Or as easy as buying morning coffee at Wawa, or a pack of gum at CVS, or a lawnmower at Home Depot or just about anything in Philly - except a SEPTA fare.
The token, which has been a pain-in-the-mass-transit here for decades, could go the way of horse-drawn trolleys by 2011, said John McGee, SEPTA's chief officer of new-payment technology.
He is reviewing proposals for a token-free future, in which lines and exact change will be replaced by a smart card, imbedded with an "electronic-purse" computerized chip, fed by an online account.
"I would like for folks to be able to pay for a SEPTA trip by using whatever they have in their pocket - a credit/debit card, a student ID card, a cell phone with a computerized sticker that acts as a surrogate credit/debit card, whatever," he told the Daily News.
"Like the smart card, the [smart] sticker has a chip in it that the electronic sensor on the fare box reads," he said. "You could even stick it on your forehead, if you wanted to. But you'd probably want to stick it on your cell phone."
Eliminating tokens and limited-time passes "would be way better," said Sabrheya Fox, 18, yesterday, while emerging from the underground concourse at Broad and Market streets with her friend Dinah Alexander, 20.
She said that she would prefer spending her money on a smart card instead of a pass that expires every week or month. Alexander agreed. SEPTA's passes "expire before you get full use out of them," she said.
Using smart cards/stickers instead of cash fares, McGee said, will end this familiar SEPTA nightmare:
"You walk into a SEPTA El station and you have to use a vending machine that you need to spend 30 minutes on a tutorial to understand," he said. "If you walk into the El with a $10 or $20 bill, the question is: Will the vending machine make change? At many stations, if you don't have exact change, we can't accommodate you."
