The reason the MTA gave a man named Zachary DuBow for denying him permission to collect the dregs of people’s old MetroCards to donate as transportation to homeless shelters was that “any money that the authority finds on MetroCards, however negligible, must be reported to the state, to comply with laws on abandoned property,” the New York Times reports. But since the MTA wouldn’t really be collecting the cards, it couldn’t explain to the Times how the law applied. A second, more believable reason makes the MTA sound pretty stingy: “Officials noted that Mr. DuBow’s plan could lead to a revenue loss for the authority if prospective riders were given cards to cover fares that they might otherwise have paid themselves.”
