(DC) Metro proposes 5 percent fare increase (Rat Incompetence on Parade)

Metro proposes to increase bus and rail fares by about 5 percent, raise parking rates and eliminate a controversial rush-hour surcharge this summer to overcome a $116 million shortfall in its next operating budget.

Riders who use paper Farecards would face the biggest change. Whether going two stops or 10, they would pay one-way flat fares: $6 during rush hour, $4 in off-peak times. For a group traveling together, hailing a taxi might quickly become more palatable.

Metro officials, however, are promoting the simplification of fares as a plus. The new fare structure would eliminate the “peak-of-the-peak” rate, in which passengers pay a surcharge for riding the subway during the busiest weekday periods. It was implemented with the last round of fare increase, in 2010, to ease crowding and encourage riders to use trains just outside the peak periods, but the strategy failed, Sarles said.

“We weren’t accomplishing our policy objective, and we were just complicating the fare,” he said.

I don’t know, don’t live there. Anything to rush the bureaucrates around washington I know is a joke. In fact, 250,000 of them at the bottom of the ocean would be a good start IMO.

My opinion is based on simple fact that most of them spend their days justifying their jobs and figuring how best to expand their empires. So, less of them better for the country. Anything that makes their life easier as in easier commuting is a detriment to the country.

The history of public transit systems in America tends to swing between two extremes of leftist lunatic ism. Right now, the pendulum is swinging back toward cutting service and making it so inconvenient and affordable that users abandon the systems for taxicabs, car pools and other alternatives.

At some point, they wake up and discover that not only usage has dropped, but so has support for subsidizing the bloated wages and pensions for the unions which are employed by these systems.

Then they find some free money from the state or the federal governments and come up with the brilliant idea that they can bring back business with reduced fares and/or improved service. And it works.

Some places have even offered free service. It works great in a tourist area like Williamsburg or Yorktown, Virginia where most of the customers are tourists. Not so well in a city where winos and homeless bums are always the first to discover the comfort of a warm subway car or bus seat on a cold day.

Eventually the free money runs out and the pendulum swings back as it is doing now. The only thing consistent in the process is that the public transportation agencies never learn to offer a good service for a reasonable value. Feathering their own nests and those of their union chums always seems to be priority one given that there is seldom if ever accountability for poor business decisions.

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