(The following article by Caren Halbfinger was published by the White Plains Journal News on May 27.)
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Metro-North Railroad is declaring its new pricing policy a success, but passengers who have gotten stuck paying higher onboard fares call it train robbery.
The on-board fares, which can be from $2.75 to $3.50 more than tickets bought at stations, took effect May 1. Small, detailed signs posted at stations spell out the difference in fares, but no signs direct passengers to the location of ticket vending machines.
“This is outrageous,” said Sandra Bernard, 60. She said she felt ripped off by the railroad after she had to pay $9 for an off-peak ticket home to Manhattan from White Plains. “Enough is enough. The ticket office was closed, and someone working there said they won’t make you pay more because it’s not open. Then the conductor said there was a machine there and you could have used it to get tickets. I was irate. I don’t ride the train every day. I didn’t see a machine. I didn’t know if there was a machine. I was angry. There should be signs at every station, so there’s no question about it.”
The ticket booth is at one end of the White Plains station and the machines are in a corridor at the opposite end.
Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said the railroad would investigate Bernard’s complaint.
“We have had isolated reports of people getting misinformation from our employees,” she said. “We will look into it. Someone will go to the station and see. It may be that we need more signs. If there should be more signs, it will become apparent. But there’s no refunds for not knowing. If the machine’s not working, that’s a different story.”
From May 1 to 21, the railroad registered 171 complaints about the vending machines, but still sold 556,005 tickets through the machines, up from 490,517 in April. The railroad verified that 95 percent of the complaints were legitimate — that a machine wasn’t working because it was jammed, empty or could not accept any more cash. In the other 5 percent of cases, the machines wouldn’t accept customers’ currency. As a result, the railroad is assigning five more people to the task of maintaining the machines.
The railroad will issue refunds to passengers who had to pay a higher on-board fare because they couldn’t buy their tickets in advance because of broken machines. Those who complain in person at a ticket window at Grand Central Terminal or at the railroad’s customer service center — and get their complaint verified electronically — can receive on-the-spot refunds.
Anders called the new pricing plan a “tremendous success, because many hundreds of thousands of people have converted to using ticket vending machines.”
“The vast majority of them are satisfied customers,” she said. “The machines are easy to use, they’re multilingual and they don’t break down very often.”
Nearly every station in Westchester and Putnam counties has at least two ticket vending machines; often, they are side by side on the same side of the tracks. Because of heavy usage, the railroad is adding ticket vending machines at Ossining, Croton-Harmon, Scarsdale, White Plains, Chappaqua, Mount Kisco, Katonah and Brewster.
Web ticket sales also are up. The railroad had a fivefold increase in the dollar value of Web tickets from March to April, increasing sales from $100,000 to $505,000, Anders said. Cash sales in May were down between 35 percent and 40 percent during the first 11 days.