New York City Plans to Replace Transit MetroCard With Electronic Card Readers That Support Apple Pay

Welcome to 2003, New York!

I sure hope they put the emphasis on speed here. When a metrocard is swiped correctly, you barely have to break your stride at all to go through.

If this takes even a couple seconds to register, it's going to slow things down horribly. I mean, aside from your occasional tourist or newbie who hasn't gotten the hang of swiping, or the odd card or turnstile malfunction, people do it very fast.

"occasional tourist" - New York City receives over 60 million foreign and American tourists each year. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_New_York_City

"When a metrocard is swiped correctly, you barely have to break your stride at all to go through." I'd say 50% of the time if you "swipe correctly" - the rest is multiswipes, frustration and/or waiting for the person in front of you to swipe over and over or go through 5 different MetroCards to figure out which one didn't expire.

Apple Pay will be a HUGE improvement in turnstiles over MetroCards

So does this mean that sometime in 2023 you have to have a smartphone to use the subway? If not, would you need to purchase a standalone NFC capable MetroCard of some kind? Wonder how much that'll cost.

Exactly how Chicago, Philly, and London does it. You’d buy a $5 NFC plastic card if you don’t want to use your phone.

Meh. Let's just switch to the honor system and have New Yorkers send in money for any rides they use. We're good for it.

Honestly, with the NFC embedded in the phone, Apple should cooperate with major city transit systems to allow owners to add a virtual transit card into wallet, and be able to just use it like a regular NFC card without the need to authenticate your phone using Face ID or Touch ID. Needing to authenticate will inevitably slow things down. And Android users have been able to do this for some systems for a while using non-officially supported NFC card emulators.

This is the best news I got all day.

Sam