My wife and I visited DC this week to attend a couple of inauguration balls.

It was the first time I had been to DC, and the first time I had been on their Metro system. I was a little apprehensive about this, since I had already seen on TV the massive problems DC had had moving people on the Metro for the inauguration – overcrowded trains, inexplicitly closed stations leaving people frozen and stranded at certain points around the city, and situation where people could literally not *exit* the Metro station because of the crowds.

However, there was little choice, as car service in the city was restricted during the day.

The first thing you notice about the system is that it is very elegantly designed and completely spotless, very modern, with LED signs keeping you informed of arrival times of trains. The inside of the cars are also clean and relatively comfy (although my knees did not fit in the seat I was in, even though I’m only 5 ‘ 11″).

I was speaking to Ben Kabak at SecondAvenueSagas.com the other day, who had lived in DC for a time, and he explained that the Metro system there was extra-clean because eating anywhere in the subway system is completely forbidden, and permanently reinforced after an big incident where a young girl was ticketed for eating a french fry.

So, yes its clean, but as a regular commuter, I would never trade the right to scoff down a coffee and bagel on my 30-minute subway ride for a relatively cleaner platform.

More annoying to us as visitors to the city, however, was the fare schedule. In NY (or Paris, Montreal, San Francisco,  London, etc), you grab your metrocard or tokens and ride between any two points for a flat rate. It is extremely simple, especially for visitors.

DC’s metro is not like this at all. There is a specific fare basis for individual trips, and they are not rounded or grouped at all, but all different prices down to the penny. It’s designed for accurate service compensation rather than traveler usability. Running late for our first ball, we were stopped in our tracks when we encountered our first ticket machine, without a doubt the most confusing and unintuitive of any transit system I have used.

In short, you have to look up the trip you want to take on the chart (like a traditional rail service, rather than a metro/subway), then double the price in your head for the round trip. Then we made a big mistake – since we were traveling together and didn’t want to go through the procedure twice, we just double the price again in our heads so we could share the ticket (which is totally legit with a NYC metrocard), which we discovered later is impossible.

(A *regular* commuter on the DC Metro would just get a farecard, although even the one-day $8 farecard is not necessarily a value for any given visitor).

Next, you enter the price you want on the card. For some godforsaken reason, you cannot use a traditional numeric keypad to do this – they have buttons where you incrementally increase and decrease the dollars and cents. Why? I have no idea, but its just as annoying to use as it sounds. The machine should not only have a numeric keypad, but it should also have a calculator to figure out the math involved.

Here’s another gotcha – if you want less than $15 on your ticket and only have a $20 bill, you’re SOL as the machine can only give you $5 in change – are you writing this down?

OK, so we have our ticket – you enter the turnstile like most any metro, by inserting your card into turnstile. This worked ok, except for the fact that while both entering and exiting the Metro, there never seemed to be enough working turnstiles to avoid a 10+ person line to exit. This was exasperated by the way the turnstile took your ticket and ejected it like a boarding pass, which requires more time than MTA’s ‘swipe while you walk’ turnstiles.

Another problem was when we exited the Metro, which requires you to again swipe the card to get through a turnstile, kind of like the Mass Pike. Because of the fare basis design, this meant that my wife could not hand the card back to me after she had gone through – I was stuck, unable to *exit* the subway!

Now we get to the final part of this disaster, which was the Metro service people in the booth next to the turnstile, who basically make MTA booth employees look like friendly rocket scientists by comparison. I mean, these people were USELESS.

There were THREE (!) employees in the booth, sitting around doing nothing that I could tell, with their *backs* to the turnstiles, as if they didn’t really want to get involved with any customers.

I walked around the turnstile to the booth and told one of them my card was not letting me out of the metro. He looked confused and inserted my card into a machine, then handed it back and told me to try again.

While I tried again, he made it a point to NOT look at me to see if it worked or not. Of course, it didn’t, so I had to walk around the side again and tell him it wasn’t working. I could not get his attention at this point, and since all of the employees were sitting with their backs to us, my wife knocked on the glass to get their attention.

Now this got us service. Another employee actually stood up out of their chair, and even *exited* the booth to come help us – or so we thought. In fact, the employee had come out of the booth not to help us, but lumbered over to my wife to give her a lecture on NOT TAPPING ON THE GLASS.

I asked the employee how customers were supposed to get their attention if they insisted on not facing the customers in the glass booth, and he explained he did not care, she cannot tap on the glass.

I was infuriated. Here we were, standing dressed for a ball, trying to simply EXIT a subway we had already paid our complete fare for, and we couldn’t get 3 otherwise unoccupied Metro employees in the booth 2 ft away to give us a modicum of assistance in getting through the turnstile.

When I started to dress down the employee for the way he was speaking to my wife while looking down at his ID badge, he suddenly opened the gate for us to leave. Good call.

When we arrived at the Google Inauguration Ball, we met up with some friends from California who also had an identically bad experience with the DC Metro customer service booth – getting into a shouting match with the person in the booth to the point of nearly being arrested!

In my final assessment, the DC Metro System is deeply flawed because of its confusing fare schedule and requirement for users to use a ticket to exit the system. This is a problem both because of its complexity and inconsistency with other Metro systems worldwide.

In my 2-3 years of experience with the NYC subway system, I have *maybe* required the assistance of a booth employee twice, and both times I had the full attention of the person in the booth, who was able to assist immediately.

The DC Metro system is so unnecessarily complicated that human customer service is required by visitors to the city constantly, yet their staff is about as helpful and friendly as a teamster on their coffee break.

I especially feel bad for the inevitable millions of international visitors to our nation’s capital, as the entire system must be doubly aggravating for them.

I have to reinforce the fact that for a *regular* commuter, there really shouldn’t be any problem with the fare structure – once you understand its uniqueness its probably fine to live with – but for first-timer riders, which in a city like DC is common, the system is a failure.

When we left the last ball at 1:30 AM, my wife and I didn’t even need to discuss it – we were NOT taking the Metro back to our hotel, even though we had fully paid return tickets. We gladly gave a cab $50 to drive us back to Bethesda, MD.