Can Your Budget and Job Survive the Washington Metro?

Commuting on the Washington, D.C., Metro is no fun lately: The WMATA system is undergoing a difficult era of long-delayed maintenance, and commuters are now intimately familiar with the obstacles of single-tracking and SafeTrack station shutdowns. Frequent service cuts and delays have inspired lots of hate-tweets about how the system sucks, but for many of the city’s young urban professionals, these inconveniences are only mild irritants, since so many knowledge workers enjoy a certain independence from the clock-in, clock-out culture of conventional jobs.

To help close that perception gap, here comes Commuter Challenge, a new interactive online game from WAMU, D.C.’s local NPR station and the home of the Metropocalypse podcast, which is devoted entirely to the system’s state of disrepair. This gamified subway experience asks players to take a commute in someone else’s shoes.