Photo: Jay Wescott

Over at Greater Greater Washington, David Alpert has a rundown of the options Metro faces in light of the hubbub over the new SmarTrip exit fare policy.

For those of you who missed it, last week Metro announced that they would no longer allow SmarTrip users to carry a negative balance. In the past, riders who came up short on exit fare were given the opportunity to leave and then replenish the card later. Apparently Metro officials were worried they could lose fare money once they dropped the price of a SmarTrip card from $5 to $2.50 this fall: Customers could potentially buy a $2.50 card, run up a more expensive fare, and then ditch the card. Whether many folks would go to such trouble is anyone’s guess.

Upon the announcement, Metro faced something of a twitter-enabled rider mutiny, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The new policy eliminated one of the SmarTrip card’s main benefits -- not needing to carry cash for exit fare. According to Alpert, WMATA CFO Carol Kissal and her team brought forth six alternatives at the Riders’ Advisory Council meeting last night. Among the better options:

• dropping the card price and waiting to see whether people actually try to game the system.

• keeping the system the way it is now, with $5 cards.

• putting a $2.50 ceiling on negative balances, meaning no one could abuse the system.

Because of the tinkering that would have to be done, some plans would take longer to implement than others. The WMATA board will dig into the issue on Sept. 16.