Subway Stories
20 comments
·January 13, 2025cypherpunks01
Anyone remember the Metrocard bending trick that worked in the '90s til sometime early-mid 2000s?
You'd just have to find an empty value Metrocard (that wasn't previously bent for this trick), make a partial vertical bend in the magstripe track in a certain area, then swipe a few times and the turnstile would let you in on the swipe following display of the "Swipe again at this turnstile" message.
I think it had something to do with causing difficulty writing to the magstripe track, and the system generously allowing entry if it couldn't determine the last write state of the card, before the whole card got revoked? Or something along those lines.
burningChrome
I had friends who used this technique when they were living in NYC for a contract gig and one of the devs showed him.
Apparently the catch was you had to have a "two-trip" card. The other catch was these were not that readily available and were only distributed by specific social agencies. My buddy got one when he applied for SNAP benefits and said he needed the card for transport to his gig.
Once he had the card, he had his co-worker bend it for him and he said in the year he was working there, he never had to buy a metro card and saved quite a bit with the hack. Apparently it was still working as late as 2017 (The MTA never fixed the issue) but Metrocards were completely phased out last year as OMNY took over completely after starting in 2019.
cypherpunks01
Metrocards were not phased out yet, they definitely still work.
The trick did work on regular cards that you could just pick up off the floor - but at some point they fixed the general glitch. It's interesting that it continued to work on only certain types of cards though!
robotmlg
Such a popular trick that it got a song written about it
chasil
Chicago actually had an "El Stories" show that captured and performed memories that were collected from the audience and elsewhere.
It didn't return after the pandemic.
MateGreat
Can't get it to load... an intriguing title though to me as a former New Yorker.
crearo
HN kiss of death
afavour
This is wonderful. It's very easy to take a data set like they've used and create a very stale, matter-of-fact accounting of tos and froms. Instead they go through and explain the whys, the narratives that make the subway the essential arteries of NYC.
Even as someone that's been in the city a long time I found something new to learn, like the number of people commuting from outside Brooklyn to downtown Brooklyn every day. Fascinating.
fitsumbelay
I'm getting 500 errors on what looks some important payload but based on the comments I'm looking forward to checking this out ...
FlacksonFive
Love the student metrocard as the favicon :)
frenchmajesty
Site is bugged and giving a 500 Internal Error.
josefritzishere
A blank page?
pavel_lishin
Looks like we hugged it:
https://subway-stories-sql-server.fly.dev/mapbox-load
Error checking mapbox load: Error: HTTP error! status: 500volkk
i don't get it. doesn't fly autoscale? i thought the point of services like these is that it makes it super easy to account for traffic spikes. or is this not fly.io?
tytho
Fly has a form of auto-scaling. You have to provision the max amount of machines then you configure them to auto-sleep. It's possible that the creator didn't anticipate this much traffic or didn't want to pre-pay for all those sleeping machines.
SirFatty
A closeup of a subway tile.
Citizen_Lame
It's dead!
In case this is hugged, this was a submission to the MTA's Open Data Challenge in November that won 'most creative storytelling'.
> Subway Stories is a series of vignettes that analyze open data to understand how New Yorkers work, enjoy themselves, and stay connected. The interactive visualization allows users to explore how different groups in NYC travel and effectively uses a complex dataset to glean insight into how folks move about the city
An article: https://www.untappedcities.com/new-map-of-one-billion-nyc-su...