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The best guide to St. Louis' public transportation is to hear from a visitor like me who visited this historical city in December.

Afterall, you can hear the sales pitch version or you can hear the opinions of someone who actually relied on the transportation.

I travelled to St. Louis to attend a board retreat for my company. The airport is okay but I found it difficult to meet the person who was picking me up from the airport.

This is because the baggage claim area is big and it is not clearly marked. So I had to ask a couple people where I needed to go to meet my ride.

The meeting was cramped, hot, not enough breaks but in the end, it was successful. Upon our departure, I was told to hop on the metro from a convenient location around the corner from our retreat. The ticket machine was not well lit and we walked down the stairs without realizing that we needed to purchase a ticket. The ticket cost $1.00.

So we walked back and got our tickets, went down the stairs once again, only to be approached by a security person who said that we needed to go back to the ticket machine to get them validated. So one of the people who I was with, went back up the stairs to get the ticket validated. Keep in mind this was December and the wind was blowing so cold, that we could barely stand to be outside waiting on the metro.

He came back with the tickets validated and low and behold, the train conductor did not even check our tickets! I suppose that if we had never gotten tickets, we could have ridden for free. Once on the metro, it was a bit nerve wrecking. There was no security, the train shook quite a bit, and although you could hear the train conductor, you could barely make out her words. So I was worried that we would miss our exit.

Well, we got the right exit, but once off the metro, there were no clear indications as to how we needed to get to the airport terminal. We saw steps that descended and so we took them, but they wound up taking us to nothing but grass. So we had to climb over a rail and walk across a very dark parking lot and back up some stairs. Then we had to cross the busy lanes and finally made it inside the airport.

I suppose that as long as we got there, that is all that matters. And as long as we only had to pay $1.00, you get what you pay for. I would prefer to use other means of transportation besides the metro especially if travelling at night. And were it not for the fact that I left the retreat with another employee to catch our individual flights, I would have been angered that my company allowed me to board the metro at all.

Your experience may be different, but I think it is better to have a true story from a visitor to St. Louis rather than one from a tourism brochure.

Learn more about this author, Chip Martin.
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