Electronic ticket app next stop for MTA railroads

Paper tickets and loose change on Metro-North Railroad may soon become as obsolete as tokens in the subway.

Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Railroad announced Monday they are looking for a company to create an app for smart phones and tablets that will allow riders to purchase digital tickets. The request also calls for a plan to let conductors accept credit and debit cards for on-board payments,Professionals with the job title Mold Maker are on LinkedIn. officials said.

“This is a huge step technological step away form the old-style ticket punch systems, which has been in use as far back as anyone can remember,” said Aaron Donovan, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

He noted that a lot of riders are already using their smartphones and tablets during their rides so “it’s an easy step to add ticketing.”

The MTA app is being developed for east of Hudson riders and is separate from the app NJ Transit has in the works for the Pascack Valley line. That app is currently in a customer testing phase, a NJ Transit spokeswoman said Monday.

Metro-North and Long Island railroads began exploring the electronic ticket idea last year. In one experiment involving Metro-North employees, workers downloaded the free app on an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry and could purchase any type of ticket with a credit or debit card. A conductor would then view the ticket on the screen or scan the ticket’s bar code with a special hand-held device.

Gene Campanello, 60, of Manhattan, said although he thinks it’s good the railroads are catching up with the latest technology, he would want to be assured his personal information would be protected before using it.

“If I had my phone and it wasn’t charged, I’d be scared of losing my ticket,” said Roslyn Dease, a 20-year-old Westchester Community College student.

Josh Block, 33, who was busy typing on his smartphone at the White Plains station, was less concerned about what could go wrong: “The chances of me losing my phone are less than my chances of losing my Metro-North ticket,” he said.

Proposals for the electronic ticketing apps are due to the MTA by March 15. The MTA plans to award a contract by July and launch a pilot program for customers by spring 2014. The app could be available to all customers by fall 2014, the agency said.

“I’m a mangy gray dog with its ribs showing named van Gogh,” my husband told me not long before he died. “I have soulful brown eyes.” In real life, his name was Kevin, and he had blue eyes. But my husband was always a writer. Words were his tool, employed skillfully to explain,Ein innovativer und moderner Werkzeugbau Formenbau. to invent, even to protect. Many years ago, defusing a self-loathing comment I made, he told me, “No, you’re a silk undershirt named Simone.”

There was a lot of living between the silky Simone and the mangy mutt. It was mostly delicious, beaches and beds, reading out loud, laughter unspooling through the days. Even a shared stint of unemployment we spent traveling through Italy, slowing down in Florence so we could cook from the markets. Fava beans were in season. When we met, on a junket for journalists in the Bahamas, we were magazine editors living a continent apart. Kevin had read a feature I had written quoting one of his favorite Berkeley professors. He thought I was smart. So we began our relationship via email, Los Angeles to Vermont. It was always built on words. It wasn’t until he sent me a poem, the one about eating the plums, that I understood he was at least flirting with flirting.Bay State Cable Ties is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products.

It was a lot of living,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. not a lot of time. On Jan. 14, 2008, Kevin began his first blog post: “I am writing this from a warm place in a small town in a cold state. It is a little bit more than 16 months after I was diagnosed with a rare cancer that will more than likely kill me.” He doesn’t mention that the disease was so off the radar — epithelioid sarcoma, with its absurdity of vowels and senseless destruction — that it took more than a year of increased suffering before anyone guessed it might be cancer. But he finally opened up that day to cope as he counted down the hours to a crucial scan, a post that made him feel exposed, wit and irreverence being more his style. His anxiety was merited: A lung had collapsed and his cancer had spread.

Yet Kevin went on with this blog, weaving data from obscure sarcoma studies with tips for the ultimate chocolate chip cookies, punctuating it with the stark day-to-day realities of living with cancer. Near the end he described his pain: “I imagined that I was carrying a dagger suspended by filaments in my lower belly.” He also stepped back to reflect on his life, recalling vivid moments from brief, now burnished times. “I think about stories a lot these days,” he wrote. “They may be the only thing that can save us.”

