Walking home I began observing peoples behavior. As I entered the subway I watched a woman swipe for admission and get rejected for insufficient funds. I tried to remember the last time I had refilled my card. Swipe. Beep. Insufficient funds…
At the refill station I reacquaint with the woman from earlier. This time her card refuses to be read from the machine. She pushes in and pulls out rapidly in a seemingly endless battle until luck performs his reappearing act and her pin is prompted. She leaves with a bare level satisfaction and I weep with joy as my bills are accepted.
Just before I triumphantly swipe through the gates, a kid plants his hands onto the sides of the gate next me, swings his legs up, and bounces through to the other side no questions asked. My celebration came to a quick end.
I’ve observed two main flaws within the MTA subway systems. First is the lack of convenience provided by them. While of course their transportation abilities are worthy even with some delays and unexpected shutdowns, the real problem comes from filling up the cards and the unfortunately high fare cost. The second flaw is how easy it is for people to get into the subway system for free. If there isn’t a entrance that can be hopped, there is most certainly an exit door that riders would rather push open than struggle trying to exit out the same gates as people entering. This combination of flaws leads to a heavy culture of illegal subway which further causes costs for the city. This can be seen from the need for police patrolling the underground waiting to catch unsuspecting fare jumpers. Creating entrances that didn’t have people both enter and exit through the same interface combined with guaranteed swiping for entry and no entrance through the exit channel would lead to a secure system allowing only authorized entry. While this wouldn’t help with the process of filling up the metro card (which isn’t really that bad) it would remove the possibility of using the metro for free from anyones head. This possibility of escaping the fare upon entering the metro is an affordance the system allows users. By removing that affordance and maybe improving upon the mechanisms tied to filling the metro card (maybe online app for filling it) and much smoother process could be implemented. And maybe if enough people still pay for the metro the prices can be dropped overall. Its food for thought but bottom line is the authorization mechanisms and badly designed refilling interfaces complement each other in a way that leads to a worse result than our subway systems should allow.