As a Monday through Friday rider of Metro for the past five years, I have had my fair share of incidents. On May 7, I had my last one. I am no longer going to ride Metro.
I am not certain who is responsible for emergency preparedness, or service interruption preparedness but I, for one, would have appreciated some sort of announcement to say: We had a train derailment, trains will be shutting down, and we will be busing to stations beyond Jackie Joyner Kersee. Instead what I received was an announcement on the train as we were leaving Emerson Park that the train was going out of service with no explanation, only to find out upon arrival at JJK that we would be waiting for buses to continue our commute.
In case you didn’t know, May 7 was also a day game for the Cardinals, so in addition to normal Metro commuters, there were thousands of additional riders who were essentially stranded in East St. Louis.
Now I am no expert on trains or engineering, but I feel it’s safe to assume that a derailment is likely to take longer than 10 minutes to fix. The lack of communication on Metro is absolutely unbelievable, again this is not my first incident, but it will be my last. “Don’t Go Metro,” is the slogan I will be using from here on out. Maybe someday they will figure it out. In the meantime, thanks for the heads up.
Stacy Simonin
Belleville
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