Photo by Tony DeFilippo
Congratulations are in order for the WMATA PR office, as they somehow managed to get a feel-good story about giving out more customer refunds in Sunday’s Examiner. The story appears at the same time that the transit agency has just lost its general manager, and is staring down the business end of things like massive budget shortfalls, looming fare hikes and likely service reductions.
In fairness, we’d have to categorize this story as merely relatively feel-good. It’s impossible to write about Metro right now without mentioning how much trouble the agency is in, and reporter Kytja Weir certainly runs down the itemized list. Still, we’re kind of amazed to read that WMATA now hopes customers will get excited about the possibility that they just might be more likely to get a refund when things go wrong in the Metrorail system in the future. The agency says it’s in the middle of revising its guaranteed service policy, you see, which “technically” offers refunds to customers who experience major delays. Note the skepticism here:
Many riders may be puzzled to learn such a policy already exists, partly because it is applied rarely. Fares were waived about five times in 2009, Kissal said, but only for major service disruptions such as the June 22 Red Line crash.
That’s more than in past years, she said. “The year has not been very typical for Metro.”
You don’t say.
So let’s see if we understand the idea here: since Metrorail riders should be prepared to see much less reliable and certainly more expensive service for oh, at least the next three years, WMATA is thinking about figuring out how to give out refunds a little more often, as it is surely going to have more customers demanding them. OK.
The transit agency says it is still working on the revised rules, so here’s our suggestion: how about, instead of spending a lot of time studying this and coming up with some complicated equation for determining refunds, but still keeping most everyone’s money when they enter and then exit the same station, you just program the fare gates to make that free. Every time. Even if a customer decides not to take a particular ride because they, say, left something at their office. Or entered the station only to discover they have an 18-minute wait. Not actually taking a Metrorail ride would mean not actually paying for one. What could be simpler than that?
