Those of us living in DC now face a new fare hike from the Metro system. Beginning in March and running through June, Metro is bumping up fares $0.10 across the board. Apparently, this will help them raise an estimated $9.6 million.
Here’s the thing: it was the wrong decision but in the right direction. Metro needed to bump the fare, that’s for sure, but $0.10 for only three months? That’s just silly. They should have raised it by a greater amount, but not in a standard way across the board, and it should have been permanent. Because all that’s going to happen is that we’ll face another fare hike at the end of this one, and Metro will take another hit to their PR when they will have just gotten over the hit they’ll take for this action.
Currently, DC probably has some of the cheapest public transportation in the country, but clearly it isn’t sustainable. Worse, no one has any faith in the Metro system, rail or bus. It’s always late. It isn’t safe. It doesn’t run long enough or often enough or well enough and the equipment is old and the workers are crotchety.
I guess all I’m saying it this: I’ve ridden trains and buses in Cleveland, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. They cost much more than what I pay for Metro, but you know what? They didn’t annoy me for any of the problems I listed above. I think our society has proven that if you offer a good service, people will be willing to pay for it. But at this point, Metro isn’t offering a good service, and no one believes that raising prices is going to fix it. All this will do is put too small a band-aid on a budget shortfall which will still swallow it all in the end.
So they need to just get over it all: hike prices where they need to be, take the PR hit for it, offer up some sort of service through the DC government to help low income persons ride Metro, and then get to work on fixing the cruddy service that you offer. It will be painful but it’s the right thing to do for your constituents.