“Dear PoPville,
I have friends coming for the weekend and wanted to suggest that they each get a Smarttrip card for their phones. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how they would be able to do it in advance of coming here, or practically at all!
My interpretation from the WMATA website is that they would have to a) buy a new physical plastic card, b) create a WMATA account, c) register the card, d) put value on it, and e) throw away the physical card.
Am I missing something or is there a visitor-friendly way to use Smarttrip on your phone without buying a physical card or even without creating a WMATA account? Why can’t you just create a balance electronically using the Smarttrip app and a “card number” generated by Metro and use it until it’s gone?
Please help me if you have managed to do this!!”