[bengali3]

>The author, clearly not a developer, doesn't seem to see the potential for high cost in making a software change

Agreed, one should be fairly close to the dev team before coming up with estimates. Other red flags: "government agencies" & "So the MTA could make a small software change that only applies to the Credit Card Only machines with limited effort"

[iquantny]

It's a price change! They don't reprogram cash registers each time a price changes. (On a side note, I do happen to be a software developer!)

[x1798DE]

It is almost certainly the case that there is no readily available mechanism for easily changing the price on credit card only machines without changing it on cash + credit card machines. Presumably changing the default pricing structure would have to change both, which would cause the problem that either a great many machines would suddenly be providing $0.95 worth of change for everyone paying with a $20, or everyone would need to start carrying around nickels.

Clearly it is more work than a simple price change to create a new user interface that asks whether you're going to be using a credit card or not before displaying the prices.