App Review: Metro STL

| Senior Cadenza Editor

Metro STL is a simple, useful iPhone app, but it isn’t ambitious enough. At a very basic level, it has what you’d expect in a MetroLink app. You can ogle MetroLink’s standard y-shaped map to your heart’s content. The app also uses the iPhone’s map functionality, so you can find the closest station. Additionally, every station’s departure times are stored on the phone, so you can check the times on your iPod Touch even when you don’t have Wi-Fi or your iPhone when AT&T’s 3G fails you.

Unfortunately, the app keeps these functions separate from one other. Neither map is integrated with the departure or arrival times. In fact, arrival times are conspicuously absent from Metro STL. Sure, you can figure out how long it takes to get from Skinker to the Stadium by examining every intervening station’s departure time, but, that is clearly tedious. There should be an easy way to ask the app, “I am located at X, and I want to get to Y by Z time—what time should I leave?” but there isn’t.

As with most iPhone apps, you can’t argue with the price. It’s free, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. Helpful, but annoying.

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