Photo by dipdewdog on Flickr.

At this coming Thursday’s meeting of Metro’s Customer Service Operations and Safety (CSOS) Committee, the General Manager, John Catoe, will discuss the plan of action and milestones for upgrading Smartrip cards. Here’s the current schedule for key enhancements:

  • Present-August 2009: Expand available locations to load value onto Smartrip cards.
  • September 2009: SmarTrip can hold daily, weekly and monthly passes (yay!)
  • September 2009: SmarTrip self-service website (you can view recent transactions and register for “other point-of-sale features”)
  • December 2009: Auto Load (refill automatically from a credit card)
  • December 2009: Account Link (for compliance with IRS tax rules that require transit and parking benefits to be stored separately on transit smartcards)

The milestones happen almost immediately (starting this week) and end with final system acceptance in March of 2010.

There is a slide at the end talking about requests for proposals for an “Open Payment System.” I think this means WMATA will be investigating using open standard farecards so the problem of being tied to a single vendor goes away.

It’s amazing what happens when the combination of the Inspector General, The Washington Post, your oversight board and a local crank blogger journalist light a fire under you. We went from upgrades contracted in 2003 with no completion by 2008, to a contract in late 2008 with (hopefully!) delivery by early 2010.

Crossposted on Infosnack.

Michael Perkins blogs about Metro operations and fares, performance parking, and any other government and economics information he finds on the Web. He lives with his wife and two children in Arlington, Virginia.