It may cost train riders an extra dollar in February if they choose to pay cash for a ticket on the train instead of getting it beforehand from the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District’s smartphone app, a vending machine, or a ticket agent, officials said.
More and more South Shore Line riders are buying their tickets with a smartphone app or a bank card, a trend NICTD officials want to grow. Doubling the current $1 cash surcharge to $2 might be the answer, officials said.
Currently, only a few stations have ticket agents, but all have vending machines that take credit and debit cards.
Discussion of the potential ticket surcharge increase, which would happen in February, came up at Friday’s NICTD meeting.
NICTD board member David Pranckus, a South Shore engineer and former conductor, said he’s still concerned about the proposed $2 surcharge. It was part of a fare increase in 2015, but the NICTD board had agreed then to delay implementing it after Pranckus objected.
“I don’t think it’s right,” Pranckus said of the surcharge.
Some people are afraid to get credit cards, he said, because they’re worried about identity theft, particularly after the recent Equifax data breach.
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Board member Christine Cid, a Lake County Council member, said some people who rely on government assistance have been reluctant to open bank accounts to get credit cards.
The South Shore Line has been working with two banks and the United Way in the Bank On Alliance, which encourages people to open bank accounts so they can obtain credit and debit cards.
Michael Noland, the South Shore’s president and general manager, said electronic tickets save money for the railroad.
He said Metra, the commuter rail service in Chicago’s Illinois suburbs, has a $5 surcharge for buying a ticket on the train.
From July to August this year, the South Shore’s figures show a 63.5 percent increase in ticket sales from its smartphone app, while sales from ticket agents and conductors were down 21.3 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Sales from vending machines were up 3.1 percent. More tickets were purchased with the smartphone app than from ticket agents.
Also Friday, Noland said the South Shore’s two major projects — the nine-mile West Lake expansion from Hammond to Dyer, and the 25-mile double-track project between Gary and Michigan City — have received “overwhelming bipartisan support” from Indiana’s governor and its two U.S. senators, who have pitched the projects’ benefits to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao.
Noland also said, in response to Munster resident Julie O’Connor’s question, that the South Shore expects to begin buying properties for both projects sometime next year, after the Federal Transit Administration reviews their environmental impacts and when the railroad has a good sense that the projects will have a high enough rating for the funding approval.
He said the South Shore could spend millions of dollars next year on property acquisition in Hammond, Munster and Dyer for the West Lake project, and in Michigan City and Gary for the double-track project.
If the railroad doesn’t start buying property until the final funding approval, he said, it loses time — and then money — on completing the project.
Tim Zorn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.