Posts about SmarTrip

With a SmarTrip card, rail fares will range from $1.70 to $3.50 off-peak and from $2.10 to $5.75 during rush hours. Regular local bus fares will rise from $1.60 to $1.70 for SmarTrip customers, while customers paying in cash will have their fares rounded to the nearest dollar.

Since use of SmarTrip by visitors and non-regular riders is expected to increase, SmarTrip vending machines will be installed at more all stations.

With the elimination of the peak-of-the-peak fare, station fare tables will go back to having just two columns. But riders shouldn't expect to save a whole lot, since the "regular" fare has been increased enough to cover the difference. With the peak-of-the-peak surcharge, the current maximum fare is $5.20. It will rise to $5.75 under the proposal.

Parking at Metro lots and garages will increase by 25¢ per day, about a 5% increase. Bike locker fees will be cut from $200 per year to $120 per year, something we argued for based on low demand for lockers.

Most disappointing to me is that discussion of implementing some sort of flexible monthly pass has stopped for this budget cycle, meaning that Metro customers will likely have to wait at least two more years to have the flexibility of paying for their commute and getting their off-peak trips for free. The topic of monthly passes was briefly discussed during an October meeting of the finance committee, but by November had disappeared from the discussion.

The fare increases are expected to raise about half of Metro's $120 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year, with local jurisdictions expected to chip in the other half of the shortfall in order to balance the budget. Metro's finance committee will discuss the fare increase along with the rest of the budget on Thursday morning.

Closing the 18th Street exit would make the station inaccessible to wheelchair users on weekends, so that entrance must stay open whenever the station is open.

Opening the 17th Street entrance on weekends, then, means a good deal of expense for Metro. They'd have to pay a station manager to staff the east mezzanine for two additional days each week. Metro does not currently open entrances that are unstaffed.

So, unfortunately, as long as Metro does not have the funds to open both mezzanines at Farragut West on weekends or unless they change the policy on unstaffed mezzanines, patrons will have to walk an extra block to access Farragut West and other stations that have closed mezzanines on weekends.

Riders can, of course, still ride through to Metro Center where the transfer only requires a single escalator.

Being able to walk to shops, restaurants, school, and home is good for the economy, too. Ilana Preuss of Smart Growth America says the Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda makes 20% more revenue per square foot than the store in a Rockville strip mall. According to Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint (by as much as 80%) is to move to a walkable community.

Who wants to be walkable?

"Millennials," that's who. Young adults have been "scarred by recession," said Manuel Pastor, Director of USC's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity. He said they no longer see home buying as a good investment, but still want to live close to where they work and play.

Pastor had a warning for government officials and planners: the only way members of Generation Y will stay in walkable communities after they have children is if they also have access to good schools.

Words matter

To tell the story of what makes a community great, you have to choose your words wisely, with your audience in mind. "No wonk terminology!" cautioned Preuss, whose group has recently done some catchphrase polling. Words that frequently garner negative or confused reactions include: mixed-use, density, transit, and infrastructure. Only 36% of those surveyed like the phrase "compact neighborhoods," while 80% are fond of "walkable" even though the two terms refer to an identical concept.

Additionally, to get folks to listen, speak truthfully and in terms they care about, i.e. the economy and family. People love hearing that government will "use the money it has more effectively" and that "making great places is the key to turning around the economy." Busy parents will listen if you tell them that by driving less, they'll have more time with their children.

New tricks to consider

Work on making the SmarTrip card smarter. A number of presenters talked about including bike share, car share, bus and rail fare, and even car parking on one card. The idea, says Rob Inerfeld of Eugene, Oregon, is "for seamless bike, ped and transit links."

Visualize data for instant understanding. Examples from the Portland metro area and i-SUSTAIN in Seattle are aesthetically stunning. As Inerfeld says, good use of technology "de-risks the planning process." By feeding government data into a visualization program such as Google Earth Pro, planning is more likely to happen according to facts rather than hunches or politics. Powerful, slick social media tools such as the MindMixer virtual town hall display opinion data using simple, colorful icons.

Become a "New Rail~Volutionary." The Rail~Volution Filmfest featured a video about one municipal transit system which held a mobile concert as a way to entice new riders. That's just one creative tactic of the New Rail~Volutionaries, a national network of professionals and advocates passionate about creating livable communities. We need to get on board here in the DC region.

It all starts with you

Finally, readers of Greater Greater Washington got props from assistant editor Matthew Johnson during a panel on the power of blogs to influence policy: "Our comment threads are often more informative than the posts in which they appear." By joining in on, and often driving (pun intended) the regional conversation, you are an integral part of making the Washington, DC region even greater.

Currently, the paper rail passes are not very popular because they are inconvenient to purchase and cannot be used to pay for parking or bus trips. The paper rail passes are about 1-2% of Metrorail transactions. By making the passes more convenient, more customers may take advantage of this discount.

