Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

Starting Monday, Metrorail riders can purchase a “short trip” pass online or at a fare machine and apply it to their SmarTrip cards. It’s a big improvement for Metro customers that commute regularly and use Metro on the weekends or for additional trips in the evenings.

The pass costs $35 and is good for one week. It covers all off-peak trips and the first $3.50 of peak trips. If you take a trip costing more than $3.50, the difference comes out of the stored value on your SmarTrip.

Metro already offers SmarTrip passes that give rail riders unlimited rides of any length. Those cost $15 for one day, $57.50 for a week and $230 for 28 days. Those are useful for riders taking longer, more expensive trips. But those who only ride a few stops won’t find that pass worthwhile. These new “short trip” passes are much cheaper because they don’t cover long trips that riders may not need.

“Short trip” passes were previously available only as a paper farecard. If you took a trip of more than $3.50, you would have to use the Exitfare machine to pay the exact fare when leaving. Putting the pass on a SmarTrip card is much more convenient for riders who take the occasional longer trip, because the faregates can automatically calculate and deduct the extra fare.

Next, consider discounts and even passes for even shorter trips

You can also subscribe online to have the pass automatically renew when the old one is about to expire. For some riders, this is a good option. But since the pass costs the equivalent of 10 rides, it’s not such a good deal that you’d want to set it and forget it, which could mean you’d end up buying one even on weeks with work holidays or vacation. I’d like to see a monthly pass with a discount, so that more riders would find it worthwhile to just buy passes automatically even around holidays.

Now that Metro’s figured out how to implement a pass where people pay and get trips under a certain amount free, they could even try offering passes with a threshold below $3.50. For example, a pass that costs $100 per month and allows all trips under $2.50 each way for free might be very popular among riders that live in DC.

Give credit for bus transfers

One downside to the “short trip” pass is that it doesn’t discount transfers between bus and rail. WMATA representatives have previously said that allowing transfer discounts to pass holders would be like giving discounts on top of discounts.

However, the transfer discount used to be available for pass holders when WMATA used paper transfer slips. When the WMATA Board approved replacing them with SmarTrip tracking, there was no discussion about eliminating the discount as well.

The discount isn’t really a “discount,” anyway. It’s a recognition that a trip that uses bus and rail is really one trip on two modes, and the fare probably shouldn’t be the same as two totally separate trips. You don’t pay double the rail fare if you transfer between rail lines. In many cities, like New York, a bus plus rail trip costs the same as just one trip alone.

WMATA should restore the transfer discounts for all pass holders, and give riders with a rail pass the same reduced fare on the bus as any rider coming from a rail trip. Similarly, all riders should get the same fare when they transfer from bus to rail, whether or not they have a Metrobus pass.

All in all, “short trip” passes on SmarTrip are a great option, and I expect to subscribe to them in the future.

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.