Great train robbery

Take the Long Island Rail Road between Queens and Brooklyn? You may well be overpaying. Last summer, the good people at the MTA slashed prices for a subset of LIRR riders. With the debut of something called Atlantic Ticket, anyone traveling between any combination of three Brooklyn stations (Atlantic Terminal, Nostrand Ave. and East New York) and seven Queens stations (Jamaica, Hollis, Queens Village, Locust Manor, St. Albans, Laurelton and Rosedale)— would pay just $5 each way.

It was designed to encourage people to avoid the hellish overcrowded mess of Penn in Manhattan. A couple of months ago, they kept the pilot program going. Nice.

Trouble is, they’ve been collecting full fare from thousands of people all along, extracting

a few extra bucks a pop from riders who fail to press a special button on ticket machines.

The smart, fair thing to do would be to just program the machines to charge anyone asking for any eligible trip $5. Instead, only those clued in to ignore the “one-way” and “roundtrip” buttons and press “Atlantic Tickets” unlock the special deal.

It adds up. A one-way peak trip between Atlantic Terminal and Jamaica or anywhere in Queens costs $10.75 ($7.75 off-peak). A one-way for seniors is $5.25. Trips just within Brooklyn are $9 one-way peak, $6.50 offpeak.

If the month of May, when the MTA sold 23,000 overpriced tickets between these 10 stations, is representative, people have paid too much for more than 300,000 trips over the last year. Fix it now.