By Jared Ebersole in Video — 01 May 2026

Why New York Has Been Fighting Turnstile Cheating for a Century

From paper tickets and coin turnstiles to tokens, MetroCards, OMNY, and glass paddle gates, New York's fare system has always been a contest between access and evasion.

Every subway fare system is a trust machine pretending to be a piece of hardware.

The city asks millions of people to pay, move quickly, not block the entrance, not cheat, not panic in an emergency, and not break the equipment. The machine has to be fast enough for rush hour, accessible enough for strollers and wheelchairs, durable enough for New York, and strict enough that people believe the fare actually means something.

That combination has been hard for more than a hundred years.

The subway opened in 1904 with a nickel fare and a paper-ticket system. Riders bought a ticket from a clerk, then handed it over to be canceled in a ticket chopper. It was simple, human, and slow. It also depended on people behaving honestly on both sides of the booth.

By the 1920s, the system moved toward coin-operated turnstiles. The premise was beautifully mechanical: drop the right coin, unlock the arms, allow one rotation, then lock again. No clerk had to chop a ticket. No paper had to be handled. The fare gate became a little machine for converting a nickel into permission.

But a coin slot is also an invitation.

Riders tried slugs, washers, foreign coins, and objects close enough in size or weight to fool the mechanism. The turnstile had to become more selective. Coin systems used sorting, dimensions, weight, and metal properties to reject the wrong object. Every improvement made the gate smarter, and every improvement taught riders what the machine was looking for.

Then the fare broke the coin system.

In 1953, New York raised the subway fare to 15 cents. A single standard coin no longer solved the problem neatly. Rather than ask riders to feed multiple coins into machines not designed for them, the city introduced the subway token: a custom brass coin built for transit.

The token became one of New York's great small objects. It was money, but only underground. It was a key, but only for one ride. It carried the identity of the system in your pocket.

It also became a target.

The Transit Museum and New-York Historical Society both trace the token's birth to that 1953 fare increase. Over the decades, as fares rose and counterfeiting became an issue, the token changed shape and design repeatedly: solid tokens, Y-cut tokens, bullseye tokens, pentagon-cut tokens. Each version tried to stay one step ahead of fraud while fitting the machinery already installed across the system.

The strangest battle was not counterfeiting. It was token sucking.

In the 1980s, thieves discovered a disgusting exploit. They would jam a turnstile slot so a rider's token got stuck. The rider, thinking the machine had eaten the fare, would walk away. The thief would then put their mouth over the slot and suck the token back out.

It sounds like urban legend because it should be too revolting to be real. It was real enough for The New York Times to cover in 1983, and for later histories to remember the countermeasures: chili powder sprinkled into slots, and in some accounts, Mace used around problem machines. The fare system had become a public-health comedy with real money attached.

The MetroCard ended that particular ritual.

By the early 2000s, tokens were phased out and the swipe became the dominant gesture of subway entry. A magnetic stripe card could do things a token could not: unlimited rides, transfers, stored value, time-based passes, discounts, and eventually systemwide payment logic. It also created new frustrations: misreads, bent cards, demagnetized cards, and the famous command to swipe again.

Then OMNY changed the gesture again.

Tap payment removed the card swipe for many riders and made fare payment feel more like the rest of daily life: phone, watch, bank card, tap, go. But the problem of evasion did not disappear. It moved away from tricking the payment medium and toward bypassing the barrier entirely.

Jump the turnstile. Duck under. Push through the emergency gate. Slip in behind someone else.

That last behavior is why the newest gate designs matter. The MTA's modern fare-gate program is testing and installing taller paddle-door gates at selected stations. The agency says these gates replace traditional turnstiles and emergency exit gates at pilot locations, use sensor systems to distinguish riders, luggage, strollers, and wheelchairs, and are meant to reduce common evasion routes while preserving accessibility and emergency egress.

The rollout is not magic. The MTA lists a 2026-and-beyond plan to install modern fare gates at 150 stations, and early pilots have already produced the predictable New York response: people testing, filming, criticizing, tailgating, forcing, and trying to figure out the limits of the new system.

That does not make the gates pointless.

It makes them part of the same old argument.

Fare control has never been a final answer. It is a moving line between speed and enforcement. Make the barrier too soft, and riders learn to ignore it. Make it too hard, and stations feel hostile, inaccessible, or unsafe in emergencies. Add technology, and people study the technology. Add height, and people look for gaps. Add sensors, and people try to confuse them.

The subway's fare history is not a march from primitive to perfect.

It is a century-long negotiation between a public system that needs revenue and a city full of people who are very good at finding the weak point in any machine.