Recent comments in /f/washingtondc

muellman t1_jeaf3tf wrote

Reply to If You Could Fix One Tiny Thing about Metro. . . [Serious] by Cooking_with_MREs

Get the employees and more importantly management of each department of Metro to work well with those in other departments.

Having dealt with WMATA for my job, my greatest wish would be for employees of one area to have some idea of what those in others are doing. From maintenance, to ops, to engineering, to planning, each department is so compartmentalized that when someone comes up with a better idea for safety or efficiency, it's rarely known by employees elsewhere in the organization. The best recent example was the new inspections of the 7000 series wheelsets in December 2021 following being pulled from service--an inspection was developed, but the maintenance people weren't taught how to do that, and then Metro quickly pulled the 7000 series back out of service (for months). There's some really dedicated and smart people there, but much of what they do doesn't get disseminated around.

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new_account_5009 t1_jeaenu6 wrote

Reply to comment by holamiis in If You Could Fix One Tiny Thing about Metro. . . [Serious] by Cooking_with_MREs

It's due to historical momentum.

They were originally installed at a time when cash was more common (and Metro still used paper farecards), so they made sense back then.

After paper farecards were retired and Metro went to SmartTrip only, they were actually unnecessary for a brief period of time. Basically, Metro let people complete rides with small negative balances, so no need for an exit fare machine (e.g., if you enter the system with $4 on your card, but take a longer ride that costs $5, you could leave with a card balance of -$1 and just pay that dollar the next time you load up the card).

However, that was short lived. Metro no longer allows people to carry negative balances on their cards. In the example above, they would allow you to enter the system with $4 because that's enough to cover a shorter ride, but if you take a longer ride that costs $5, you have to use the exit fare machine requiring $1 in cash.

It's annoying for regular users, confusing for tourists, and Metro has to pay money maintaining these older machines at every station. Rather than upgrading the exit fare machines to accept credit cards, they should really just allow negative balances again. Sure, they'll miss out on a few bucks from people that allow their card to go negative and never refill it (mostly tourists), but they'll save much much more than that by not needing to maintain the old machines.

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pickletype t1_jeadqrq wrote

Reply to People that post about Crime, what are you doing to help your community in the City? by Diela_N

Some people blame the D.C. City Council.

Some people blame Mayor Bowser.

Some people blame D.C. police.

Some people blame the U.S. attorney for D.C.

Those four parties all have the ability to directly address the crime problem in our city via policy decisions, effective policing, and prosecution of crimes. It's quite literally their job. But sure, let's pin the blame on users of the D.C. subreddit for not fixing these problems.

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