Farewell, [New York City] Subway Token
March 15, 2003
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
The New York City subway token, tool and talisman of city
life since Vincent R. Impellitteri was mayor, is dead at
age 50, transit officials said yesterday.
The causes of death were technology and economics.
Tokens
will be sold for the last time on Saturday, April 12, said
Lawrence G. Reuter, president of New York City Transit.
After 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, May 4 - the moment at which
fares will rise, with the price of a single trip jumping to
$2 from $1.50 - any token plinked into a turnstile will be
spit back out. Bus fareboxes will still accept the token -
along with 50 cents cash, thank you - through the end of
the year.
The death of the token has been a planned, gradual demise,
conceived in the 1980's and set in motion in 1994, when the
first electronic turnstile was installed and the first
MetroCard sold. Handling all those tokens - emptying them
from turnstiles, delivering bags of them to token booths,
counting them out to riders - is cumbersome and expensive,
and transit officials have long looked forward to the day
when most of their business with riders would involve
exchanges of electrons, not metal and paper.
"In this time of dwindling resources, the shift away from
tokens will allow us to be more efficient," Mr. Reuter
said.
The token can look forward to an afterlife as a nostalgia
fetish, a cherished little piece of a bygone New York, like
Brooklyn Dodgers gear, Automats and Checker cabs. "Tokens
will become cuff links and buttons and watches and who
knows what else," said Kenneth T. Jackson, president of the
New-York Historical Society. But for now, there is little
lament for the token's passing. "All that rummaging through
your change, all that standing in line at the booth - who
needs it?" Mr. Jackson asked.
Tokens are used for only about 8 percent of transit rides.
When the Metropolitan Transportation Authority held public
hearings on the fare increase, no more than a handful of
people stood up to protest the elimination of the token.
"We're not in mourning," said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer
for the Straphangers Campaign, the riders' advocacy group.
"The MetroCard is a better deal for riders. I have such
powerful associations with the token from most of my life,
so yeah, there's some emotional attachment, but it's no
more than nostalgia."
The agency will not say what will become of the remains, 60
million of them, except that it has no plans for disposing
of them.
The system has kept older tokens in storage, occasionally
dangling the prospect of bringing them back into
circulation, but that never happened.
The token was born in 1953, and then, too, the reasons were
technology and economics.
For 44 years, until 1948, the subway fare was a nickel. Not
five cents, but a nickel, the only coin that would open the
turnstile. For five years after that, it was a dime (not
two nickels or 10 pennies).
Then, with the fare set to rise to 15 cents, engineers
could not design a turnstile that would accept two
different coins. Thus, the token.
In fact, there have been five tokens over the half-century,
not counting commemorative ones issued in 1979, to mark the
75th anniversary of the subway system, and 1988, for the
opening of a set of new stations in Queens. The original, a
small disc with the letters "NYC" in the middle and the "Y"
cut out, lasted the longest, 17 years, through multiple
fare increases. A larger "Y" cutout token followed in 1970,
and it was retired in 1980 in favor of the solid brass
token. The "bulls-eye" token, with a lighter-colored
center, was introduced in 1986, and finally, in 1995, came
the last incarnation, with a pentagonal cutout in the
center.
Each fare increase over the last five decades has been
accompanied by a bluffing game by the transit system as it
sought to prevent hoarding of tokens at the pre-increase
price. Each time, officials said they would either
introduce a new token or bring back a former one, but just
as often, they announced at the last moment that the token
would not change.
New York's was one of the last major transit systems to
adopt an electronic fare system, and it is hard now to
remember that just six years ago, transit officials were
still complaining about how reluctant New Yorkers were to
use the MetroCard. Not until the card was sweetened in the
late 1990's with volume discounts, free transfers and
weekly and monthly passes did it really catch on.
"I don't know if New Yorkers are any more resistant to
change than anyone else, but obviously, for a lot of
people, being forced to move to the MetroCard was like my
84-year-old mother being forced to learn to use the
computer," said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for
Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate
Center.
"It's not as though the token was a cherished part of life,
though I think it will become a cherished relic," he said.
"It was just what people were used to."
The token is survived by the turnstile and the farebox, as
well as Fun Pass and other members of the MetroCard family.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company. |
