When a manager at a Metro station couldn’t retrieve a paper fare card stuck in a vending machine, a journalism professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs contacted the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority through Twitter – and got the card back later that day.
Jonathan Ebinger, an adjunct lecturer, was at the NoMa-Gallaudet station after a field trip to NPR Headquarters last week with a class of high school students taking courses at GW for the summer. But while one of the students was trying to transfer money from a paper fare card to a SmarTrip pass, the card became stuck in a machine. After a station manager said he didn’t have access into the machines, the professor to turn to social media for intervention, the Washington Post reported Friday.
This NY Ave machine ate $40 card and station agent sez nothing to be done. Shame. #WMATA pic.twitter.com/ttHSgcrIrh
— Jonathan Ebinger (@JonathanEbinger) July 22, 2015
After Ebinger’s Twitter conversation with WMATA’s customer service account, a high level official at Metro instructed maintenance staff to retrieve the card, a task they typically wouldn’t do, and the professor picked it up at the station later that day. And while the problem was solved in this case, the incident pointed to what Ebinger found out was a common problem at Metro stations: Metro station managers don’t have access into the machines where fare cards regularly get stuck. Both Ebinger and a Metro workers’ union were concerned, according to The Post.
Ebinger said the response he received was “impressive” because he wasn’t sure when WMATA’s customer service account would respond to his tweet. He said the system seems “completely antiquated. It’s a service industry.”
“I thought that was crazy and that was one of the reasons I tweeted it out,” Ebinger said in an interview. “It seemed to help and I got an appropriate response. Whether it was the publicity, pace, speed, I don’t know.”