The CTA recently rolled out it's new payment system, Ventra. This is an RF chip used in major credit cards that allows you to tap your card above the turnstile reader and go right in. This has the added benefit of flexibility, in that tourists or anyone need not buy a farecard, but can simple use their existing credit or debit card for fare payment.
This is great, except that you may three or four of these cards in your wallet. Looking over my recent activity, at least on train ride was paid by my bank atm card, and another was paid by my america express card. I guess simply holding my wallet up to the reader will not be sufficient, and instead I will need to carefully hold the ventra card alone up to the reader when entering a station. For the most part, it seems that this has been working fairly well, since I have less than a 20% error rate for cards essentially next to each other in my wallet.
This is only a quirk for me, since I don't have a monthly pass (which wouldn't have been used when I pay directly with a different card) and am not yet using the pretax fare payments through my employer. I can see this catching a number of people by surprise, and it's a departure from the previous chicago card chip, which would not accept outside payments, and would work right inside your wallet.
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