“With MetroCards no longer being sold after Dec. 31st, 2025, thousands of older New Yorkers must now navigate a system they did not choose and have not been guided through.”

(Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

The MTA’s transition from MetroCards to OMNY marks a major technological shift for New York City transit. But as the system evolves toward automation and convenience, one question remains: Who gets left behind?

For many older adults, especially those facing language and digital barriers, the rollout has brought confusion, anxiety, and new obstacles to accessing the public transportation they rely on daily for medical appointments, groceries, community programs, and social connection. 

With MetroCards no longer being sold after Dec. 31st, 2025, thousands of older New Yorkers must now navigate a system they did not choose and have not been guided through.

Meanwhile, more changes are coming. In January 2026, fares will increase from $2.90 to $3, and from $1.45 to $1.50 for Reduced-Fare riders. At the same time, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has pledged to make city buses fare-free, though cost and feasibility remain unclear. If New York is serious about equity and accessibility, OMNY must address the issues experienced by riders who depend on it.

At Homecrest Community Services, which has centers across Brooklyn in Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Sunset Park, and Bay Parkway, staff repeatedly hear the same concerns. 

At a MetroCard Van event at Homecrest’s Bensonhurst Older Adult Center, staff heard firsthand from older adults about the challenges they face with OMNY. Some reported trying to swipe their new OMNY cards instead of tapping, while others were unsure if the beep and flashing light meant their fare went through. Without the MetroCard’s familiar balance display, many were left guessing whether they had enough value or had just paid twice. 

The MTA has stated that next year’s updates will enable OMNY readers to display more visual cues. Riders can also check their OMNY balances online through the MTA’s website, which is also language accessible. However, it requires creating an account with an email address—something many older adults don’t have or find difficult to use. For them, OMNY vending machines are a more practical option. These machines offer language settings, but many who are less comfortable with technology find this initial step challenging. 

“One client never uses her OMNY card,” said Rihan Wu, case manager at Homecrest’s Sunset Park Center. “Every time she rides, she asks someone else to borrow their card and pays them back in cash.” Her reason? She does not know how to use the machine.

Unlike the old photo Reduced-Fare Metrocards, the new OMNY cards have no identifying marker. “If I lose my card, how will anyone know it’s mine?” Yin Mui Pun, a 72-year-old community member, asked us. After losing her OMNY card once and facing a long, complicated process in an attempt to recover funds, Ms. Pun now adds no more than $10 at a time. “As a retiree, every dollar matters,” she said.

Starting in December 2024, OMNY Reduced-Fare cards were automatically mailed to eligible riders to replace the Reduced Fare MetroCard. However, in recent months, the mailing has stopped. While riders can still apply by mail, this process is often slow and unreliable. Now, older adults must visit a customer service center or a mobile sales vehicle to obtain a new or replacement card—a step that can be challenging for those with mobility or language difficulties.

Stephanie Kuang, deputy director of the social services division, shared how her 83-year-old client traveled to the 24/7 Customer Service Center at Coney Island to replace a lost MetroCard. Because the client does not speak English, Kuang provided a note explaining the situation and the service the client required.

Access-A-Ride users are also confused. Lisa Zhen, Homecrest’s director of social services division, reports complaints from clients that the notice sent to recipients with their new OMNY card does not explain that users must call Access-A-Ride to activate it. This means that many learn only at the turnstile that their card does not work. 

When these issues surfaced repeatedly, Homecrest created a one-minute video in Cantonese and Mandarin showing how to use OMNY and check balances. While filming at the busy Bay Parkway N Train, multiple older adults approached us, asking for help reloading their cards. Community organizations should not have to fill the accessibility gaps left by a public transit system.

Given these issues, many older adults continue to rely on MetroCards as long as possible. As community advocates, we urge the MTA to address these gaps. The shift to OMNY could be a meaningful step forward, but only if it includes equity, multilingual support, and clear guidance for riders who depend on it most.

Wai Yee Chan is president and CEO at Homecrest Community Services. Alice Mo is the policy and advocacy manager at Homecrest Community Services.

