Criticism
An early criticism of the SmarTrip cards had been that they were only sold at suburban Metrorail stations, online, a few selected retailers, and Metro sales offices. However, in 2008, Metro reached an agreement with CVS/pharmacy to sell the cards at 187 DC-area locations in an effort to increase SmarTrip use. The SmarTrip cards are also sold at area grocery store chains. In late 2012 WMATA installed SmarTrip vending machines at all Metrorail stations.
A number of SmarTrip features that were supposed to be introduced in 2005 by SmarTrip's creator, Cubic Transportation Systems, were not fully implemented until 2012. Initially, riders could only add value to a SmarTrip card at Metrorail stations or by using cash while boarding a Metrobus. In November 2008, after years of delays, WMATA announced that customers would have the ability to add funds to their SmarTrip cards online by September 2009, but that deadline was missed. WMATA did launch SmarTrip's online reload feature in September 2011. WMATA allowed customers to load a seven-day unlimited Metrorail pass to their SmarTrip cards in April 2012.
All trips made with a SmarTrip card, with the exception of bus transfers and passes, are charged as individual one-way fares. WMATA offers discounted rail and bus passes to customers who make several trips in one day, or many trips, or many short trips, in a seven-day period; however, SmarTrip users can only use the 7-day unlimited pass, and must manually load each transit pass onto their SmarTrip cards. This is in contrast to the Oyster card system on the London Underground, for example, where fares are automatically capped to ensure that customers never pay more than the cost of a one-day pass each day.
There have been complaints when customers' cards cease to work as a result of placing the card in proximity to metal or physically damaging the card. In such cases Metro guarantees that the fund balance on the card will be transferred to a new card. However, customers have complained that WMATA has not been processing such balance transfers promptly.
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