While Transit may one day add more service on Staten Island, for now, the authority is looking to charge more for the one commuter rail line currently servicing the borough. Earlier this year, the MTA started charging fares at Tompkinsville, and now, we learn that the entire line will be a fare-generating one in the near future.

As Maura Yates from the Staten Island Advance reports, the MTA will soon do away with free rides on the Staten Island Railway and will begin, within a few years, to require paid fares at every station. She writes:

The MTA plans to restore fare collection along the entire 14-mile rail line from St. George to Tottenville within the next few years, as part of a master plan to raise more revenue, cut down on crime and close what has been a free-ride perk that is unique in the city’s public transit system.

Turnstiles recently installed at the Tompkinsville station are the first part of the plan, which eventually will incorporate “Smart Card” technology to collect fares along the rest of the line. Riders now swipe their cards only at Tompkinsville and St. George, while the train is free for trips beginning and ending at any other stations along the line. Make the 37-minute trip between Stapleton and Tottenville, for instance, and pay not a cent.

When the new system goes online, which, owing to the MTA’s budget crisis, is still at least a few years away, passengers will no longer use MetroCards but rather pay with a “Smart Card,” likely a “tap and go” system, where a card is held up to a reader without the need to slow down to swipe. The system would include a way for inspectors to check for proof that the fare was paid, and scofflaws likely would face a steep fine if caught. If you didn’t pay and there were a spot check, “you’d have a problem,” said MTA board member Allen Cappelli.

While City Council members and MTA Board members are happy to discuss the impact fare collection and fare inspection will have on the safety and security of the State Island Railway, I’m more interested to hear about the costs. Yates reports that the new $6.9 million station at Tompkinsville will generate approximately $702,000 in fares this year. It will take, more or less, ten years to pay off that investment, more so if we consider depreciation and maintenance costs.

New York City Transit didn’t provide a revenue projection for the service or any potential information on the installation costs simply because it’s too remote a plan right now. While ridership dipped in 2009, recently, approximately 15,000 per day have been using the SIR, but because many of those enter and exit at the Ferry Terminal, their fares are captured. Although further investment in fare technologies on Staten Island could earn the MTA more revenue down the line and avert maintenance costs by discouraging vandalism, the overall net gains from this added revenue probably will not be realized much quicker than the investment at Tompkinsville will be.

Since the MTA eliminated fare-collection agents on the Staten Island Railway as a cost-measure in the 1990s, the agency has seen its SIR-related revenues dry up. That will change tomorrow when the agency begins collecting fares at Tompkinsville as part of a $6.9 million program designed to turn around the SIR’s money-losing ways.

For years, the SIR has been unique among the city’s transit options. The MTA has collected fares at only the St. George Ferry Terminal and the Staten Island Yankees’ ballpark stops. Tompkinsville is but a half-mile away from the northern end of the line, and many customers are more than happy to hoof to avoid paying the fare. The MTA launched this project in 2008 with an eye toward completing it during the summer of 2009, but tomorrow — a few months late — the free ride will end.

As part of the Fare Collection Project, the agency has beefed up the Tompkinsville stop. Riders will now have a station house in which to wait as well as turnstiles to serve as the fare gates, cameras for safety and enforcement efforts, and fare vending and communications equipment. The agency says this move is expected to bring in approximately $702,000 annually, a 15 percent increase in total SIR fare revenue and will cut the estimated $3.4 million in operating losses incurred on Staten Island by more than 20 percent.

Staten Island residents looking to evade the fare could still choose to walk yet another three-quarters of a mile to the Stapleton stop. If a 25-minute walk from the ferry terminal is a better use of your time than simply paying a fare that is, at most, a $2.25 MetroCard swipe, then, time isn’t always money.

Earlier this year, the cars that run along Staten Island Railway, the city’s loneliest train route, came back from the Coney Island railyard all prettied up. To go along with a rehab, the cars all received new logo bullets to strengthen their ties to the SIR. That’s probably the best news to come from this railway all year.

In an article that reads like a laundry list of bad news, Maura Yates from the Staten Island Advance went through the trials and tribulations of the SIR earlier this week. We start with ridership.