The post Opinion: As MTA Moves From MetroCard to OMNY, Accessibility Must Come First appeared first on City Limits.

A 64-year-old Mora, Minn., man has been put on probation for sending threatening emails to a White Bear Lake church music director after getting angry with political banter between members of a Beatles cover band during a September church concert.

John Allan Sandeen Jr. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

John Allan Sandeen Jr. was sentenced Friday in Ramsey County District Court after pleading guilty to felony threats. As part of a plea agreement, he was given 87 days in jail, which he already had served, and three years of probation. A stalking charge was dismissed.

Sandeen still faces four counts of felony threats in Hennepin County for emails he allegedly sent to a Maple Grove church music director who was one of the band members. Sandeen was jailed in that case Monday on a warrant and was being held on $200,000 bail before an initial court hearing Tuesday afternoon.

According to the charges, Sandeen attended the Sept. 7 concert at White Bear Lake Methodist Church by the Beatles Ensemble, which played songs by the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

At some point during the concert, two band members engaged in “stage banter” between songs:

“When ‘The Fool on the Hill’ was released, we all thought the song was a reference to President Nixon, but it turns out to have been a reference to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom the Beatles had met in 1967,” one said.

The other replied, “Interesting. I did not know that. But also, President Nixon was working with the FBI in an attempt to have John Lennon deported.”

“I’m sure glad they don’t do that anymore,” the first band member said.

The other then said, “Let’s hear it for ICE!”

‘Your people killed my friend’

Five days later, on Sept. 12, Sandeen sent an email to the White Bear Lake church music director, writing, “We don’t need (the band member’s) opinions.”

He also wrote, “Charlie Kirk was a friend of mine” and told him he “better have (expletive) eyeballs on his back.”

Sandeen emailed the band member the same day and referenced his comment about ICE, saying, “you think that ICE is evil” and that his “cohorts have killed” Kirk.

Other emails Sandeen sent that same day and the next — 16 writings in all — included that the music director “better (expletive) hide” and that he was going to “break your (expletive) fingers,” and also do physical harm to the band member, according to the complaint.

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Sandeen further mentioned the Sept. 10 killing of Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist that federal prosecutors allege was intentionally targeted by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson at Utah Valley University.

“Your people killed my friend in front of his wife and children,” Sandeen wrote to the music director, adding that he was “going to cut your (expletive) throat.”

In an interview with investigators, Sandeen initially said he didn’t know anything about threatening emails. He then told them he was probably drunk and said some “crazy (expletive),” the complaint continued.

He said musicians are supposed to play music and not give political opinions, then complained that had he known the concert was going to be a political rally he would not have attended.

By KEVIN FREKING and LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republican leaders are determined to push ahead with a GOP health care bill that excludes efforts to address the soaring monthly premiums millions of Americans will soon endure as pandemic-era tax credits for people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act expire at year’s end.

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Speaker Mike Johnson had discussed the prospect of allowing more politically vulnerable GOP lawmakers a chance to vote on their amendment that would temporarily extend pandemic-era subsidies for ACA coverage. But after days of private talks, leadership sided with the more conservative wing of the conference, which has assailed the subsidies as propping up a failed ACA marketplace.

“We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve,” Johnson said Tuesday at the Capitol. “In the end, it was not — an agreement wasn’t made.”

The maneuvering surrounding the health care vote all but guarantees that many Americans will see substantially higher insurance costs in 2026. In the Senate, a bipartisan group was still trying to come up with a compromise to extend the subsidies, which fueled this year’s government shutdown. But senators made clear that any potential legislation would likely wait until January, after the holiday break.

Instead, House Republicans will pursue their 100-plus-page health care package that focuses on long-sought GOP proposals designed to expand insurance coverage options for small businesses and the self-employed. A test vote is expected Wednesday.

The Republicans’ package would clamp down on middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers who work to manage drug costs and process claims for insurance plans. The bill would also expand access to what’s referred to as association health plans, which would allow more small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together and purchase health coverage.

