the prices? Because the issue here seems to be only for a very small set of users who have purchased a new card (starting with zero balance) and do not intend on topping up later on (do they just throw the card away?). What's the difference between a leftover of $0.01 and $2.49? You're still not going to make that train. And after topping up even once, the remainder will be some other random amount less than a whole fare.

The public transport where I live in QLD, Australia, (TransLink) has pricing based on distance (zones) travelled, so you'll almost never have a perfect leftover amount. Even so, the auto top-up system removes the need to even think about how much money is left.

The article which this was a follow-up to showed that by spending $19.05 you can get one more full ride than if you spend $19.00. The charge for a new card is a dollar, so if you show up with $20.00 and get a new card, you wind up with $2.45 left on your card when you've used as many rides as you can use without refilling the card.

I think it was also said that the cards are really flimsy and won't be likely to make it through more than one or two "top-ups" unless you handle like eggs.

Every trip is $2.50, so getting stuck with $2.45 in credit when you followed the default purchasing options is at least a little slap in the face when they are already purporting to give you a "bonus". They are in reality probably going out of their way to sell you an uneven number of fares.

If you are seriously asking what's the difference between $2 and $0.05, I suggest you contact the MTA and see if they are willing to adjust the bonus percentage to give away $0.05 to card payers (where making change is not an issue), as extra on top of the existing 5% bonus on $20 purchase, so it comes out to a round number. (Hint: they won't.)

If you refill with $20 and use all of the fares, you wind up with a balance of 0.95, then next time it's $1.95, then $0.45, then $1.45, and finally $2.45 again, rinse and repeat. If I've done the math correctly, it's not a case of "almost never" having a perfect leftover amount. You will never get all of the value out of your card unless you do some math and make it happen for yourself every time.

Granted I'm sure this is not the first time in history people who won't sit down and do some math are getting screwed, or for that matter the largest amount ever.

I really don't think this is a big deal. I've had the same MTA card in my wallet for over a year (and a previous one like it for a year before that). I just top it off with $50-60 a month and there's no issue.

I appreciate that this might be bothersome to some tourists, but my experience is that most tourists who buy MTA cards don't calculate exactly how many rides they're going to take in a several day visit to NYC.

I don't think it's a big deal either, but it's harder to argue that it's not a dark pattern at all. I promise you there is a non-zero number of people who are filling up with cash and throwing their cards away when they reach the error "insufficient funds". At least there is some transparency about the fact that those people are really throwing away $1 because the cards themselves unambiguously cost $1.

The MetroCard system is pretty old, and the MTA is probably doing the minimum possible maintenance since it was planning on phasing out the system 2 years ago: http://secondavenuesagas.com/2013/02/24/a-rudderless-project...

And this leftover-money pattern will probably disappear once the base fare is raised, anyway.

People who live in the city generally just repeatedly reload their Metrocard, especially since the MTA added a $1 charge for a new one, anyway.

> So the MTA could make a small software change that only applies to the Credit Card Only machines with limited effort.

The previous post had some good points, but I doubt a government written software system can support that type of change with only "limited effort".

Ahhh, government software. The change would be in the numbers displayed... Seems pretty straightforward given how often they raise fares.

Well to change the fares they just change the amount deducted from the card. For this change they'd have to make a change that only applies to some of the machines. In a reasonable architecture that's a few lines in a config file plus some way of managing which machines get that file (possibly cumbersome if they didn't plan for this).

You're making a lot of assumptions.

Any comments on how easy or hard the change would be are.

Remember it is just a price change on the page. The machines are already online and they change prices with every fare change. I bet they can do it.

What a myopic follow-up to what was originally a myopic blog post. Of course the denominations are a result of trying to minimize change for people who pay in cash. And tons of people pay in cash, especially since a lot of lower-income people rely on public transit. Getting cash into and out of a credit card is not cost-free for people who might not have checking accounts, get paid in cash, etc. The author needs to get out of whatever bubble he's living in.

I'm not sure I want the MTA to fix this. It seems that to some degree the large float the MTA gets from people who don't optimize their Metrocard balances helps to subsidize fares. Certainly if they don't have the float, it'll be a fine excuse to raise fares even more.

That's one way to look at it. But I always feel being aboveboard is the way to go on this stuff. Also, its a tiny bit of a regressive tax as well. Unlimited cards go to those who can afford the upfront cost.

That float is also known as a rip off.

This generally only hits tourists but there is one place that' it's super annoying. If you take the AirTrain from JFK to Jamaica you have to pay $5. The issue is that you can't load that $5 onto an unlimited Metrocard (the kind that most locals use) so you have to get a new one with the associated $1 fee. Then you get your bonus on top of the $5 so you have a $5.40 Metrocard or whatever it comes out to but you've paid $6 for it and now have 40 useless cents on it once you come out of the Airtrain.

You can add cash to an unlimited MetroCard now and have been able to do so for about a year. More annoying is that you can't use the auto-refilling MetroCards on PATH.

Most of the people using pay-per-ride cards don't have credit cards (or debit cards). The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly unlimited cards. And most tourists in New York, believe it or not, don't even use the subway. So this is really a problem that affects a small minority of people.

> The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly unlimited cards.

That's not true.

This is the wrong way to respond to something like this. It's treating the issue as if it's the single most important problem facing our time, and is very clearly getting emotionally involved, and worked up by the bureaucratic nature of the response.

This should have been an, "Well this is interesting and weird, they could be more efficient in this way." kind of thing and that would be that. The MTA responds with their incompetence and that's that. No surprises.

But to pretend like this is an actual social justice issue is taking the whole thing way too far, and the writer has gone from "someone who found something strange and interesting" to "someone who is trying too hard to make this moment last".

Just let it go, it's hardly a big deal.

I'm going to get downvoted for being a grammar nazi, but this disingenuous "spokesperson" should know the difference between "insure" and "ensure."

I feel like this could be easily handled. Does anyone want to print out the three important values and tape them to machines/nearby walls so everyone knows?

(I don't live in New York.)

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