Although it won’t be of any good for this summer season or for the 400th anniversary celebration in Jamestown, things are moving along toward implementing the E-ZPass system at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
This 20-mile-long series of bridges and tunnels is one of the real engineering wonders and provides the kind of awe-inspiring views that you might see in the Florida Keys. It also handles a fair number of trucks that use Route 13 between Virginia’s Hampton Roads area and Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Delaware.
The problem with the Bay Bridge-Tunnel is that it takes only cash in payment for its $12 toll. But that will change in this November. It’s been a long time coming, but the Web site for the bridge-tunnel says that work will begin next month to install the equipment necessary to accept electronic toll payment via E-ZPass. That should reduce some of the lengthy queues that have plagued the toll plazas there over the years. It’s costing the bridge-tunnel just about $1.5 million to get the system in place.
Pedestrian Safety Meeting
Metro and the Riders’ Advisory Council will host the second of two town hall meetings about pedestrian safety. The town hall meeting will give riders the opportunity to hear from Metro board members and Metro officials, find out about Metro’s new safety initiatives and learn how they can be safer pedestrians. The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. June 12 at the Petey Greene Community Services Center, 2907 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE. Metro board member Marion Barry and RAC member Sharon Conn will moderate. Individuals attending the town hall meeting at the Petey Greene Community Center can take Metro’s Green Line to the Anacostia station and transfer to Metrobus A2, A4, A6, A7, or A8 toward Congress Heights.
Trip planner improved
Metro has added another service to make its trip planner (www.wmata.com) even more useful. You can now have it send your itinerary via e-mail to your computer or to your Web-enabled phone or other device. This means you won’t have to carry around a sheet of paper with the information on it the next time you need to get somewhere. The beauty of this system as I have found through using it is that it is usually very accurate. All you do is enter your starting point and ending point, and it will calculate the best combination of buses and trains to get there. This program gives connection information on local buses as well as Metrobuses for those jurisdictions not served well by Metro. It will even tell you how far you will have to walk during segments of your trip. At the bottom it tells you how much your fare will be for the trip.
I tested it on my Web-enabled phone and found that with a little scrolling I had everything I needed in a tidy little package. This is one way to make a good service even better.
