(The following story by Jonathan Lucas was posted on the Stamford Advocate’s website on January 29.)
STAMFORD, Conn. — A communications breakdown has created confusion among commuters at the Stamford train station.
Ongoing rail and overhead wire replacement projects and the recent cold snap have caused numerous delays and last-minute track changes that have left commuters guessing which train is which.
In addition, the announcements from the Metro-North Railroad ticket agents in the station are often wrong, forcing commuters to scramble from platform to platform to get the right train.
“Sometimes it seems like the people upstairs are just guessing which train is coming in,” said Steve Rose, a public relations consultant in New York who has been commuting sporadically from Stamford for the past 15 years. “Sometimes a train will be pulling in at 8:20 and they will announce it as the 8:20 (express) train, but really it’s the 8:16 local train.”
Rose and other commuters have complained often that communications at the station needs to be improved to provide accurate information to ticket agents making announcements and for commuters to know where to wait for their trains.
Jeffrey Maron, a member of the Metro-North Shore Line East Rail Commuter Council, said a rash of recent incorrect announcements can breed hostility between commuters and the railroad.
“Knowing that the solution is in Grand Central Terminal and they have not deployed that software and the system out to the larger train stations to keep customers informed is a disservice to Metro-North staff and the riding public,” said Maron, a Moneyline Telerate executive who has been commuting from Stamford for 13 years. “It puts the riding public in an adversarial position with the people in the booth. . . . A little information would go a long way. All we ask is to be kept informed.”
The Connecticut Department of Transportation is working with Metro-North to solve the problem by installing a direct video link from the railroad’s rail traffic control center at Grand Central Terminal to see when trains are approaching Stamford. The link is expected to cost about $5,000 and will provide real-time information to the ticket agents in the station’s lobby.
“Now we’ll have a system that will give real-time visual information on incoming trains and the platforms they’ll be arriving on so the station agent can make announcements in a timely manner and we don’t have people waiting on the wrong platform,” Metro-North spokesman Dan Brucker said.
The state also is spending about $30,000 to install 10 monitors in various locations around the station for commuters to see which track their train will be arriving on.
Harry Harris, chief of the DOT’s Bureau of Public Transportation, met with Metro-North President Peter Cannito yesterday to discuss the problem. Metro-North is dealing with similar problems at its White Plains, Croton-Harmon and 125th St. stations in New York.
Stamford is second only to Grand Central in commuter volume, and Harris said the improvements are expected to be completed early this spring.
Harris said the new monitors should go a long way toward alleviating the confusion, but there could still be some problems.
“We’re dealing with a very finely tuned system and if there’s a hiccup in the system, then that can throw everything out of sync,” he said.
Harris said the new system will still rely on people in the Rail Traffic Control center to update information displayed on the monitors.
“We’re still dealing with a human error problem, but it’s a step toward improvement,” Harris said. “The real final step will be to link the trains to the monitors through transponders, but that’s still a ways off.”