FRA Certification Helpline: (216) 694-0240

(Newsday posted the following article by Tom McGinty on its website on May 27.)

NEW YORK — They’re scattered around the city — probably around the world, in fact — hidden in coat pockets and old purses, jammed in wallets between business cards, buried in landfills.

And they once were worth $55 million.

They’re the millions of MetroCards that expired over the past three years before their owners used the full balance for subway or bus trips.

The riders’ losses are the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s gains — $21 million last year alone — and it’s possible that many straphangers took that hit because they were unaware of a little-publicized policy allowing the balance from an expired card to be transferred to a fresh one.

“They should make it more public,” Herbert Byrd of Long Island City said Thursday as he waited for a train at the Queensboro Plaza Station. “A lot of people throw those cards away and are losing money. It doesn’t seem fair.”

New York City Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said the MetroCards have expiration dates because they deteriorate over time. The forfeited fares, which were detailed in the agency’s 2004 financial reports, all came from either full-price, single-ride cards or pay-per-ride cards, which give one free trip for every five purchased, he said.

The balance on an expired MetroCard can be transferred to a new one up to a year after the expiration date, but it requires filling out a questionnaire and mailing the card to NYC Transit, which provides postage-paid envelopes at ticket booths.

NYC Transit couldn’t say Thursday how many riders had done that, but it’s clear from the financial reports that millions didn’t.

The pile of forfeited fares grew as MetroCards supplanted tokens as the primary method of payment, going from $9 million in 2002 to $25 million in 2003, the year tokens were done away with completely. In 2004, expired cards contributed $21 million to the agency’s coffers.

Seaton said the issue of forfeited fares is “really no gain to the transit authority because it doesn’t effect the amount of service we put out.”

But Martin Robins, director of the Vorhees Transportation Policy Institute at Rutgers University, said the revenue does provide “a net benefit to the MTA.

“I wouldn’t call this, by any means, an abuse,” said Robins, a former deputy executive director of New Jersey Transit. “I think the one point they could be called upon [to correct] is for the refund process to be posted more conspicuously near the token machines.”

Transit advocate Gene Russianoff, staff attorney of the New York Public Interest Research Group’s Straphangers Campaign, also said he didn’t fault the MTA and theorized that many of the expired cards were bought by tourists who left town before they were used up.

“I have a typical New York attitude toward tourists: They’re on the their own,” Russianoff said. “The more they help the system out the better, and I don’t stay up late at night worrying about them.”

He also said he didn’t think mailing in expired cards was too onerous.

“I guess you could argue you should be able to hand in your card to the station booth clerk,” he said. “There’s no system that’s going to be perfect and there are going to be people who are going to be unhappy.”