Visa has just rolled out a new pilot program that allows New Yorkers to pay subway, bus and train fares with a wave of their iPhones.

New York City Transit, NJ TRANSIT and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are participating in the pilot program. As part of the program, Visa is testing both payment cards and Visa payWave-enabled smartphones.

Rather than having to buy or refill a Metro card, travelers can just wave their phones in front of a contactless reader.

As we reported last month, Visa is also working with Bank of America to bring smartphone payments to retailers in New York City.

Smartphones that are equipped with a special sensor can transmit payment information to contactless card readers at fare gates. Not only does this help people get through transit stations more quickly; it also eliminates the need to buy a transit card or dig around in your purse for your existing pass.

Check out this video that Visa produced to show the smartWave wireless payment option in action:

Beyond New York, Visa is also working with LA Metro to bring TAP ReadyCARD dual-use prepaid Visa cards that act as both transit tickets and Visa debit cards.

Internationally, Visa has been deploying its payWave technology in Kuala Lampur, Singapor, Paris, Istanbul and London.

The New York subway program is only deployed across 28 stops along the Lexington subway line; but if it is successful, we might see this feature rolled out across the wider system.

Frankly, as someone who frequently loses or misplaces transit cards, having the option to just wave my smartphone to pay my fare sounds incredible. Even better than getting to use this feature for a train, using the system on the bus would make getting around much faster. Would you like to be able to pay for transit tickets by waving your phone? Let us know.

Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon
via: Mashable

Check out the apartment that LeBron James was rumored to be touring the other day. It’s in the Time Warner Center (same building that JAY-Z has a Penthouse in) and it’s beautiful: hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, marble-covered bathroom, and an amazing view.

Apparently, the folks over at New York Magazine actually suggested that LeBron check it out, and he is said to have taken their advice. According to The Huffington Post, one of the brokers over at Prudential Douglas Elliman, Sherri Shang, was heard saying that she gave James a tour of the apartment.

It’s available for rent at $45,000 a month, or for purchase at $14.95 million.

It began with a startling, inexplicable explosion of anger over a seat on a D train. And then the passenger who had resisted giving up his seat was bleeding from stab wounds, staggering through the car, collapsing, dying.

The other passengers on the train at 2 a.m. Saturday — among them four photography students on their way home from burgers and beer in a Midtown restaurant — had just become witnesses to a murder. One of the students, Paola Nuñez Solorio, 30, chronicled the aftermath of the stabbing, ending her day as she had begun it, watching the world through her camera.

In the morning she had zoomed in on apartment-building courtyards for a school project. Now she was photographing frightened passengers, a wounded man tottering through the train, a killer standing at the end of the car.

She took 120 photographs in the mayhem that followed the stabbing, some out of focus, some a blur of passengers scrambling to get out of harm’s way, some showing the victim’s blood on the floor, some showing the victim’s body sprawled across the two seats he collapsed on.

New York City and its subways are far safer than they once were, but violence can still erupt, seemingly out of nowhere, and Ms. Nuñez’s photographs captured the harrowing moments in all their unfiltered, unvarnished reality.

Ms. Nuñez and her friends had been standing in the first car of the uptown D train after they boarded at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas. There were scattered empty seats, not enough for them to sit together, so they stood, talking about nothing in particular.

The train stopped at Rockefeller Center, and moments after it pulled out of the station, they realized something was wrong at the other end of their car.

“Everyone started running toward us,” Ms. Nuñez said. “We thought there was a fight. Then we saw this guy with blood coming out of his mouth, and the killer right behind him, putting this thing away. I didn’t know what it was.”

It was a knife, other passengers said.

Instinctively, Ms. Nuñez reached for her camera, a digital single-lens reflex model that did not need a flash to function in the fluorescent light of the car.

She and her friends had not noticed the suspect, identified by the police as Geraldo Sanchez, 37, an exterminator from the Bronx, when he boarded at Rockefeller Center. Nor had they realized that he had gone on a rampage at the other end of the car, spilling food and demanding that a passenger, Dwight Johnson, 36, vacate a seat beside one of the doors.

Mr. Johnson said there were other seats.

Mr. Sanchez said he wanted that seat. Soon he pulled out a knife and slashed Mr. Johnson’s hands and neck, witnesses said. Ms. Nuñez said Mr. Johnson staggered through the car, bleeding, with Mr. Sanchez right behind him.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said, and she and her friends realized they might be in danger: “We were stuck with the killer.”

The fear behind that thought deepened when someone pulled the emergency brake cord, freezing the train between Rockefeller Center and the Seventh Avenue station. The passengers were trapped in the car with the suspect and the dying victim longer than if the train had gone on to the station and had been met by the police.

As the train sat in the tunnel, the terrified passengers huddled together. Mr. Sanchez walked by and began trying to open the locked door leading to the next car. “We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said. “A guy standing with us said, ‘Don’t move.’ ”

Another passenger, a woman, fainted. The man with her tried to revive her, Ms. Nuñez said.

After several long minutes, the train started moving again. It pulled into the next station, at Seventh Avenue, but the doors remained closed.

One of Ms. Nuñez’s friends said it appeared that the two officers on the platform were waiting for backups to arrive. That left the passengers in the car feeling vulnerable anew. “People were looking at us like we were in the zoo,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified because she had not told her father that she had been at the scene.

Once the doors opened and the police stepped in, “We told them, ‘That’s the guy who killed him,’ ” the woman recalled. “They said, ‘Step aside.’ ”

She said Mr. Sanchez tried to blend in with the other passengers as police officers swarmed into the car. “The killer tried to be a part of us,” she said. She remembered hearing him say, “I didn’t do anything.”

Mr. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said. Mr. Sanchez was charged with second-degree murder and weapons possession.