SmarTrip 4+

I am really bummed because I was excited for this feature. I got a new iPhone and my digital cars disappeared from my wallet - I tried to reset my password for my Smartrip account and never got an email. I tried twice. So I’ve lost like $15 I had on the previous card.

I got a new card in my Apple Wallet and put $20 on it. It charged me the typical $2 we pay for physical cards. Why am I being charged for a digital card!? What’s the point?

I left an extra star because the swiping process at the metro is actually easy and has been flawless so far. Whoever I am thinking of abandoning this feature if I’m going to randomly lose money and be overcharged. What a bummer.

Hi, sorry about that. Please give our SmarTrip team a call at 1-888-762-7874 so we can further assist you. Metro charges a one-time fee of $2 for its mobile SmarTrip cards to help cover our costs, just like a plastic card. While we’d like to be able to offer a mobile card for free, it wouldn’t be fair to our other riders who pay $2 for a plastic card. Remember, a new, mobile SmarTrip card fee is only charged once and remains free for anyone transferring an existing plastic card to your mobile device. -CC

Thought the app would make my trip easier, but I should’ve just loaded my cards at the station. Trip planning is easier on the app than the website. After adding existing cards and adding value 12 hours before I was planning on using them, no value was added to the cards. I had to show the station manager that I had attempted at it and on a busy day. It was very frustrating. Station manager let us through both times highly inconvenient. It’s almost 60 hours later, and the value is still not added to the cards.

Hi, if you added the funds using our app or website, it does take 4 hours for those funds to appear on your account after initially tapping your card. If the funds still aren't showing, please call our SmarTrip team at 1-888-762-7874. -CC

First of all, it’s annoying that if you add a card to your digital wallet you can no longer use the physical card. Second and more importantly, the app never has up to date arrival times, especially for bus. It’s basically useless for real time information. I always pull up the wmata website instead. It makes no sense to me that the website and the suburban Ride On app can have accurate live times but smartrip’s app can’t. Isn’t the data from the same place??

Our system is a card-based system versus an account-based system so it can only be housed in one place at a time. This is why the virtual mobile card can only be on your iPhone or your Apple Watch and not both at the same time. You are correct that the SmarTrip app is using the same data as our busETA system. We're sharing this with our team. If you are able to capture this in real time, please send us screenshots to wmata.com/contactus so that we can look into this further. Thank you for the feedback. -KB