Metra, Amtrak Come Up With Plan To Deal With Union Station Overcrowding
(CBS) -- Metra and Amtrak have a new plan to deal with overcrowding at Chicago Union Station, reports WBBM's Bob Roberts.
More than 67,000 of Union Station's 120,000 weekday passengers ride on the BNSF line, so it doesn't take much for riders to find a crowd.
Rather than try to herd everyone into the Great Hall, which has failed, Metra CEO Don Orseno now intends to block access to the south concourse escalators and group people through the food court and north concourse.
"We're going to have people at various locations and they are going to use straps to cordon it off to make sure people don't access it that way," Orseno said.
Signage also will be put up diagraming where riders must go. Metra is also promising to do more testing of the sometimes troublesome public address system to make it more audible.