By Lena H. Sun
Friday, July 13, 2007

Metro wants to upgrade its Farecard machines so riders can use cheaper, paper-based SmarTrip cards, under a plan approved by a board committee yesterday.

Disposable SmarTrip cards might be preferable for tourists and other infrequent users who don't want to spend extra money for the regular, plastic cards. The minimum purchase for plastic SmarTrip cards is $10, including $5 for the card. The limited-use cards will probably cost less than $1, officials said.

Dave Couch, director of infrastructure renewal projects, said Metro plans to have paper cards available in two to three years.

The cheaper cards are part of a nearly $25 million, four-year plan approved by the planning and development committee to upgrade fare machines in all 86 stations.

As part of the upgrade, all 900 Farecard machines will be able to accept new dollar coins that will begin circulating in January; fareboxes on Metrobus already accept the coin. In addition, the upgrade will allow fare machines to accept a new $5 bill scheduled to be released in March. Metrobus fareboxes will also have to be upgraded to accept the new paper currency.

A final board vote is scheduled for July 26.

A Metro board committee approved designs yesterday for two memorials to honor 21 Metro employees who have died on the job. The first memorial will be a 12-foot-high, polished black granite pylon with a stainless steel "M" logo that will stand on the mezzanine at the Metro Center Station. It will be surrounded by a granite circle with an inscription. Silver lettering will spell out the names, job titles, years of service and years of death of employees.

A 4-by-5-foot black granite plaque will also be placed at Metro's maintenance and training facility in Landover. The memorials will be installed early next year.

The board approved spending $50,000 on the memorials in December. The death of technician Jong Won Lee in May 2006 inspired Metro's then-interim general manager, Dan Tangherlini, to suggest the memorials. Metro also set up a scholarship fund for minor dependents of employees who die on the job. Lee was hit and killed by a Red Line train at Dupont Circle Station.

Metro and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities are partnering to engrave excerpts of a Walt Whitman poem on the granite wall encircling the escalators at the Q Street NW entrance of Dupont Circle Station. The engraving, which is partially complete, will be unveiled at 11 a.m. Saturday. It is part of an art project honoring caregivers of people with HIV-AIDS.

Excerpts of the 1865 poem "The Wound-Dresser" evoke Whitman's service to wounded soldiers during the Civil War and serve as a tribute to health-care workers in the 1980s, when little was known about AIDS and HIV, according to a statement by Metro board member Jim Graham, who initiated the project.

A second poem, "We Embrace," by Howard University professor E. Ethelbert Miller, which also acknowledges caregivers, will be engraved at the base of a circular bench to be installed at street level along the Q Street entrance near Connecticut Avenue. The art project, funded by the commission, will be completed next month.