UPDATE May 14, 2014: FDOT decides not to charge the fee for the first 90 days.
SunRail hasn’t even started charging users to ride, but when they do start next week passengers are going to be paying $0.50 more than they had probably anticipated.
SunRail started selling SunRail tickets and SunCards today. You can only purchase the tickets right now at the platform.
We went out to purchase a one-way, one-county ticket.
We assumed we would be paying $2.00 for this ticket since that’s what shown on the SunRail website for the cost of this ticket:
But we were surprised when the ticket vending machine wanted to charge us $2.50. It said “Prices include 50¢ per ticket fee.”
We’ve searched the SunRail website and marketing materials and can’t find anywhere that this ticket fee is mentioned.
The $0.50 fee is added to each paper ticket you purchase, so you’ll pay $4.25 for a one-county round-trip ticket instead of just $3.75 and $6.00 for a two-county round-trip ticket instead of $5.50.
The fee is not charged when you use your SunCard to pay for your ride. So, not only will you get a 10% bonus when you add money to your SunCard, you’ll also be saving $0.50 for each trip when you use a SunCard instead of purchasing an individual ticket.
SunCards do have a one time $5.00 activation fee. If you know you are going to make more than 10 trips, you are better off purchasing a SunCard and adding the money you need to ride each time.
We reached out to the Florida Department of Transportation spokesperson who told us that there is a fee for all media ($5.00 cards and $0.50 for tickets).
We did end up being able to purchase our ticket.
Updated May 12, 2014 at 5:21 p.m. with information from the FDOT spokesperson.
Click here for Bungalower’s SunRail Coverage >>
Interesting… I do like the idea of limiting waste by encouraging the use of reusable cards, but that seems a little excessive.