Here's an idea for a pro-transit ad

You know the American Express ads, featuring various people who have the AE credit card? (I Still remember the one featuring William E. Miller, the guy who ran for vice president with Barry Goldwater in 1964.) Maybe we need to do that with transit.

This is by Gene Epstein from yesterday's NYT "Metropolitan Diary" column:

I boarded the 57th Street crosstown bus at York Avenue and, as usual, inserted my senior citizen transit card incorrectly. The driver very kindly took it out of the fare box slot and reversed it before handing it back to me to reinsert. I sat down wondering why I could not master this simple procedure. True, I didn’t use city buses regularly, but still ...

My seat overlooked the bus entrance, where I could observe boarders doing it right the first time without assistance. The large black bar went on the right, the cutoff corner on the upper left. I told the driver (we’d been talking) that I’d just completed the short course on card insertion.

He laughed. “Listen to this,” he said. “I’ve been on this route so long that I’ve gotten to know all the early morning regulars. One of them, an older guy, just couldn’t get the card thing right. I always had to help him; not that I minded, but he took some kidding. So one day after he got on, people were applauding and congratulating him, and I couldn’t figure out why.”

“Because he’d finally put the card in the right way?” I asked. “Nope. It was just announced the night before that he’d won the Nobel Prize. Someone told me it was for some kind of scientific work at Sloan-Kettering or the Rockefeller Institute. How about that? The Nobel Prize.”

We were silent for a moment. “That’s a good story,” I said, realizing my downtown bus was just pulling into its Second Avenue stop and I’d have to leave before I could find out more. But boarding my bus, I did insert my card correctly with no fumbling whatsoever.

On a NYC transit bus, Fifth Avenue.