Farewell, Subway Token

he 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.

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.

Bloomberg is out of his mind. In two years he has increased the daily cost of living in New York by some 35%. He throws out common sense and years of traditions, will not listen to anyone and will not reduce services or stand up to the Unions. Moreover, whoever comes in after him will not recind his many stupid policies. His government's reponses to the city's many problems are pathetic. He is more unpopular that Dinkins ever was, and I thought that that benchmark was impossible to beat. The econmic future of NY is in grave jeopardy. Liberal just cannot govern. Rudy, come back!

There are already too many. One more increase will do it. Many large firms wanted to leave NYC even before 911. After the attack many of them essentially said "Look we'll stay, just don't harm us." Bloomberg actually got up on a podium and said that firms cannot avoid have offices in New York! This is directly opposite of the experieinces of the last 25 years. Guilliani managed to keep the exodus at bay by fixing the crime problem and stalling tax increases.

Bloomberg's approach will kill the city. It is so mindless and arrogant. It goes to show that Liberalism is a mental disorder. How can a self-made man be so stupid. People forget that we do not have the diversified economy we once had. I expect the worst.

I will give you an example. All parking meters in NYC have doubled in price and there use is now required 7 days a week. This really impacts the little guy. It becoming impossible to find a place to park (people in the outer bouroughs own cars, BTW). Pure Limo Liberal crap. I have never seen a NYC politician so out of touch with the average Joe. We are still in shock. I doubt if the Republican party backs him in the next election. If they are smart they would force him to run as a Democrat. The damage is done - no one ever lowers a tax in NYC.

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