They smell better

WMATA (like most public transportation organizations, tbf) has been struggling to turn itself around since long before I got here. We went through the dreaded SafeTrack year (plus) of major repairs to tracks throughout the system a couple of years ago. And they’ve recently embarked on an initiative hopefully (?) titled Back2Good that, among other things, refunds your fare if your journey is delayed by 10 minutes:

That’s down from the previous 15-minute promise.

I had several refunds on my card last month, and I’m so used to “schedule adjustment” and “train at the platform” delays that I hadn’t even noticed being late.

They’ve also been introducing their new 7000-series cars, which are always 8-car trains. I’ve noted before that these cars at least show signs of having been hosed down occasionally. I don’t think the old-style ones, with their threadbare carpeting, have ever been cleaned.

And I noticed a while back that Metro is capitalizing on this:

Um.