As great as eTix might be in the future, there will likely still be many of us who will want to stick with paper tickets—in lots of cases it’s just easier or more convenient to have a physical ticket or to pay with cash. But on the LIRR, they don’t always make buying paper tickets easy. On a quiet afternoon at an outlying station, you can generally get your ticket without too much hassle, but on the first of the month or Summer Fridays in NY-Penn Station, the lines for Ticket Vending Machines can be out of control. It’s not uncommon for lines of 25-30 people, if not more, to be seen at each TVM in NY-Penn Station on days when there are a lot of occasional riders travelling, like Summer Fridays, to the point where people have to decide between missing their train and paying the $6 onboard surcharge.
When the LIRR rolled out their current TVM’s many years ago, they didn’t get all that many, and as ridership has increased (especially non-commutation travel, which requires more frequent visits to TVM’s) and the railroad has gradually whittled down ticket window hours over the years, the number of people buying tickets at TVM’s has increased considerably, and it shows in the form of long TVM lines.
The LIRR currently has 279 different TVM’s located at 115 different stations. Several stations (Mets-Willets Point, Belmont Park, Pinelawn, Yaphank, Riverhead, Mattituck, Southold, Greenport, and Bellport) don’t have any machines at all. Those stations, along with Bridgehampton, Amagansett, and Montauk are “exception stations”, meaning riders boarding there can get tickets on the train without paying the onboard penalty. The LIRR also has five different varieties of ticket vending machines, for some reason, and they all do different things.
Full service ticket machines sell the most ticket types, and they are the most common type of machine. The LIRR bought seven new machines that had contactless readers not too long ago—these let you pay with contactless cards and also mobile wallets (like Apple Pay, Android Pay, etc.), but they are only located at NY-Penn Station, Jamaica, Mineola, Hicksville, and Bayside. AirTrian ticket machines also sell joint $5 MetroCards for use through the AirTrain turnstiles, but there are only four of those machines—two each at Jamaica (inside the fare control area for the AirTrian) and NY-Penn Station (by the 7th Avenue exit). Some have requested that the railroad add more of these machines, but considering how the AirTrain entrance at Jamaica is staffed most, if not all, of the time, I don’t see why all full-service TVM’s couldn’t become AirTrain TVM’s—instead of dispensing a $5 MetroCard, the machine could print out a separate voucher that you could hand to the attendant at the AirTrain turnstiles, like how it works with the package deals. Card-only ticket machines that sell the same tickets as full service machines, but don’t accept cash.
There are also Daily ticket machines (referred to as “Express TVM’s”). What possessed the LIRR to order these machines is beyond me—they only sell one-way and round-trip tickets, and $25 standalone MetroCards, but still accept cash and cards, so it has all of the necessary equipment to do all of that. All they don’t have is a few extra spools for the monthly, weekly/ten-trip stock, and the joint MetroCard tickets, so they couldn’t’ve been all that much cheaper. One-way and round-trip sales only account for about 32% of ticket sales, so about 68% percent of transactions can’t be done at daily TVM’s. The card-only machines I can get—sending people out to swap out cash boxes does require a bit of extra work, but if it’s just a matter of switching out a few more ticket spools, I can’t see how much money they save (especially since most stations have full TVM’s as well that need to be visited each month anyways—they’re already there in most cases).
Ticket Type/Feature | Full (TVM) | Contactless | AirTrian | Card only | Daily |
Monthly Tickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Weekly Tickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Ten-Trip Tickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
One-Way Tickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Packages and Deals | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Joint MetroCards | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
UniTickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
$25 standalone MetroCard | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
$5 MetroCard for AirTrain | No | No | Yes | No | No |
Accept cash | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Accept contactless payment | No | Yes | No | No | No |
Total Machines | 147 | 7 | 4 | 15 | 106 |
I assembled a count of how many ticket vending machines are available at each station, then compared the number of TVM’s to the number of passengers using that station. Since card-only and daily TVM’s can’t be used by everyone, they’re weighted by the percentage of transactions they can handle (about 70% for card-only machines, 31.8% for daily TVM’s). Altogether, each station has an average of 1.6 ticket machines, which is not all that much.
