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But beginning on Sunday, the empty MetroCard — that oft-discarded remnant of the rails — may begin to recede from view.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will begin charging $1 to buy a new card, a move that transit officials predict will lead riders to save and refill their existing passes.

The change will come on a day that travelers have braced themselves for since December, when the authority voted to raise fares and tolls on its subways, buses and major crossings. By Sunday morning, a MetroCard swipe will cost $2.50, up a quarter. A 30-day unlimited use card will cost $112, an $8 increase.

Across New York City's subway stations, though, the new $1 surcharge may yield a more visible shift.

The cards have long clustered on platforms, at newsstand entrances and, most often, beside the turnstiles that delivered riders the bad news that theirs were empty.

They have even spawned an underground economy, as the destitute mine station floors, hoping riders flicked their passes to the ground too soon.

"They just drop it," said Gloria Benitez, a station cleaner, hauling trash at the 14th Street station on Eighth Avenue, "as if it was a candy wrapper."

The transportation authority has sought to frame the new policy in environmental terms, arguing that it will curtail littering. In a letter to board members before the change was approved, the agency's chairman at the time, Joseph J. Lhota, called the surcharge "a fee that no one needs to pay."

Officials said the measure should reduce production costs, which total roughly $10 million annually, if the system required fewer cards. (The authority said it had been making nearly 160 million MetroCards a year.)

Of course, the provision has also created a new revenue stream, from which the authority expects to reap about $20 million a year.

And while old habits may be difficult to break, MetroCards are not.

"It's a good marketing technique," Angelo Spagnolo, 25, a sculptor and musician from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said at the 14th Street station. "They make something disposable and still make you pay for it every time."

The authority emphasized that broken or expired cards could be traded in, with no surcharge, at a vending machine — if the card is not so mangled as to be unreadable — or with a station agent. The surcharge also does not apply to people who buy MetroCards from vendors outside the subway system, those who receive them directly from employers or benefit providers, or riders who buy a combination of railroad and MetroCard tickets.

Some riders suggested that the new rule had already begun to influence behavior.

Carlton Gilliam, 56, a maintenance worker from Harlem, said he would no longer buy new cards. "I'm a New Yorker," he said, pulling nine MetroCards — most of them entirely or nearly empty — from his pocket. "A dollar makes a difference."

Ms. Benitez, the station cleaner, said she had not noticed as many abandoned MetroCards as she made her rounds recently.

"People are picking them up," she said.

But a scan of the station suggested that cards had not disappeared entirely. Some were scattered across the tracks, among an iced tea bottle, a rubber ball and a soda cup that appeared too big for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's New York. Several more could be found behind a vending machine near the turnstiles at 14th Street, caked in dust and grime.