NEW YORK - November 28, 2010 - A Metropolitan Transporataion Authority (MTA) bus bully slapped a $100 summons on a Manhattan woman deemed too slow to show her ticket for the new express M15 Select Bus - a service that has increasingly become a cash cow for the money-strapped agency.

Since 2008, NYC Transit cops have handed out more than $1 million in summonses on the two Select Bus lines, the M15 and the Bx12, whose riders buy tickets from a sidewalk machine rather than pay on board.

The machines are supposed to speed the passengers' trips, but some straphangers gripe that the speediest thing about the Select Bus service is how quickly officers ticket customers.

Yvette Stokes, of East Harlem, said she got a summons Oct. 28 simply because she was too slow to fish her ticket out of her purse.

Stokes, 60, used a 30-day MetroCard to buy her ticket at 7:09 a.m. from a machine at Second Avenue and 106th Street.

When she boarded, officers immediately asked her if she had a ticket. No problem: It was still in her hand. After displaying the ticket, she put it in her purse and the officers left the bus.

But at 34th Street, a new crew of officers boarded the M15, and passengers were again asked to show their tickets.
Stokes rooted around in her handbag and mistakenly pulled out one that was two days old.

"The officer was very agitated with this and started shouting at me," Stokes, still shaken, recalled. "The very next thing he said was that I couldn't hold up the bus -- and then he ordered me off the bus."

Back on the sidewalk, Stokes looked in her purse and found the proper ticket, but the officer, Harry Melendez, wrote her a summons anyway.

"He simply ignored me," Stokes said.

She learned Friday that the summons had been tossed out on a technicality because her address and other identifying information were wrong.

She still wants an apology.

"It was horrifying. I just can't get it out of my head. I couldn't stop crying," said Stokes, who works in the Manhattan County Clerk's Office.

Officials said that, after a "comprehensive review," MTA managers determined that Melendez did nothing wrong.