It really is remarkable. When you look at the list of the top 10 weekday ridership days in the 31-year history of Metro, you’ll find that four of them occurred this month. Metro attributes the high numbers to “continued high gas prices, an influx of visitors to the region and a Washington Nationals baseball game,” and that seems to make sense.

It doesn’t seem as if Metro can currently handle any more people in the parking lots, on the platforms or in the trains. Even with all this recent success, there is talk of raising fares to make up for losses that won’t really be made up at all. Perhaps the union pension plan could kick in a few million every once in a while to help out.

Pardon my snicker, but I couldn’t help it when I read that England is putting a maximum speed limit on those mobility scooters. You know, the ones with a seat and handlebars and an accelerator lever and a top speed that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr. envious.

Apparently there have been way too many mobility scooter crashes in the United Kingdom that are attributed to high speeds. Pedestrians are getting run over, the scooters can’t stop fast enough to prevent crashing into parked cars and the like, and the darn things are flipping over because the senior set is taking curves at too high speeds.

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The new Highway Code, to be published this fall, will call for a 4 mph limit for pavement use and 8 mph on the road. It’s a shame that it had to come to this, but I guess if this group of miscreants can’t police themselves, then someone will have to do it for them.

A reader writes in: “The new fareboxes that PRTC recently installed are the same, standard size as those installed throughout the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan region and will eventually allow PRTC riders to use Smart Cards to transfer to any of those systems. While the maneuvering room around the fareboxes on buses used for most OmniRide services is not as great as it is on standard transit buses like those used on PRTC’s OmniLink, Cross County Connector and Metro Direct services, it is sufficient and complies with the requirements of the American with Disabilities Act.

“The maneuvering room is more limited on the OmniRide-related buses because they are ‘over-the-road coaches’ (think Greyhound or a tour bus), which are not normally outfitted with fareboxes. Such buses are well-suited for those traveling longer distances on highways, and that’s why they are used for OmniRide service. The entranceways were modified to maximize maneuverability around the new fareboxes, but there were practical limits to what PRTC could do modification-wise. Keep in mind that all OmniRide buses have wheelchair lifts that allow access from the side of the bus rather than the front when necessary. And PRTC believes the benefits of the new fareboxes far outweigh the ‘maneuvering’ inconvenience that some may experience.”