As many who ride the Metro can attest, the eastern part of the Red Line has a lot of graffiti visible from the train. Besides the large “Bush Hates Borf” message near the Takoma station, there’s also a whole bunch of graffiti nearer to the ground. A lot of it is on walls in CSX’s right of way, and then there’s some on nearby buildings, and so on.
But I noticed a whole bunch of new tags when I rode up to Fort Totten yesterday on the Red Line. They are anti-war graffiti tags. Here’s an example of one near Brookland-CUA station:
I actually saw a bunch of these along the Red Line with similar messages. I don’t necessarily agree with the method used to get the message out – that being tagging – but the sentiment is definitely a good one.
Meanwhile, on an unrelated topic, on the way home from DC, at the Sheetz in Haymarket, I found that one of the MTO ordering screens had crashed. Check it out:
It’s not a blue screen of death, but the program has definitely crashed nonetheless. Thankfully, the lady at Sheetz let me grab a few shots of it before she rebooted the machine.
And meanwhile, the whole thing with the day pass losses that I described earlier demonstrates a very good reason to put passes on SmarTrip as soon as possible. With SmarTrip, I don’t even have to pull it out – I just tap my whole wallet on the target on the faregate and I’m done with it. That’s just all there is to it. Easy and convenient. Compare to the passes, which are paper, and therefore get wrinkled, demagnetized, torn, etc. And the passes must come out and be run through the faregate with the possibility of jamming (which has happened to me before), compared to SmarTrip, which just has to be tapped to the target. No moving parts, no having to pull anything out. If only WMATA would hurry up and do that…