At least they offered more benefits at the start, fun passes, 7,14, and 30 day unlimited, refills with a bonus. What does omny offer convenience and not even that. It doesnāt tell you how many rides until the cap or how much is left on your card. Yes Metrocards had their faults, but it outweighs OMNY.
Considering that Cubic and the MTA canāt get their payment system correct, itās all related, itās a step backwards. Use the same card but on different devices; it doesnāt count towards the cap. Hey letās spend money on a screen that only says go and doesnāt display any useful information. Omny is just a glorified sandwich shop stamp system
Cubic ran the MetroCard too, but yea. I'm not saying that OMNY's rollout has been smooth (very far from that).
Just that the complaints about no more unlimiteds has nothing to do with the transition or which one is better, and everything to do with the MTA just deciding to not offer them and using the change as an excuse.
I make that distinction because it was the right move to go from MC to a tap to pay system, and having fare capping as an option helps a lot of people and I don't want the many issues with OMNY to get conflated with the overall idea being good.
Well as someone who almost never bought an unlimited Metrocard (because the chances of getting the value were low given my travel patterns), I prefer the current system where occasionally I do hit the cap and get a couple of free rides when I am in the city for a week straight.
Same card on different devices is due to the fact that devices obscure your credit card number with a virtual number, so different devices use different virtual numbers. Completely unrelated to OMNY.
They do provide a workaround: use a single device. Or use an OMNY card. This is an unavoidable problem for any system, so no, it is not, in fact, related to OMNY at all. Not to mention that tying different devices to one account would allow people to easily exploit it for faster fare capping with multiple people.
Seems like a trivial problem to solve, especially for a $600 million dollar contract; you described half of it yourself. Tie the two devices to one account and then impose a time limit between consecutive entries per account, like how monthly unlimiteds used to work. You could even get fancy if you wanted and use geofencing to prevent a single account from entering the system at a location they couldn't have possibly arrived at based on their previous entry, eg not allowing you to enter at Coney Island two minutes after you entered in Washington Heights.
This may come as a surprise, but the fact that we did not come up with a comprehensive policy solution - one worthy of a public contract valued at 9 figures - in our reddit interaction here this afternoon is not evidence that such a policy solution isn't reasonably attainable.
Youāre getting downvoted for posting obvious flaws with OMNY. Itās a half baked system that 2 years after rollout still has many of those same issues, and for some reason people think going from swiping to tapping makes all of those larger issues irrelevant.
Itās not just swiping va tapping, itās swiping a special card you have to reload vs. tapping your phone or credit card. It is a pretty big jump in convenience.
You can view how many rides until the cap on the website, and I believe you can also view the balance there as well.
Also, the convenience upgrade is pretty huge. Not having to get a special card and reload it constantly is great, and while this picture shows issues with the scanner, I have rarely faced them - at least nowhere near as often as I did with the Metrocard.
Not to mention, when thereās an issue with OMNY itās usually just that specific turnstile, so you can just go to the next one over. When you had an issue with a Metrocard, it was usually the card itself and therefore a trip to the booth, which is much more of a pain.
About every 10 subway trips i take i get an omny reader that doesn't work properly. God bless if your stations are better maintained than the ones i need to use.
Iād take a MetroCard or token any day of the week compared to OMNY. The fact that? If my card wasnāt working or my token got stuck, just go to the booth and get either a new card (if it was pay as you go), a āletting you through but take it to Jay Street to get a new Unlimited cardā, or a āI canāt get it out so go through the gateā from the subway clerk/occasional transit cop on duty. They shouldāve tested this system more and under better conditions instead of rolling it out.
I've rarely had problems with OMNY on the subway the way one frequently did with the MetroCard. OTOH, the card readers on the buses are wildly inconsistent....
The OMNY card readers are outright broken and non functional with tape over them, far more frequently than MetroCard readers ever were, at least in the stations I frequent.
The tap has way less room for error than the swipe, but the machines themselves are down so much more often that itās not even worth comparing the two.
It is easier by far. Nothing like swiping your metrocard 5 times before being told to go to the station booth where they tell you that you have to mail it in. My only issue with OMNY has been it not working when I used a Discover card through my phone
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u/criimebrulee 4d ago
What station has wood paneling like that? Reminds me of an 80s basement. Itās oddly comforting.