The passes will only work for rail trips, and do not allow customers to receive a discount on transfers to or from the region's bus systems, including Metrobus. The Smart Pass proposal would change the pass to monthly, allow customers to choose how much to pay for their pass, and would work on bus or rail flexibly. The amount the customer pays for a Smart Pass would determine what kinds of trips the pass will cover.

Metro recently rolled out to all riders the ability to add value to a SmarTrip card online. Another upgrade still in the works is "autoload," where a rider can put a credit card into the system and have it automatically charged each time the SmarTrip value gets low, like you can with E-ZPass.

But the market has grown substantially in the past few decades. These days, transit agencies don't want to be locked into a single vendor. Instead, they want to be able to buy some of their faregates from one manufacturer, and some from another. And, they want them to see those faregates work with ticket vending machines from yet another supplier.

Open standards, like ISO 24014 and the ITSO specification, enable this kind of interoperability. By using open standards, transit authorities can procure fare collection equipment from multiple vendors and rely on it to work together seamlessly.

The use of open standards also enables better cooperation between neighboring transit authorities, even if they use fare collection equipment from different manufacturers. Existing regional smart cards for transit, like SmarTrip, TAP, and the ORCA card, have required all of the participating transit agencies to use the same equipment, from the same manufacturer.

By contrast, with open standards, riders can use the same ticket or smart card to pay their fare on multiple transit authorities as long as their fare collection systems adhere to relevant standards, regardless of manufacturer. In addition to the convenience of having a single card for fare payment, this enables benefits for riders like discounted transfers between transit systems.

Open payment represents another major shift in thinking for transit authorities. Historically, transit authorities have been the sole suppliers of what is known in the industry as 'fare media'—that is, the token, ticket, or smart card you use to pay your fare. While you may be able to reload your smart card or buy tokens at a location that is not directly controlled by the transit authority (such as a convenience store), ultimately the transit authority is responsible for supplying the fare media, no matter where you might buy it.

Open payment changes that. Open payment systems make use of smart cards and similar devices that riders already have, rather than requiring them to use a card dedicated to a specific transit authority (like New York's MetroCard or the SmarTrip card). In an open payment system, riders can use existing contactless credit and debit cards (like MasterCard PayPass, Visa payWave, American Express ExpressPay, and Discover Zip) to pay their fare directly, by tapping the card on a faregate or bus farebox.

Other contactless smart cards, such as university, government, and corporate IDs, and even some smartphones, can also be used by open payment systems, as well, allowing transit users to pay their fare using cards and devices they already carry. In addition to providing a new level of convenience to riders, open payment systems enable transit agencies to spend less distributing fare media, because more riders will opt to use personal cards and devices, rather than relying on fare media provided by the transportation authority.

However, not all riders may have a contactless credit or debit card, or other smart card, that they can use to pay their fare. For most transit agencies which are looking to adopt open payment (including WMATA), the solution is to continue to distribute some type of prepaid card (similar to the existing SmarTrip card). While many riders will choose to use a contactless credit or debit card, the prepaid card will remain an option for users who prefer a more traditional way to pay for their trips.

Together, open standards and open payment reduce the cost of a fare collection system and increase flexibility for transit authorities and riders. With these two innovations in place, transit authorities no longer have to worry about the vendors of proprietary equipment going out of business or making a system uneconomical to maintain. Instead, they can take advantage of a growing marketplace of innovative, interoperable solutions. These solutions give riders new, more convenient ways to pay their fare, and they allow transit agencies to create new programs like frequent rider rewards and cross-promotions with local merchants.

When the second phase of Metrorail, the Blue Line from National Airport to Stadium-Armory, opened in July 1977, automatic fare collection was introduced. Then, only one other transit system in the US had introduced similar technology: BART, in San Francisco, which opened in September 1972.

At that time, other cities had begun to use magnetically encoded tickets (like the London Underground, in 1970), and many cities had long used simple mechanical turnstiles to collect tokens and coins. But only BART and Metrorail used a card which actually stored cash value, as well as faregates which computed a distance-based fare and deducted it from the value on the card as the rider passed through.

Since 1977, the technology has received incremental upgrades, but until now it hasn't gotten a complete overhaul. For example, farecard vending machines have been augmented with the ability to accept credit and debit cards and reload SmarTrip cards. However, at their core, the farecard vending machines, exitfare machines, and faregates are still the same technology that was introduced in 1977.

The age of the system makes it inflexible, compared to newer systems. For example, when peak-of-the-peak fares were introduced, they taxed the faregates' limited processing capacity, resulting in slightly slower farecard and SmarTrip processing. Features like online top-up and passes on SmarTrip have also taken longer for WMATA to implement.

