Transit agencies should create pop up stores for the holidays, selling agency branded merchandise (I'm talking to you, WMATA!)

Going to the WMATA "store" to buy some toys for a child isn't much of a store compared to those transit ticket and convenience stores in Liverpool or a museum gift shop, especially at the Transit Museum in New York City or the super killer store at the London Transport Museum.

DC's renowned National Building Museum Store has a smattering of transit toys, including a cool large style Metrobus and "squeeze" toy Metrorail railcar.

The WMATA store at Metro Center are cashier type walk up windows where the clerk goes off somewhere to find the item you want, and most of the items have to be ordered online.

They will give you a nice merchandise catalog if you ask.

Isn't that kid's backpack absolutely cool?

For years, I had a WMATA Metrorail map shower curtain...

But given the holidays, from the standpoint of branding, marketing,"transit as fun," and the Downtown Holiday Market it would be a natural for a transit agency like WMATA to have one or more pop up stores to sell merchandise for the holidays.

DC Downtown Holiday Market across from the Capital One Arena and next to the Smithsonian Reynolds Center museums.

They should do it at street festivals too, as a part of their information delivery function.

WMATA's booth at the H Street Festival wasn't particularly scintillating.

In some communities, the local transit agency has donated an old bus to food security organizations to make over as a mobile produce stand.

St. Louis Metro Market food bus.  St. Louis Post-Dispatch photo.

Arlington's Commuter Store has at least one mobile RV that sells transit fare media, provides information, etc.


Why not make a decommissoned bus over as a transit information center and branded items store for street festivals, as well as do pop up stores for the holidays?

Making Transit Fun, book by Darrin Nordahl

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I realize now in my discussion of Union Station as an active transportation museum within this entry, "DC State Rail Planning Initiative," that I should have mentioned that Metrorail needs some museum presence too.  There is the National Capital Trolley Museum in Montgomery County, but it is a museum dedicated to the streetcar era, which pre-dates WMATA.