Reply to 70% of WMATA bus riders don't pay

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The issue with free or cheap buses is that you end up with homeless taking them over to sit in there all day long to hang out there. Same thing happens in SF. Then paying customers don’t want to use the buses because they’re dirty and stink, etc.[/quote]

I ride both Metro and Ride On (the bus system that serves Montgomery County) pretty frequently.  I haven't seen an increase in homeless people, or problematic people, on Ride On since they became free.  [/quote]

+1  Same.  I use public transportation (metro+bus) all the time in both MoCo and DC and have never even witnessed a problematic incident on the bus.  It's working people and kids getting where they need to go.    Yes, some people don't pay.  But I will say that there were often times a year ago that the bus fare reader machine was out of service and taped up and I thought people got out of the habit of paying.  But this year I haven't seen as many problems with the fare readers.  Having the WMATA card on the phone also helps--no digging around to find it anymore.

My big complaint is that buses are not always where they're supposed to be a good chunk of the time.  Not sure what's wrong with their GPS but on the app it will show for a long period that your bus will appear in 2 minutes (in real-time), and then all of a sudden it changes, and it's 25 minutes away, so for me, bus is not nearly as reliable as metro if you're commuting to work so I will often walk to metro just to avoid being disappointed by the much closer bus.  It seems like WMATA should be able to have better tech on communicating schedules than they do have.[/quote]

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