Why the MTA is Broke

You guys, I think I figured out why the MTA is cutting services, raising rates and generally sucking at being a modern, economically viable train system:


This is my Transit Chek card, and I don't mind sharing all the info on it with you. Here, I'll even give you the PIN. It's 10005. You wanna know why that doesn't matter? Because this card is absolutely useless after the moment I use it once. I get it in the mail, I use it that afternoon, and then it is a worthless piece of plastic that I have to throw away.

In the olden days, a.k.a. April through August 2010, I would receive an actual Metrocard in the mail, just your typical yellow and blue, laminated cardboard. I would use it all month, and that was that. The new one would come on the first of the next month, and I never had a problem. (Except maybe the fact that the card had to come wrapped in plastic, but that was something I was willing to overlook.)

Now I get the Transit Chek card in the mail. I take that with me to the train station, pop it in the machine like a credit card, punch in my pin, and out comes the same exact card I used to get delivered to my desk. At this point I am in the same situation I was in under the old system, minus an extra three minutes of my time, and plus an extra 2 ounces of plastic headed straight for a landfill. Meanwhile the MTA just wasted about 50 cents on the extra postage to mail me the heavier card, and the cost of producing the card along with the original Metrocard I used to get in the first place. Now multiply that by 8 million.

Simply put, this is fucking moronic. And now on the first of every month, I have to be reminded about this fact. Evey month as I stand at the kiosk, with my one-time-use credit card, I will be thinking about the dwindling intelligence of mankind, and about the extra $14 I will be paying each month for the same service, because the MTA was running so inefficiently, they had a giant loophole of a new program whose sole purpose was to pay for and make me use two cards every month, instead of one, and they didn't ever stop to think that maybe this was part of the fucking budget problem.

You know it's not the only thing they're messing up. It's just (hopefully) the dumbest one.