An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the package would decrease the number of people with health insurance by an average of 100,000 per year over a 2027-2035 window, while reducing the federal deficit by $35.6 billion.

Failing to address expiring insurance subsidies ‘political malpractice’

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., blasted the leadership’s decision to not allow for a vote to temporarily extend the health insurance subsidies, saying it amounted to “political malpractice.”

Lawler, who hails from a competitive district, noted that most people who get their health coverage through the Affordable Care Act live in states that President Donald Trump won and said the changes proposed for a temporary extension were “conservative reforms.” He also criticized Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for not pushing Democrats to support a pair of bipartisan extension efforts.

“You have two leaders who are not serious about solving this problem,” Lawler said of Johnson and Jeffries.

Still, the centrist Republicans indicated they would not try to block the Republican leadership’s measure from coming to a vote.

Johnson defended the House GOP’s bill, which includes priorities that Republicans have been working on for several years.

“We have a long list of things that we know will reduce premiums, increase access and quality of care,” Johnson said. “The Democrats have zero ideas, zero concepts and zero legislative plans on anything they’ll propose other than just subsidizing the broken system.”

Democrats said even if the bill passes the House, it will not pass the Senate, where it would need 60 votes and bipartisan support to advance. They said it was not a serious effort to address rising costs.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters following the weekly policy luncheons at the Capitol, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

“Millions will be priced out of their coverage, and those who can still afford it will get less while paying more,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democratic campaign arm. “Republicans are ignoring the pain, the pain we’re seeing across the country for everyday Americans. And make no mistake, it is going to cost them the majority.”

GOP bill focuses on insurance options and cost-sharing

During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to expand access to association health plans that don’t have to offer the full menu of benefits required under current law. The option offers lower premiums for small businesses and self-employed people, but the policies are likely to cover fewer benefits. A federal judge who struck down the administration’s effort in 2018 said the plans were were “clearly an end-run” around consumer protections required by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The House Republican plan would also restore government funding for cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs, a type of financial help that insurers give to low-income ACA enrollees on silver-level plans that reduces their share of costs like deductibles and copays.

From 2014 until 2017, the federal government reimbursed insurance companies for CSRs — but in 2017, the Trump administration stopped making those payments. To make up for the lost funds, insurance companies hiked premiums for silver-level plans — a complicated move that ended up increasing the financial assistance many enrollees get to help pay for premiums.

As a result, health analysts say that while restoring funding for CSRs would likely bring down silver-level premiums, it could also have the unwelcome ripple effect of increasing many people’s net premiums on bronze and gold plans.

The provisions related to pharmacy benefit managers require the middlemen to disclose certain data about their operations to group health plans, with the hope that more transparency would reduce prescription drug costs.

Senators revive talks of action in the new year

Almost two dozen Republicans and Democrats met late Monday to talk about a last-minute fix on the ACA tax credits after the Senate rejected two partisan health care bills last week. They emerged from the meeting discussing ways to end the stalemate, including a possible two-year extension of the subsidies with reforms that would narrow who could receive them. They also discussed adding some version of a GOP proposal to create new health savings accounts that would help people purchase insurance.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who led the bipartisan meeting, said the group would like to announce a proposal this week. But there were still significant unresolved issues, including whether to include stricter language on abortion funding. Disagreements over abortion were one of the main sticking points in earlier talks that derailed a compromise.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., speaks to reporters following the weekly policy luncheons at the Capitol, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there’s a “potential pathway” to an agreement in January, but acknowledged, “we’re not going to pass anything by the end of this week.”

Staff writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Ali Swenson contributed to this report.

ChatGPT and its peers have become the bane of teachers. Students churn out homework assignments with it and, according to one exasperated professor, secretly feed themselves smart comments for class discussions.

Far from helping kids think for themselves, today’s artificial intelligence tools offer an irresistible cognitive shortcut they’ll likely depend on through their adult lives and careers. RIP critical thinking.

So Estonia is pioneering a better way of using ChatGPT to learn — by making it harder and retraining the model to pose more questions than answers. The effort challenges ChatGPT’s core appeal and could get the cold shoulder from OpenAI, but it could also unlock AI’s true potential in education in a way no one else has managed.

