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MetroLink Service Extended and Extra Trains Added After NCAA Late Basketball Game Tonight
Return to BlogWelcome to March Madness
Welcome, college basketball fans from around the country to the 2012 NCAA Men’s Basketball Midwest Regional Semifinals in St. Louis! We hope you enjoy your stay in our fair city and region. To accommodate fans after tonight’s late game (9:17 p.m. start time) between North Carolina State and Kansas, MetroLink will extend service and operate extra trains after the game. The last eastbound and westbound trains to all stations will leave the Convention Center MetroLink Station at approximately 1 am.
Delays to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport
NCAA fans and customers traveling westbound on MetroLink to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport tonight and this weekend should allow an extra 15 minutes for their commutes. The delays are due to ongoing rail grinding maintenance work between the North Hanley MetroLink Station and the airport stations.
Beginning at 8 p.m. tonight, March 23, until the end of service, MetroLink will conduct rail grinding on the tracks between the North Hanley MetroLink Station and the Lambert Airport Terminals. To accommodate the crews, MetroLink will operate on a single track at the Lambert Airport Terminal #2 MetroLink Station. During the single track operations, westbound Red Line customers will experience 10 to 15 minute delays from the North Hanley MetroLink Station to the Lambert Airport Terminal stations. Blue Line customers will not be affected.
Beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, March 24 and 25, until the end of service, MetroLink will conduct rail grinding on the tracks between the North Hanley MetroLink Station and the Lambert Airport Terminals. To accommodate the crews, MetroLink will operate on a single track at the Lambert Airport Terminal #2 MetroLink Station. During the single track operations, westbound Red Line customers will encounter delays of 10 to 15 minutes from the North Hanley MetroLink Station to the Lambert Airport Terminal stations. The maintenance work will not impact Blue Line customers this weekend.
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But buses aren’t running late so when someone gets back to the station where they started they’ll be stuck? Or maybe they took the #40 bus right to the games? Then what?
As far as I understand, it is not financially feasible to extend all of the buses pass their running times, since bus operation expenses are heavy on the labor side. We would have no way of knowing demand for certain routes. However, since many buses tend to run late from many areas, and the second game of the NCAA is anticipated to end around 11:45 p.m. (at the very latest, games should be expected to only run 2 hours, or ending around 11:20) many people will still have bus options should they choose. For example, if you took the #40 to the games, the last southbound bus leaves Civic Center at 12:57 a.m., and the last northbound leaves at 12:25 a.m.
Correction: leave Convention Center at 11:57 pm. for #40 southbound. My times were off, looking at the schedule. But many of these routes still have options coming from Civic Center. Unfortunately, extending service for the entire transit system is not possible.
I am all for extending the train hours, and personally much prefer the train to the bus (and wish we had about 6 more lines in St. Louis – which would require tons of cash Metro doesn’t have and is a discussion for another time.) Metro has to know, though, if all they do is extend the hours of train service, what they are doing as a byproduct is reinforcing the ‘i’ll take the train but not the bus’ mentality.
Could Metro not look at a map of the St. Louis region served by Metrolink with hotels/hotel complexes marked on it and run selected routes late? You’d pick up one or two routes (I’m thinking places like Chesterfield, or maybe Westport) where there are hotels you could connect to. Of course, if you did that – it would also mean Metro would have to *advertise* those extended services….