The Subway Token
On fare evasion and token sucking
This week, the MTA announced a redesign of the subway turnstile. Well, it isn’t actually a turnstile: Rather, the new design is a pair of glass doors that opens after fare is paid. This new design will replace the emergency exit doors in subway stations, which –– according to MTA chair Janno Lieber –– is the MTA’s main source of fare evasion.
Fare evasion is a major issue for the MTA. According to a recent report, the MTA lost around $300 million in 2022 to fare evaders. This isn’t a new problem; in 1990, a study found around seven percent of all subway passengers didn’t pay the fare. “Pervasive fare evasion is a threat to the spirit that makes New York not just a great city, but a great community,” Lieber said (perhaps hyperbolically) in April 2022. “The transit system is our most important public space.”
Today, we pay our subway fare using a credit card or a MetroCard. But, in the 1980s and ‘90s, people used tokens (until they were discontinued in 2003). And the token led to its own form of fare evasion: Token sucking.
In his 1990 book Rough Justice, former Manhattan assistant district attorney David Heilbroner described the crime: “[The fare evaders] slip a folded piece of paper into the token slot so the token won’t go through into the token box. After a passenger loses a token and walks away, the kids come back, and suck it out of the slot. They put their mouth on the token slot and suck.” According to Heilbroner, every morning these criminals are “in the subway ten, maybe twenty times and then they come back for more at night.” Some suckers were collecting up to $50 worth of tokens a day.
It was a crime of desperation –– so unpleasant that people didn’t do it unless they’d fallen on the hardest of luck. “Hardest of times makes you do it,” said one token sucker. The downsides, perhaps, are obvious. “These guys had a lot of various diseases,” said NYPD Officer Brendan McGarry. “You name it, they had it. You don’t last too long in that line of work.” It is, per journalist Randy Kennedy, “widely considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway.”
The damage caused by sucking and jamming was significant. In the 1990s, during a typical summer week, more than 60% of the nearly 2,000 repair calls to fix turnstiles involved paper stuffed into token slots by token suckers. To the MTA, this turnstile damage was as much of an issue as the fare evasion.
Thus, to dissuade suckers, booth clerks sometimes sprinkled chili powder onto the token slots. Though, per NYPD inspector Hillel Valentine, “the kids came back with buckets of water, threw the water on the turnstiles and then threw the rest at the token clerk.” Other officers sprayed Mace around the slots, then watched for people walking around the station with bright red lips to arrest them.
The crime was a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. However, most often, because the suckers were almost always teenagers, they were given youthful-offender cards –– i.e., just a warning. Anne Milgram (currently Biden’s Administrator for the Drug Enforcement Administration) said of the crime during her days in the New York prosecutor’s office: “If someone was willing to go through that, I really didn’t want to prosecute those cases. I felt that someone deserved to take the token.”
Today, fare evasion takes on new, often less disgusting, forms: Slipping through an emergency exit door, jumping over a turnstile. The battle between evaders and turnstile technology persists. It’s only a matter of time until fare evaders find a way through those new glass doors.
You can watch a video of token sucking here.
Special thanks to Molly Bodurtha for telling me about token sucking.