More than any other MTA-run train line in the city, the Staten Island Railway is very dependent on the economy. Because the line doesn’t offer up any connections off of Staten Island besides at the ferry terminal where boats head to Lower Manhattan, when demand for access to Wall St., when firms stay laying off workers, ridership drops. After serving a record 4.4 million passengers in 2008, ridership is down six percent through 2009.

To make matters worse for Staten Island, soon more riders will have to pay. Currently, passengers can travel for free between Tottenville and Tompkinsville with fare collection at the ferry terminal only. In January, to combat the rising number of passengers who walk to and from Tompkinsville, the MTA will begin fare collection efforts at the railway’s second most northern station. Whether or not this will negatively impact ridership remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Yates profiles a few projects bogged down with problems:

Unveiled with much fanfare in 2007, a $1.75 million security monitoring system, including surveillance cameras and a push-button intercom on the wall of the platform waiting area, was first installed at the Old Town station in Grasmere, the site of a brutal mugging in 2005. Funded by City Councilman James Oddo and former state Sen. John Marchi, the system was originally expected to be rolled out to all stations along the 15-mile route by the end of this year.

The closed circuit television monitoring system is still functional, and has already been credited with at least two arrests, including a purse-snatching at Old Town, said Railway chief John Gaul. But plastic bags are now covering the intercom button, which was disconnected after problems with the fiber optic cables connecting the stations to a monitoring center at St. George. The project remains a top priority and the system is expected to be back up and running by next October, Gaul said.

Started in 2007, the project to re-tile the 60-year-old walls of the St. George station and lay a new terrazzo floor was sidelined after it was determined the aging floor needed to be reinforced after decades of pounding by commuters. Borough President James Molinaro offered $1 million to assist in the rehabilitation, to modernize the rail station to match the new ferry terminal upstairs. “A year from now, the rider should experience a seamless transition,” Gaul said.

One day, perhaps, the subway will reach to Staten Island and offer up a speedier ride to the rest of New York City. A harbor tunnel would certainly qualify as a megaproject. For now, though, the Staten Island Railway is suffering through the same problems delays and technological upgrades as other ongoing subway projects. Alas.

Poor Staten Island. It is, by far, the most transit-neglected borough in the city. Once envisioned as a destination for a subway line spurring off the R in Brooklyn, the city’s least connected borough enjoys a slew of buses and one fare-less subway line that runs from the ferry terminal to Tottenville along the island’s south side.

Now, though, Staten Island’s borough representative to the MTA Board wants to increase transit offerings on the car-dependent island. Allen Cappelli told the Staten Island Advance’s Maura Yates over the weekend that the time is now for SI-based transit improvements. From the sound of it, the SI transit outlook may actually be a rosy one. Yates writes:

With Albany’s approval of a bailout package back in May that included a payroll tax and other revenue sources to help the MTA address its forecasted $1.2 billion budget deficit, the MTA board can now turn its attention back to moving forward with much-needed projects, including the borough’s proposed light rail system.

“I’d like to see us have rail access,” Cappelli said. “We’ve got to get cars off the streets. We’ve got to give people a real way to commute, because we’re not going to be able to handle the cars to a greater extent than what we’re doing now.”

With projections of population growth that will further tax the borough’s clogged road network over the next two decades, “We’ve got to plan this now, or 20 years from now, somebody will ask, ‘Why didn’t they do anything about this’?” Cappelli said. He said he hopes funding will be included in the MTA’s 20-year capital plan.

Cappelli has made progress on the bus front as well, with Staten Island receiving the first of the city’s brand new hybrid-electric local buses. The new buses will eventually account for more than half of the borough’s local bus fleet, he said.

Staten Island is ripe for transit experimentation. The borough could really benefit from a light rail system and from legitimate bus rapid transit plans. Ideally, of course, those BRT routes would connect into and through Brooklyn and Manhattan for faster commutes. The light rail would be an intra-borough mode of transit.

In the end, the MTA should probably look at reviving the Brooklyn-to-SI underground subway connection. While the project would be expensive and wouldn’t become a reality for decades, a subway to Staten Island would do wonders for the mobility of a part of the city often considered the forgotten borough.