Estonia, which has a population of 1.4 million, has long been a technology pioneer. A 1990s effort to digitize all government services turned it into one the most digitally sophisticated countries. This January, it’ll also become the first to give all schools access to ChatGPT Edu, a version of the popular chatbot developed for universities. OpenAI has mostly given it stronger privacy protections, but Estonian scientists also want to modify the model in the coming months to make it a better teacher.

Fine tuning changes an AI model’s behavior. Engineers retrain an existing model on new data — in this case, conversations with students — and give it new instructions to alter how it responds, so it prompts the user to think instead of giving a polished answer. That, however, can make it feel less helpful by ChatGPT’s usual standards.

Generative AI’s value to both businesses and consumers is its output. It’s why Estonia’s high school students got instantly hooked on ChatGPT a couple of years ago. The country’s students bring in Europe’s highest PISA scores (PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment and the scores are collated by the OECD), which rank the scholastic performance of 15-year-old students in reading, math and science, and with pressure high to maintain those grades, many turned to AI. “We started noticing with my fellow teachers that the text quality changed,” says Ivo Visak, a former high school principal who is now heading Estonia’s AI-in-schools effort. “Sometimes it turned better but sometimes it turned weird.”

Visak foresaw a rise in academic fraud and decline in critical thinking; Estonia could either race to catch up with the future or try to steer it, he says. Fortunately, the country is used to being an early adopter: As part of its digital leap forward in the 1990s, it gave every school computers with fast internet access and trained teachers to use them.

Now, with its next leap into AI, older teachers are the most enthusiastic users because they lived through that earlier tech transition and know the drill.

Katriin Henrietta Kriisa, a 16-year-old high school student in the city of Tartu, says her biology teacher regularly asks the class to use AI. One recent assignment was to ask ChatGPT to play the role of the 19th century eugenicist Francis Galton, interview the bot and then write an article — “NOT with AI assistance!” the brief emphasized — about the ethics of eugenics. Her school is one of nine in a pilot program using ChatGPT Edu.

Another English teacher told the class to type the prompt “Ask me deeper and deeper questions about the novel. Don’t give me answers — only questions that help me think” into ChatGPT on their laptops. “The whole point was to make us trust using it but to still be as critical as when you search something on the internet,” Kriisa says.

Her principal, Mari Roostik, is trying to steer students away from using ChatGPT for answers only, which is about as easy as telling a kid who’s been eating McDonalds every day for lunch that they should now switch to vegetables. “The fact that it is so helpful and pleasant goes against learning,” says Jaan Aru, a computer science professor at the University of Tartu, who’s leading the research team studying how Estonian schools use ChatGPT Edu and recommending changes to OpenAI. “Learning always requires some friction. You learn only when it’s a bit hard.”

Aru and his colleagues are analyzing anonymized transcripts of how Estonian students are using the chatbot to see how often it gives them answers versus prodding them with questions like “What would be your first step in solving this problem?” Large language models are uncannily good at sympathizing, but Aru also wants to see the AI encourage students to keep going, especially when tasks become complex. Some of those changes are taking effect for the Estonian version of ChatGPT Edu, but slowly. Over the coming months, he hopes the transcripts show less instances of “I don’t know” and “just give me the answer” from the students and more evidence that they are thinking through a problem.

The biggest challenge is that OpenAI doesn’t have to apply any of Estonia’s feedback to the worldwide version of ChatGPT Edu, especially around adding friction to make it a better teacher. Make the AI too tough a taskmaster and students may switch to another AI model, even if the more challenging chatbot produces better learning outcomes. And retraining ChatGPT Edu would probably cost millions of dollars; OpenAI is already burning through cash.

If Aru and his team can push for necessary changes in ChatGPT, they could end up doing the rest of the world a favor. But changing habits won’t be easy, even at home. In a recent biology test, Kriisa says her classmates were complaining that the bot kept giving them questions.

“I somehow got lucky,” she says, laughing. “It just gave me answers.”

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”