Business Insider:
New York is finally catching up to the rest of the world and moving away from its iconic MetroCard. But there's one glaring problem with the replacement.
A commuter swipes her MetroCard above a contactless card payment scanner installed at a turnstile at the Chambers Street subway station in New York. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is phasing out its MetroCard in favor of a new payment system that allows commuters to use their cellphones or certain types of debit or credit cards to pay their fares directly at turnstiles. () AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Americans who have travelled abroad have likely gotten a taste of what transportation could be like.
In London, for example, a simple tap — of an Oyster card or your credit card — gets you through onto the Tube. The same is also true in Hong Kong, Singapore, Santiago, Chile and other cities across the world.
But New York, the US's largest transportation system, like in other technologies, has been slow to catch up. The subway system, after all, only ditched physical tokens for fare payment in 2003. That's finally going to change.
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But there's one glaring problem: most US consumers don't have contactless cards.
Only about five percent of the roughly 480 million cards in service in the United States had contactless payment technology in 2017, according to research by ATKearney. What's more, they only make up about 0.18% of all transactions.
That's an issue Visa and Chase are trying to tackle together.