5 zany ideas aimed at making your Metro commute greater

MetroGreater, Greater Greater Washington’s new website aimed at crowdsourcing ideas for small-scale improvements to Metro, closed submissions this past Friday. But before doing so, the site managed to collect more than 1,300 ideas for making our city’s transit system better.
Boy, did you deliver. Ideas on the site run the gamut from the tongue in cheek (rename Metro “Trainy McTrainface”) to suggestions clearly based on very individual experiences. There’s a decent amount of overlap — better signage for and enforcement of common courtesy rules, for example, seems to be something a lot of people are after.
Here are five wacky and/or wonderful ideas that caught our attention:

• Exchange program for Metro leadership: Need a little inspiration? Go see how cities overseas are doing it! This seems to be the basic gist of this idea — “Metro leadership will come home inspired and refreshed,” the suggester writes.
• Metro evacuation training: This person suggests that Metro train a bunch of frequent riders on what to do in the case of an emergency. Would you be down to be a volunteer Metro emergency responder among us?
• Phone charging stations in the system: This was suggested more than once. Interestingly, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also proposed this for the subway recently, as Technical.ly Brooklyn covered here.
• Highlight different great “voices of Metro” in the new trains: We’ve all had the unique experience of a really great Metro train operator. But in the #newtrains, the automated voice available just doesn’t have the same flair. Why not use some of the “best” conductors for voice work to give new trains a personality? This suggestion got people pretty excited in the comments.
• Fancy uniforms for Metro employees?: “Maybe requiring staff to have fancy uniforms at all times will help give them a sense of pride in their jobs,” this suggester writes.

Now comes the part of the competition when a jury reads through all 1,300 submissions to pick five to 10 that meet all the criteria to be finalists. In the meantime, the public is free to comment on the suggestions already submitted. Remember — the idea that ultimately gets chosen must cost under $100,000 and be easy to implement and maintain.
What’s your favorite suggestion from MetroGreater? Tweet us to say what makes it so great.