This morning, The New York Times provocatively declared “good riddance?” to the MetroCard, New York City’s transit pass that has been in use since 1994. The MTA, NYC’s transit authority, has been rolling out a new system, OMNY, which you can pay with your phone or by tapping a card rather than swiping. No one would disagree that the rollout has been a disaster, but New Yorkers are torn on whether OMNY represents a brave new technofuture or the death of a small piece of the city’s soul. I am in the latter camp, in large part because the OMNY card machine sucks.
And look, I get that you aren’t supposed to need the machine; you’re supposed to connect OMNY to your phone or bank account and never have to refill it again. The classism here is obvious–what if you don’t have a smart phone or a bank account?–which is why I appreciate that an OMNY card can also be filled with cash like a MetroCard. That is the only way I personally have used it: While the MetroCard is still accepted until the end of the year, I was forced to convert to the OMNY card a few months ago when the last MetroCard machines finally vanished from every station in my neighborhood. I am old and contrary and do not want to pay for anything using my phone, and I was also turned off enough by horror stories of glitchy OMNY cards to refuse to give it access to my bank account, so I shove my wrinkled dollars and random coins into the new machine and then live with the mystery–which the MTA might fix–of never knowing how much money is on my card when I use it, because the new OMNY gates don’t show your balance the way the MetroCard reader did.
This means I am frequently confronted with the OMNY machine. The OMNY system is designed by Cubic Transportation Systems, which administers several cities’ transit and also dabbles in military contracts and surveillance (another good reason, especially these days, to put cash on your card). It’s a squat machine with a giant touch screen, and if you ask me the whole thing looks like a scrunched-up face, like it’s a little disgusted that you’d dare to use it. It has a silver case accented with dull gray plastic, with tiny cutouts for your coins and credit card but, in its favor, a very obvious area where you tap your OMNY card to start the interaction. I don’t know why the machine is so small; in the stations near me, single OMNY machines huddle in the cavernous spaces where multiple MetroCard machines once stood, looking outmatched and adrift. It is easy enough to use, when it’s working–I have frequently encountered machines that aren’t taking payments–but as I get used to it, its blank, undifferentiated surface sometimes leaves me casting around for where I need to interact with it as if I’ve never used a transit fare machine before, when I have lived in this city for over 20 years and feel like I need to make a big show of that fact as I wave my hands around the OMNY machine in angry bafflement. Using it is perfunctory and commonplace, but it does–or is supposed to–translate your money into public transit rides…