“I am hoping to throw away a pair of boots tomorrow,” one post began. “They are sitting in the playroom under a chair; neither toe nor heel sit evenly on the ground, and what was a rich cordovan leather is now murky with filth and dust. I haven’t worn them for years, and still the boots span some of the biggest happenings of my adult life: ‘Testing’ products for a national magazine; hiking with my now-wife in New Mexico, the red cliffs of Sedona, around the Grand Canyon. Walking with her another time up a steep pitch in Vermont and being surprised and delighted when she threw off her clothes and plunged into a mountain pond, truly, that wasn’t very remote at all.”

We scratched the itch, more surely being more, until there was a toddler and a newborn. But at least we had a common enemy, these chortling little crazy people who whittled us bare at times as we longed for sleep and dinners communing with uninterrupted sentences. Still, we had hope then, a muted vision of ourselves once again in an Italian wine bar or even a coffee shop downtown without a miniature mouth suctioned to my nipple. Meanwhile we kept our Newfie from upending the highchair as she dove for spills, met kindred spirits doing the daycare dance,Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets for applications spanning electronics. bought an old farmhouse with a beautiful new kitchen, not for show but for braised short ribs and birthday cakes.

Add cancer and we got an enemy that over time hushed joy and divided us into camps, speaking languages that became increasingly foreign to each other. We both had caverns of pain and fear, but they weren’t the same. It’s a side effect that’s not much talked about.

Rare as it was, Kevin’s disease was unusually “proximal.” It tends to turn up somewhere like a finger, and they talk amputation. When it starts in the pelvis, in and around a number of considerably useful parts, they stop talking. At least about surgery. They made guesswork plans and started debilitating treatments and experimental trials that poisoned me too in a bleary transformation from lover to overbearing caregiver.

“I’m good,” he would say with a captivating smile and nod to the techs, the nurses, the doctor. Kevin so wanted to be fine, to be whole and human. But I saw him gray with pain as he got out of the car, shuffled inside. He would talk and I would shoot the doctor a “don’t buy it” look. I wanted them to understand and help him. That’s the position I would bring to the fight after we left the hospital. His bitter response: “You don’t see a man, you see cancer.”

Waking him as I headed out to a meeting one morning, his greeting was so warm but I noticed his narcotics-glazed eyes. He was planning to get himself to the hospital for something routine. I hesitated on the edge of just-a-feeling and the certain consequences of changing my plans, enforcing my judgment that he not drive. We kissed goodbye. A few hours later I stood at the tow lot in the pounding sun, removing license plates and junk from our minivan, a small sapling lodged in its fender. Kevin was fine, no one else involved, but I still tremble imagining his reaction if I had called it the other way. I don’t remember words exchanged, just silence, avoidance, shame.

Physical pain is a different divide. Early on it was radiation burns disintegrating the most vulnerable skin imaginable. Despite his shocking level of endurance, there were nights I got children to bed trying to downplay the sounds of screaming from the bathroom. Somehow I could keep kids, pets, home and my job, but here I was helpless. He was in a place too deep to connect. Later, with the disease and the drugs amped, I would hold out until 4 on Sundays before losing hope that he might get up. Widow rehearsal.

I know I’m leaving out the many lovely, loving bits, painting a black mural over the end of my marriage that in truth at least flickered with light. Van Gogh still made me laugh, and I watched him pour the end of his energy into playing and reading with the kids. It was only fair. I didn’t get enough, but I got a longer turn. That we never stopped loving each other is true but not a surprise. It’s the ugly, still human moments that get buried.

In the summer, before he died in late fall, the kids were in California visiting their grandparents. Time for the two of us. I came home from the grocery store and tossed him a chocolate bar he liked, which landed on the floor near the sofa where he lay. I’m not sure why I didn’t hand it to him except that it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, just a nice gesture. But I screwed up and it came off as contempt. He threw it with such bitter hostility my next gesture was cleaning gooey chocolate off the walls.