It was probably silly to assume that there would be any groundbreaking news revealed about the future of SmarTrip cards at yesterday’s meeting of the WMATA Board of Directors. Indeed, the same old script was trotted out: WMATA’s thinking about linking electronic balances to credit cards once the agency runs out of SmarTrip cards in a couple of years, but there’s still plenty of debate about how that linking should be done.

On NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt this morning, WMATA Board Chairman Peter Benjamin pushed the credit card chip option. “We need to do the next thing…that makes it even easier…to ride [Metro],” Benjamin said, talking about new chip standards which would allow credit card linking. After the current SmarTrip supply runs out, Benjamin said, “we will shift SmarTrip to the new chip…for an indefinite period of time, we will be able to use SmarTrip and continue to use it effectively.” Benjamin also touted the capability, under the credit card chip, to easily use a credit card with the new chip to ride other cities’ transit systems, like New York.

Linking SmarTrip to credit cards is already a controversial idea. (55 percent of DCist readers didn’t think it was a good idea in a poll we ran a couple of weeks ago.) As Dave Jamieson reports, WMATA board member Gordon Linton brought up some of the obvious issues with linking SmarTrips exclusively to credit cards — namely, how would people who don’t have credit cards ride Metro? It also begs the question of whether it’s a good idea to have a financially struggling transit system curling up with large credit card corporations like Visa and MasterCard. WTOP reports that WMATA might get around that issue by utilizing chips in driver’s licenses, but, of course, not everybody has one of those either.

Obviously, the solution is some kind of hybrid. But what kind of documents to include and the logistics surrounding implementing those changes still seem pretty far off at this point. There’s always such drama with these pubescent transit systems.