Why WMATA bus riders don't use SmarTrip
WMATA's SmarTrip smart fare payment card has been very popular among Metrorail riders. Stand in any station during commute times and you'll see many riders touching their wallets and purses to the faregates: typically the customer doesn't even need to take the card out of a wallet.
Bus riders have not embraced the card so eagerly. My very unscientific observations would peg bus usage of SmarTrip at less than one out of ten passengers. This can make bus boarding a time-consuming process as customers dump change into the farebox and receive transfers. This low SmarTrip bus adoption rates seem to puzzle Metro board members, and a member of the public raised the issue at a Metro budget comment session a few weeks ago.
I don't find this nearly as puzzling. SmarTrip just doesn't offer many benefits to a typical bus rider. Thus here you'll find my unsolicited explanation for why bus riders don't use SmarTrip:
Bus customers pay at the door; rail riders don't. Rail riders cannot pay at the faregate. Whether a rail rider pays with cash, a credit card, or a pass, she must make a separate trip to the fare vending machine (or perhaps to a supermarket to buy a pass) in order to buy her farecard or pass or to fill her SmarTrip card.
For me, this means that I have to go to a separate machine anyway, so I might as well use the SmarTrip.
Bus customers on the other hand pay at the door. Using a SmarTrip saves them very little time. They don't have to go to a separate machine to pay; so, when they file past the farebox, they might as well pay cash at the box.
Intertwined with this is that SmarTrip's restoration of lost value has less benefit for bus riders. If you lose your SmarTrip, Metro will replace it and restore the lost value, minus a five dollar charge for the new card. This benefits me as a rail rider. I load up to $300 at a time onto the SmarTrip card. This saves me trips to the fare vending machine.
But using SmarTrip doesn't save the bus rider much time, because it doesn't eliminate trips to a machine. Therefore, why would the bus rider add $300 at a time to the SmarTrip card? Instead the bus rider will do the rational thing and pay $1.25, one ride at a time. Adding $1.25 at a time to the SmarTrip card would be silly. Thus, the rider ignores SmarTrip altogether and pays cash.
Not all regional bus systems take SmarTrip. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think Metrobus is the only bus system that takes SmarTrip. I know Montgomery County, Maryland's RideOn bus does not accept it. One benefit of SmarTrip is paperless transfers. However, many bus riders have to ride multiple bus systems. Since the other buses don't take SmarTrip, the rider needs a paper transfer anyway. Therefore, why use SmarTrip?
SmarTrip does not work with passes. Passes are worthless for many rail riders. They're still a good deal for bus riders though. Unfortunately passes do not work with SmarTrip. That actually would be a handy feature, because then if a bus rider loses his pass, he could get it replaced without losing all the value.
Thus, bus pass customers use paper passes. This is less convenient than a SmarTrip might be for bus passes; however, on the bright side, boarding for a bus pass customer takes even less time than for a SmarTrip customer.
SmarTrip costs $5. Sure, $5 is not much to a lot of people. But to a lot of bus riders, $5 is some real money. I remember reading in a Washington Post article that some bus riders were discussing cutting back their ridership when bus fares increased by something like 25 cents. People like that aren't going to pay $5 for a plastic card, especially when, as the above paragraphs show, it doesn't benefit them anyway.
In a similar vein, one reason I like SmarTrip is because I can load so much money onto it at a time. Lots of bus riders can't afford to put $300 at a time on the card--not that they would anyway, because it wouldn't benefit them much.
There is no SmarTrip discount. I'd imagine it costs Metro more to process cash than to process SmarTrip payments. In such a case a SmarTrip discount would be helpful. In the past, there was a 10 percent "bonus" for farecard purchases over $20. A frequent bus rider could get this discount only by using SmarTrip (Metro paper farecards aren't accepted on buses.) Now there is no discount.
Some have suggested that more SmarTrip sales outlets would increase bus rider adoption. Perhaps this is so, but rail SmarTrip usage was high even before Metro sold the cards in rail stations.
So, how could Metro increase SmarTrip adoption by bus riders? Get the other regional bus systems to accept it. Institute a discount for SmarTrip riders. Allow passes to be loaded onto a SmarTrip card.
In other Metro news, the Riders Advisory Council meets tomorrow, April 5 (PDF warning); Tunnel ads debut; hearings to be held for Silver Spring transit center, Glenmont parking structure, and bus service changes; Spring track work announced.
Post Author:
massysett | 3:38 PM |
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The major incentive to use SmarTrip on the bus is the transit benefit program. Before, I used to have to get paper farecards and take those to Metro Center to exchange for bus tokens. Of course SmarTrip is much more convenient than that.
Where did your "unscientific observations" take place? Along routes where commuters were likely to be travelling to/from jobs that participate in transit subsidy programs?
Hi Matt--
I work for the federal government and for whatever bizarre reason my agency won't load the benefits directly onto SmarTrip cards. Instead several people come to our building from DOT several times a year to manually dispense Metrocheks.
All my observations of SmarTrip usage come from riding buses like the S2, S4, and J2, all during non-peak hours; and from watching people board buses around Chinatown during various parts of the weekday. It's possible that I witness periods and routes of disproportionately low (or high?) usage.
You're spot on with the main overall reason not to use Smartrip on the bus: no benefit to the bus rider.
Until I started getting a transit benefit it was all dollars and quarters. Now it's the card, but I'd say 20% of riders, those with white-collar jobs, use Smartrip. This would be on the S & 42 bus lines I ride daily.
Also, if you get a bus pass in the morning, you can usually use that all day - the drivers don't check so close. But my Smartrip card times out at 2 hours on the minute.
Some folks have been known to pay with cash if they're gonna take multiple buses all day even if they have a card, just to save $2-5 on fares.
Here's a trick I learned just yesterday: you can refill your Smartrip card via the bus payment box. News to you too?
"Also, if you get a bus pass in the morning, you can usually use that all day - the drivers don't check so close. But my Smartrip card times out at 2 hours on the minute."
Actually, I discovered a glitch when I first started using my SmarTrip card on the bus: I'd board the bus to go to the gym at 6:30 am, come back home around 7:45, and get back on the bus to go to work around 9, only having to pay one fare. I think maybe the clock resets itself, if you will, when you reboard.
A couple of comments:
1) Smartrip was always envisioned as a regional smartcard for transit. It will eventually be accepted by all regional bus operators
2) The other comment about transfers not being checked is real, in addition a lot of drivers give you more than 2 hours
3) Eliminating paper transfers would cut down on fraud and really encourage people to use Smartrip or bus passes
This was supposed to be a screed about how you can only refill a SmarTrip at a machine which are only in Metrorailk stations. Now, though, I find out that you can refill them on the bus machine. Oh. How many times are you going to see someone standing in the front of a bus running a route while trying to feed a $20 into the thing? I do my crappy card (which doesn't work through the thin plastic of my wallet0 20 at a time off my debit card - which also won't work at the front of the bus.
I currently recieve Smartbenefits from my employer (I can download them onto my Smartrip by going to farecard vendors), but before then I paid my own way. In some instances, I did add value to my card using the farebox.. it works. You can even use coins to add value to your Smartrip card!
