Photo by slack13

The Examiner’s Kyjta Weir shares a new report that sheds light on a problem with which most Metrobus riders are already familiar: Bus fareboxes are often broken, and it’s costing the cash-strapped transit authority money.

Metro logged 924 work orders to fix or maintain fareboxes in the month of May, out of 1,479 buses, the report said. That would mean 62 percent of fareboxes needed repairs, unless some broke down more than once.

The fareboxes are supposed to be inspected before the buses roll out each morning and checked at the end of each day. But they break during service as well. The report said 127 work orders were submitted during bus service in May, which translated to an average of seven failures per day on weekdays and four per weekend day.

Any machine with moving parts is going to have to be repaired from time to time, but these numbers do suggest that WMATA’s aging fareboxes ought to be replaced. And they will be, but not until 2013, in a process that’s expected to take three years. Meanwhile, bus drivers with malfunctioning fareboxes routinely allow riders to board for free, and at a time when Metro is desperate to collect every last cent, that’s a big problem. Metro couldn’t even provide an estimate of how much fare money is lost due to broken fareboxes.