The station with the most machines is, as you might guess, NY-Penn Station, which has 21.5 machines (mostly located in the main concourse). Jamaica has about 6 ticket machines—two of their machines are inside the AirTrain fare control area, out of reach for most LIRR riders using the station. Mineola has a weighted total of 5 machines, Ronkonkoma has 4.7, Brklyn-Atlantic Terminal has just 3.7 machines, and Central Islip has 3 full-service machines. All other stations have some combination of TVM’s that amount to less than 3 full machines.
There are fifteen different stations that don’t have any full-service machines at all, they just have one or two daily machines, which means riders can’t buy their monthly, weekly, or ten-trip tickets (or any package deals or getaways) at these stations. These stations are Carle Place, Country Life Press, Lakeview, Westwood, Albertson, Hollis, St. Albans, Hempstead Gardens, Greenvale, Hampton Bays, Medford, Bridgehampton, Long Island City, Montauk, and Amagansett. The railroad’s TVM skimpiness also means that there are 44 different stations that only have TVM’s on one side of the station, usually the westbound direction, so riders going eastbound have to cross over, buy their tickets, and then cross back over to the opposite side to board the train.
The LIRR has very few ticket machines when compared to NJTransit. NJT’s ticket machine situation is much better than ours—in addition to having 150 more machines than we do (for a considerably smaller number of riders), every NJT station (even Lebanon with 21 daily riders) has at least one machine, which means everyone has the option to buy their ticket before boarding and pay by cash or card if they want to. NJT also has one TVM variety—all machines sell all ticket types, so riders don’t get tripped up trying to differentiate between types of machine.
In terms of machines per rider, the LIRR has about one ticket machine for every 1,618 passengers. Metro-North averages one ticket machines for every 1,353 riders, but neither of the MTA railroads come close to the ticket machine coverage that NJTransit has, 622 riders per machine—meaning they have about 2.6x as many machines as the LIRR. In NY-Penn Station alone, NJTransit has 35 machines across the station (for its 80k daily riders). In the LIRR part, which sees far more daily riders, the LIRR has just 21.5. No wonder the lines are often so long.
Striking a balance between the number of daily riders at a station and the number of machines available for riders is important so riders can get their tickets without having to wait in frustratingly long lines. On a station-by-station basis, NJTransit and Metro-North have the LIRR beat too—the LIRR’s busiest ticket machines are at Jamaica, where the railroad has
Busiest Ticket Machines in the New York Area
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The table at the right shows the top-25 busiest ticket machines in the region. More than half of the busiest ticket machines are on Long Island. 13 machines are on Long Island, 7 are on Metro-North, and 5 are on NJTransit, so it’s clear LIRR riders can have some of the longest waits for tickets in the region. You can view a full count of how many machines each station has for both railroads at this link.
The lack of enough ticket machines at stations (particularly NY-Penn Station) has generated lots of passenger complaints in the past, but the LIRR has resisted adding more machines, saying they’re too expensive. When you think about it, it’s actually quite the scam—by not getting more machines, not only does the railroad not have to pay for more machines, but they also get an extra $6 out of you when you have to buy your ticket on the train and pay the onboard surcharge. It’s not remotely customer-focused, but it’s the way things are done.
New ticket machines are probably not on the radar until the New Fare Payment System arrives, whenever that’s going to come. While not shelling out a ton of money on new machines might not be the smartest idea with the New Fare Payment System 6(?) years away, the current conditions aren’t acceptable, so some sort of action needs to be taken. Whether it’s waving the onboard fare indefinitely so riders don’t have to choose between staying on line and missing their train and boarding anyways and having to pay the $6 surcharge, or increasing the use of Station Ticket Issuing Machines (where the LIRR has people out standing by the machines in NY-Penn Station selling tickets using an iPad and receipt printer), something needs to be done. The commuter rail TVM portion of the New Fare Payment System needs to be worked out as quickly as possible so more TVM’s can be ordered. eTix isn’t going to be the magic solution—even if it reaches the full 25% adoption rate they expected, the lines will still be 20-25 people long, which is still too long. Something more needs to be done.
