I'm planning a business trip to Boston, Massachusetts, during which I'll have a day or two free to play railfan and tour its public transport system.
From my research at the MBTA website, it looks like there are two main ways to pay for transit rides there: either a contactless plastic card called CharlieCard or magnetic-strip paper tickets called CharlieTicket. Both operate on a stored-value principle, but the fares are lower with CharlieCard than with CharlieTicket.
Since I only have a few days, my instinct is that the paper CharlieTicket will be cheaper for me -- but on the other hand, during that time, I'm going to ride a lot more than the typical local, or even the typical tourist. So there's a possibility that the CharlieCard will break even for me.
However, I can't for the life of me find anywhere on the MBTA website where it says what the price of a CharlieCard is. Without knowing that in advance it is hard to figure out where the break-even point is.
Does anyone here happen to know?
(The card price may be disguised as a minimum non-refundable balance or something similar, like some other contractless transit payment card systems do, but I can't find anything about that either).
Bonus question: If I determine the card is advantageous for me, is there somewhere at Logan airport I can buy one at around 7pm on a Sunday? The MBTA's list of points-of-sale requires me to select a particular neighborhood of Boston from a textual list before it will show me anything, and I don't know which of them contains the airport.