Photo by brhefele on Flickr.

This morning’s WMATA Board meeting, as usual, brought up a number of small yet significant items.

WMATA will sell SmarTrips at a loss: Last month, the WMATA Board voted to reduce the cost of SmarTrip cards to $2.50. That decision was made in part on information some staff told the Board that SmarTrip cards actually cost WMATA about $1.

However, a presentation today revealed that they actually cost $3.40. There is a reserve fund WMATA has created by saving up all the excess they’ve earned from the sale of earlier SmarTrips at $5, which will now start to be depleted.

Board Chair Peter Benjamin expressed some dismay that they had received this incorrect information and not been informed it was wrong earlier.

Today, CVS and Giant sell SmarTrips for $10, which come with $5 of stored value plus the $5 cost. They would like to keep the total retail cost at $10, so cards purchased there will come with $7.50 of stored value plus the $2.50 cost. Dispensers in the rail stations will also do the same thing, as they are not capable of providing change in coins.

“Making a gallery out of Gallery Place” (As Chris Zimmerman put it): Gallery Place-Chinatown will get a new piece of art by Martha Jackson Jarvis containing four panels depicting classic Chinese imagery:

The piece is free to Metro, funded by the Chinatown Community Cultural Center, Target, the DC Arts Commission and Pepco. It will be placed near the 7th and F entrance, the one to the arena.

Try passes on SmarTrip: Metro is looking for volunteers to try loading unlimited-use passes on a SmarTrip card. They’re offering a free week if you buy three.

The program asks riders to provide a credit card number and a registered SmarTrip card number. When you sign up, the pass you select will be purchased and loaded automatically for the month of August. Passes will be activated when they’re first used, and after five days the next pass will be purchased, ready to be activated when the previous one expires.

If you receive a transit subsidy as farecards or SmartBenefits, you won’t be able to pay for your passes right now. If you have a pass on rail or bus, you’ll need to use stored value to ride the other system. There will not be a transfer discount when using the pass.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.

Michael Perkins blogs about Metro operations and fares, performance parking, and any other government and economics information he finds on the Web. He lives with his wife and two children in Arlington, Virginia.