Yea, I sing of the allmighty Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority. Ye of cramped train cars and vanishing buses. Ye of surly employees and stopped escalators. Ye who I have loved of old, despite all tribulations.
I used to really like Metro. Cheap, convenient, comparatively clean and well run. Then they screwed me on my SmarTrip Card. The deal is that you use the hard plastic card with a chip in place of Farecards. Plastic and rechargeable, they let you put a large amount on and not have to deal with getting fifty million farecards, which are paper and easily pulped by the dread washing machine. I’ve been using mine for almost two years. Then, on 07 July, it stopped working. Kaput. Dead, it was bereft of life. Pining for the fjords, it were. Fine and dandy. I have cash to get myself to work and send the thing off registered mail per the demon voice mail info system. I’m told it will get back to me in five business days. I never recieve the registered mail receipt.
It arrives last Friday. July 27. I’m out of town and pick it up today. It’s nice and new. Opening it, I stick myself with the staple in the protective plastic envelope. I’m now bleeding, sweaty from walking to the post office, and late to work. I swipe it to get on the train. It reads $79.00.
I sent it with 183.00. I'm now sweaty, bleeding, late for work and short 104. Fuck you, Metro. Fuck you for all that you’ve done.
What I don’t understand is why you guys have depleting bus passes like that. Here in Montreal we have monthly passes, $48,50 for unlimited passage all month long on the bus and metro. There are also weekly, 3-day, and one-day passes. If your weekly or monthly pass gets demagnetized, you just go and get it replaced. What a pain to have to keep refilling your pass!
Matt, as soon as I sat down to compose the rant, I hoped you’d show up. I, much like yourself, love Metro. I’ve been on almost every capital city that has one. I like the stops, the conductors, the people, the stations.
What I hate, however, it taking a chance on a new technology and having it bite me in the ass. Apparently from talking to people, the standard useful life of the chips in the cards is about 1.5 years. The manufacturer and Metro don’t make any concession to people whose cards malfunction as mine did.
In answer to your question, there are unlimited passes, but they tend to be less economical than paying either per trip or getting reimbursed from your employer. There’s an initiative called MetroChek down here whereby employers who provide X amount of a travel stipend get a tax break of some kind. Natch, the only passes that work are either MetroChek cards proper (magnetized paper), regular Farecards (same) or SmarTrip cards (chip). Once every three months, I put $180 on it, so it’s not really a hassle. My roundtrip commute costs USD 2.60 a day, so I get a lot of use out of one charge. Still, this sucks. And not in a good way.
WHEW!!! I thought, for just a moment, you were referring to Metro in Seattle – the Washington Transit etc.etc. threw me. We’re lucky, our options are only passes and tickets (good for a set $$ amount), not the depleting card.
I like our transit system. I think it’s one of the best. BUT…it could certainly be better!
Well, for every good there’s bad. I don’t think there’s any financial incentive on employers’ parts to favour the use of public transit in Montreal; also, it’s among the least subsidized in North America, which may partially explain why there haven’t been any new stations in the past fifteen years.
Anyway, they just broke ground for the extension into Laval, so I’m happy.
He’s damn right about how expensive Metro passes are. You say that to ride unlimited for a month on both bus and train is about $50 (I assume Canadian) in Toronto. Well, here to pull that off in Washington, you need to fork over – drumroll please! – $120US!! And you have to do it at $30 a week. If you don’t need to ride the bus, you can get an actuall monthly subway pass at the new, low, introductory price of $100. And unlike most transit systems in the world, there is NOT a student discount for those of us in college. (Though there is a discount for DC grade-schoolers).
In fact, I have to roll my own 'student-discount.’ It requires me to get up at an ungodly hour on Wednesday morning and ride the bus to the Franconia-Springfield station, and use the slip they give on those buses to get a $10 discount on those $30 passes.
False_God, would you let us know if you ever get your hundred dollars back?
I HATE the stopped escalators!!! However, I understand why they need to do that during high traffic times. I remember the first year we lived here (NoVa) we went into DC for the fireworks… arriving just as they ended. We were in a packed Metro station, on a packed elevator heading into a pack of people standing still staring into the sky. I had Dominic in a stroller with me. We got to the top of the elevator but there was nowhere to step off. People started pressing in behind us as the elevator delivered more people into an area with no more room. It was a little like the thing with Lucy and the pies on the conveyor belt. It was loud as fuck but I screamed out instructions loudly enough that the people in my imediate vicinity squeezed themselves apart and helped me lift Dominic’s stroller overhead. I seriously feared that he would literally be crushed. I was terrified. People let us through to the edge, helping to pass Dominic overhead… I was really impressed that no one was angry or pushy… even though we were all literally pressed together, full body, on all sides…
Anyway, when I see the elevators stopped in heavy usage times, I agree with it. When I see them stopped in the middle of the day when no one is on them, I get pissed.
That is totally fucked about your card. Our SmarTag just stopped working, but at least that is tracked in an account not in the device itself.
The account info for the SmarTrip can’t be stored in the card itself (or at least not solely). Otherwise, Metro wouldn’t be able to send you a replacement card with the amount you had before should you lose the card (less $5, the cost for the replacement card). Which is what I will tell Metro if and when my card dies; “I lost my card, my password is …”
And Opal? Elevator or escalator? I’m confused. I’m assume esalator and comment that I’m amazed and relieved that you and family made it off safely.
Well, after the ranting and all, the fix turned out to be surprisingly easy. I called the SmarTrip office, told them what had happened, told them my card numbers, and it turns out some brain trust couldn’t figure out the difference between one hundred seventy-nine and seventy-nine dollars. They apologized and said that they’d credit my account within 3 to five business days. Mind you, it still took two days of calling them, reporting my problem to various supervisors and leaving my info for callbacks that never came, so I’m still pissed.
Oh, and the other day I saw a tourist family shoving their way onto a crowded car. Impolite, sure, but they didn’t see the blind guy with the dog one person ahead of them, whose dog nearly got crushed and stepped on. I let them have it. Stoof up during rush hour and shouted “Godammit, there’s a seeing eye dog ahead of you! Stop pushing until he gets inside!”
The look on their faces was worth the brief loss of my hundred dollars. I’m going to have a beer for breakfast now, and dream of those flying cars.