As an early adopter, WMATA has not had the benefit of the decades of technological development which followed the introduction of the paper farecard on BART. When the New York City Transit Authority introduced the MetroCard in 1993, they were able to use a plastic card which is more resilient than the paper Metrorail farecard. The ticket vending machines used in New York City are more advanced, too, with an easy-to-use touchscreen interface. Neither of these were available to WMATA in 1977, and would have been costly to add as the system aged.

WMATA has also been criticized for its dependence on a single vendor for its fare collection system. This, too, is a factor of the system's age. Open standards for fare collection systems are relatively new. The introduction of automatic fare collection in 1977, and even the introduction of the SmarTrip card, predate these standards. In fact, when launched in 1999, SmarTrip was the nation's first contactless smart card for transit.

Since WMATA intends to replace its fare collection system, with phased implementation of the new system beginning in 2014, the current system will see only limited upgrades in the interim. Riders now have the ability to reload their cards online, and automatic reload is scheduled to arrive in the fall.

More substantial changes will likely have to wait until the implementation of the New Electronic Payments Program, WMATA's name for the next-generation system. As described in this presentation to the WMATA Board of Directors, a pilot program could begin in the summer of 2013. As the pilot expands, riders will gain the ability to pay their fares directly using credit and debit cards, certain mobile devices, and identification cards like those issued by universities and the federal government.

The New Electronic Payments Program will also make it easier for WMATA to sell new kinds of passes, like Smart Passes, as well as to operate loyalty programs or cross-promotions with area merchants.

In the future, we'll delve more deeply into the new fare program.

Once users log in, those with the feature have a new link to add value, taking them to this screen:

Click to enlarge.

The site lets riders add between $10 and $200 in cash to the card, or add the 7-day bus pass. In the future, Metro will have additional passes for purchase including ones for other transit systems like Maryland MTA, PRTC, and more.

Because of the way the SmarTrips work, adding money to the card doesn't instantly update the card balance. SmarTrip cards store their value directly on the card, encoded on the card's chips. If you add $20 to your card online, WMATA's central servers know you added it, but the card doesn't yet since it can't communicate with the servers when it's in your pocket.

To update the card, you have to touch the card to one of the targets on a bus or rail faregate. Those targets all get a periodic download of all the transactions. When it sees your card, if it has a transaction in its memory for your card, it will add the value to your card.

It takes some time for all the transactions to get to the targets. The rail ones are wired into a network and get downloads periodically throughout the day, but can take up to 1 day to get them. The bus ones have to be updated when the bus is in the depot, so it can take an extra day.

The bottom line is that some people might add $20 to their card, then go to a rail station or bus soon after and get confused when their card doesn't yet reflect the added money.

In the long run, WMATA wants to switch to a different system that's more like your debit card: the balance is actually in a central database, not on the card, and when you swipe it, the terminal communicates with the credit card company to check your balance.

However, that takes some time, which is why credit card terminals have some delay. To let people touch their card to a faregate and go through right away, WMATA has to make sure this communication happens very quickly.

They also want to integrate it with credit cards that have built-in chips; it's possible you could just tap your credit card instead of a SmarTrip one day and have it charge your card for the ride, or charge you at the end of the month for all of your rides that month.

There's an RFP out now to design this system. Kurt Raschke has analyzed some of the technical details, and we're working on an explanation that'll be more accessible to those not familiar with payment industry jargon.

In the meantime, WMATA is working on additional upgrades to the SmarTrip site including the ability to enter a credit card and have it automatically reload your card when the balance gets low, like you can do today with E-ZPass.

Disclosure: I met with the site designers recently to give feedback on usability, such as layout of items, explanatory text, and more. A number of modifications based on my suggestions as well as others they thought of are reflected in the current interface.

One way to simplify fares for tourists and people who don't have SmarTrip cards would be to simply make a fixed fare, equal to the peak-of-the-peak fare, that applies all the time to paper farecards. With this, Metro could also eliminate of the paper farecard surcharge.

Such a move would not be without drawbacks. SmarTrip card usage is high for bus (78%) and rail (82%), but there are still barriers for people with disabilities and limited incomes that prevent them from using SmarTrip cards. Any move to reduce the discounts available on paper farecards should be implemented alongside improvements that allow everyone to use SmarTrip.

But a table with just one, instead of three, columns would simplify the system particularly for those visiting DC, who are very likely to buy paper farecards. Since everyone knows (or should know!) what station they're going to, it makes the decision easy. You no longer need to know what time you're going or returning. If you're traveling during the peak of the peak, there's even a small discount compared to today because the fare for paper and Smartrip are the same.

There's still an incentive to get a Smartrip card, since they're convenient and offer discounts for off-peak rides. They protect your balance and offer transfer discounts to buses throughout the region.

There are currently six different fares between any two stations. This change would reduce that to three (Peak of the Peak/Paper farecard, Regular, Reduced). Only one of these fares would actually be listed on the fare machines. That's much simpler.