The city will eventually replace all of its older mechanical meters with the electronic ones.

A mechanical meter decides the fare and is proportional to the distance traveled.

The demise of the mechanical meter was painless but not swift.

The city stopped buying mechanical meters about 10 years ago.

From a heyday of 69,000 on the streets in the late 1980s, the city has fewer than 5,000 intact mechanical meters now, all in storage.

Most monitoring is done with electronic or mechanical meters, and each dummy generally carries about three dozen of these instruments.

In the future we expect to put in equipment mechanical meters further control the stroke.

Making things worse, the city is also replacing its 23,000 other mechanical meters with electronic ones.

And wouldn't the company, a leader in mechanical and electronic meters but hardly the first name in digital ones, be at a technological disadvantage?

These companies have already carved 15 percent out of Pitney's one-time monopoly in mechanical meters.