Travelers subway fare swap

December 9, 2006 10:43 PM

Looking for suggestions on how to organize and promote an exchange of unused subway fare cards for travelers from Ann Arbor to DC, NYC, SF. Leaning towards a design that minimizes writing code. I'm heading out to DC Sunday and had to dig around to find the remnants of the last fare - that should have been easy and an opportunity to socialize with the last person who came back with a partly full Metrocard.
posted by edwardvielmetti to travel & transportation (4 comments total)

(note: I haven't used the paper DC fare cards in years)

If I remember correctly, the fare cards have the date on them (with some sort of odd expiration date on the back) and you can't combine them (which is what I think you're attempting to do).

Here's the link to the DC metro page about fare cards.

But, you need to know that depending on how travelers are getting around, they will most likely need a SmarTrip card in order to get out of the Metro parking lots. I think I might've heard something about the parking lots starting to accept credit cards for exit, but I don't remember.
posted by sperose at 11:39 PM on December 9, 2006

It seems like a design that would minimize code would have to be something that would maximize location or something similar. So, if there were drop boxes at some convenient location (Traveler's Aid in the airport? Are your people likely coming in via bus or plane or car or what do you think?) where you could do a "take a penny leave a penny" sort of thing, you could do this with only the coding it would take to set up a nice repeating craigslist ad and give some local coffee shop some extra business by hosting such a drop box.

Granted, this is not social, but it does solve the problem. Otherwise, I would think about visualizing places where people who travel are likely looking already -- CL rideshare, Kayak.com, hotels.com, couchsurfing.com -- and thinking of ways that you could hook into those eyeballs to get people to share fares. I mean it's a nice assonant idea, it should be possible to scope a good URL and get a freecycle type of RSS feed going where people can get a feed of where they're going and post a note on where they've been. Of course, whether or not such fares are NON TRANFERABLE will detemine how much of a hurdle it's going to be to even consider such an idea, but as a frequent traveler, I think it's a great one.
posted by jessamyn at 12:01 AM on December 10, 2006

Thanks for the ideas and suggestions of sites to try to grab eyeballs from, Jessamyn. The repeating Craigslist ad sounds like a good one.

I have an existing weekly meetup at an Asian bakery downtown with enough of a core of travelers to get something started, so maybe it grows out of that. I added a bit to the Yahoo group weekly autopost for that meeting announcement, updated the upcoming.org event listing, and have started the hunt for that good URL.

I wonder if 43 places might be a good place to point to this too.

In Ann Arbor the usual mode of transportation is car, shuttle, shared ride, but not bus to the airport - no public transit available to the airport.
posted by edwardvielmetti at 9:36 PM on December 11, 2006

Nice idea that I was thinking about also (within NYC).

Not to rain on your parade, but to give you a constructive point to consider, is that NYC MTA law does not allow for "sharing" of Unlimited Metrocards.
But if you wanted to share let's say, Pay Per Ride cards, you could do that in the NYC area, though there is less incentive for cost saving, since one could easily purchase it.
posted by redhotchips at 12:57 PM on December 12, 2006