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The MTA is letting go of 450 station agents as early as May. Each one earns an average of $75,000, including benefits. Taken together, the layoffs will save $13 million this year during one of the authority’s worst budget crises. Some New Yorkers are already mourning for their lost agents, but plenty of others aren’t shedding tears.

The MTA began targeting station agents last year. In September, the authority closed 101 booths across the city. That’s made people like Arp Gurpinar, a stay-at-home dad with a two-year-old, invent a new kind of dance when he uses the eastern entrance to the Union Square station.

“I just put the stroller in front of the door and then swipe my card and go inside,” Gurpinar says.

Gurpinar used to ask the station agent there to buzz him and his stroller through the service entrance. But now that the agent is gone, Gurpinar leaves his child outside the turnstile and goes through it alone. Then he turns around, pushes open the emergency exit door, and drags in the stroller.

“Which is very inconvenient--because for five, two, three minutes I leave the child behind,” Gurpinar says.

So far, he hasn’t had any problems, but he worries. “We are also anxious if the door will open or not,” Gurpinar says.

Judy Brown, a station agent for 24 years, working at Houston St. on the Uptown 1 line.

Photo Gallery: Agent Booths, Open and Closed

Then there are people like Danny Jones, a 35-year-old actor from Brooklyn. He doesn’t need the service gate, but he doesn’t like using a credit card to buy MetroCards from the machines.

“What we got here today, there’s no station agent but the machine--these valued machines that replaced human beings--they say they don’t take bills, they say they are not accepting bills at this time,” Jones says.

Jones isn’t alone. Two-thirds of all transactions through MetroCard vending machines are done in cash, not debit or credit cards.

“Everybody thinks using a credit card is a convenience. It’s not a convenience if they’re charging you 18 percent interest,” Jones says.

The job of station agent was left over from the era of tokens, when every rider had to line up at the booths and buy tokens with cash. Since tokens got phased out seven years ago, the agents have been searching for a purpose. Turns out they found one: serving the many outliers of the system; the parents with strollers, passengers with bikes, people who don’t like credit cards. And people also say they feel safer with someone around,though in reality subway crime has continued to drop despite last September’s cuts.

Station agents also consolidate spare change left on MetroCards.

Added all up, that’s a lot of outliers. But many riders don’t have any need for station agents.

“Never. I never use them,” says one straphanger, Brittany Gholston. “Even when I do go to them, they don’t give me the correct information.”

These mainstream riders use credit cards fearlessly, and can read maps well. Marianne Ciccantelli, a real estate broker, says she’d rather see fewer station agents than less service on the busy Lexington Avenue line she uses.

“These people don’t seem to like their job in the first place," Ciccantelli says.

She says she knows there must be exceptions, but she’d rather see station agents doing something more productive, like telling people on subway platforms to allow people off the cars before getting on.

“It appears to me that they’re hiding back there because they are very low," Ciccantelli says. "The window actually cuts off half of their face."

The MTA is betting the system’s outliers will learn to adapt. The authority is keeping at least one station booth open at each station at all times. If you have a stroller, you’re not supposed to leave your child outside the turnstile while you open the service gate. You’re supposed to find that manned entrance and get buzzed in properly. Sometimes, that entrance will be on the wrong side of the tracks. You may end up riding uptown a few stops to a transfer point, when you really want to ride downtown.

This month, 600 agents with the least seniority received notices that they could be laid off, depending on civil service rules. One of them was Sabrina Greenwood, who says she loves her job.

“I’m the counselor, I’m the social worker. I talk to kids in the morning when they're hanging out at the station—like, 'Aren’t you supposed to be at school? It’s 9 o’clock,’” Greenwood says.

Greenwood admits station agents have a poor reputation, but says part of that is because they’re stuck behind thick glass with faulty microphones. They go a little stir-crazy sitting inside a booth for eight hours.

“Most people, unless you’re incarcerated, don’t have to ask to go to the bathroom,” Greenwood says.

Greenwood is a single mom with four kids. She showed up at the MTA’s board meeting last week to plead her case. She used to work as a screener at JFK Airport, but says she doubts she could go back.

“I don’t want Medicaid. I don’t want food stamps, and that’s what I’m going to end up with this situation,” Greenwood says.

The station agent union is still fighting to keep its members' jobs, but the MTA just closed 11 more booths last weekend and is getting ready to close or reduce service at another 99 in the coming months.