With its goofy block lettering and bright colors, the MetroCard feels like a relic, which it sort of is—an early 1990s design, complete with gradients and drop shadows, that’s managed to stick around long enough to become one of New York’s defining symbols. At a time when generic minimalism and the sheen of AI-generated graphics have taken over, its unmistakable graphics feel refreshing. And the fact that a 31-year-old fare payment system is still in circulation when most tech today becomes obsolete in a matter of months is a remarkable achievement. 

But the end is near: on December 31st, the MTA will stop selling MetroCards and completely phase them out on an imminent date that the agency has yet to announce. Loving tributes have already begun as the city pays its respects to the slim piece of plastic that kept commuters moving for three decades. 

“It’s not as iconic as the token, but maybe in the future it will be,” says Jodi Shapiro, curator of the New York City Transit Museum, which on December 17 opened “FAREwell, Metrocard,” a new exhibition on the card’s history.

While it might be New York City Transit’s second-most famous fare payment system, it has had a tremendous effect on the metropolis’s culture, how people get around, and what good municipal design ought to accomplish. It all began with a big ask: getting New Yorkers to change their habits.

For 40 years before the MetroCard, New Yorkers paid for the subway using tokens. Dropping it into a turnstile wasn’t much different than paying with coins. The MetroCard was a technical leap that changed how riders experienced the public transit system.

“At the time of its introduction, not many people used swipe cards,” Shapiro explains. “If you were familiar with them, you probably worked some kind of job where there was a security measure.” 

The idea to replace tokens percolated in the late 1970s, when city council member Carol Bellamy proposed the idea. But it took until the 1980s for the MTA to take fare cards seriously.

Richard Ravitch, the chairman at the time, wanted to update the system and keep it on par with Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Paris, which already adopted magnetic strip cards. He argued that it would encourage off-peak ridership, curb fare evasion, and allow the sale of monthly passes. “’Passes will encourage mobility,” Ravitch said, and “enhanced mobility will increase commercial activity in this region.” The MTA launched the MetroCard in January 1994 and existed side-by-side with tokens for nearly a decade. 

With the change to a fare card also came a change to the turnstiles. To riders, the subway’s built environment doesn’t change all that much, but when it does, it’s big—the Vignelli/Noorda signage, demolishing the El lines, the fare evasion spikes and fins. The MetroCard was responsible for a major physical shift: electrified turnstiles, which were required to power the magnetic strip readers, and with them electrified emergency exit gates that can be remotely opened by booth clerks.

Now back to the MetroCard itself. With a blue gradient background, MetroCard spelled out in golden block letters that ascend in angle and descend in size from the bottom right to top left corner, the card is 1990s to the core. The decade was a highly experimental time for graphic designers because of the freedom desktop publishing, a relatively new tool at the time, gave them. With typography in particular, designers obliterated the rules. They set type on curves, stretched and warped letterforms, and layered text. 

Cubic Transportation Systems designed the magnetic strip and the turnstile readers, but the exact designers of the graphics are unknown. The most Shapiro has been able to........

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