Who to blame? Banks, according to one transit official, who told The New York Times yesterday that lack of distribution of NFC-enabled cards means that the MetroCard won't go completely out of service until 2019:

“We originally thought that these contactless cards, distributed by banks, would be widely distributed and in wide use today,” Michael DeVitto, executive vice president in charge of fare collection for New York City Transit, told the authority’s committee on capital program oversight on Monday. “That’s not the case.”

And so we're all doomed to spend another six years calculating how many dollars to add to our regular MetroCards if we're ever going to run the balance down to zero.