Washington metro technology glitch

[Steve4031]

I'm seeking advice here after an extremely annoying experience purchasing a smart card at the Reagan airport.

We attempted to purchase a smart card out of a machine that was designated for this. Three credit cards did not work. Then my dad inserted 5 dollars in the machine, not realizing we needed to put in 7. At this point we had only 20 dollar bills. We did not wish to put in this much money at this point. Then the machine spit out a receipt and told us we had to call the smartrip to get our money back. The station agent then advised us we could use one of the older machines to purchase and load a smartrip card. This worked with a credit card.

On Monday during business hours we made several calls. Each agent told us to call back later because the system was down. I attempted to access the account for my smartrip card to register his card on my account. The password would not work and resetting still did not work. This was all attempted from an iPhone 6 Plus.

Is this type of outage common?

Granted I made a few mistakes here in not carefully reading instructions on the stand alone machine. I would advise avoiding these machines and using the older machines.

 

[Ryan]

You mean National Airport?

Yes, the machines are a mess, calls are a pain in the neck, the whole system sucks. Try using a real computer, you may have better luck.

Now that I have a working card and auto reloads set up, it "Just Works". But getting there isn't always easy.

 

[Steve4031]

Thanks for the advice to use a real computer. I'll go in the lounge tonight and use that one.

 

[Steve4031]

Ryan, using a desktop worked. Once the card is registered it was possible to add the missing 5 dollars. I also set up auto reload.

I will return to Washington, D.C. Enough to use two cards.

 

[Ryan]

Excellent, glad that it worked out. :thumbsup:

 

[DCAKen]

This was a system-problem yesterday

http://dcist.com/2015/12/metro_machines_cant_currently_accep.php

It's pretty rare...I don't remember this happening in the past. However, now that Metro no longer uses paper farecards (you have until March 2016 to use your existing ones), this might become more common in the future.

 

[Steve4031]

Thanks for the link. We got on and everything was in order with are cards.

Major escalator fail. At one entrance for gallery place downward escalator did not work. Then one at Farragut north didn't work. Add that to a closed exit at Farragut west which caused additional walking and I felt like I never left Chicago, the city that never works.