In college and looking for extra income, Christine Kuennen applied for a job in the Transit Information Center. With experience in telemarketing, she got the job, quickly moved into a trainer role, then became a supervisor in the Transit Control Center where she took on special projects that opened new doors.
Those first few years were a sign of what was to come.
Over the next three decades, Christine continually looked for opportunities to excel and take on additional responsibilities, relishing chances to be on the front end of new initiatives even when it meant going outside her comfort zone.
After 33 years of service, she retired in April 2025 as the director of Bus Transportation, a role responsible for overseeing Metro Transit's 1,300 bus operators, a training department, and teams that manage service in the field and from the Transit Control Center.
A record of proud accomplishments
Reflecting on her career, Christine said she was proud to have been a part of many innovations that have since matured into fixtures of Metro Transit's operations.
“I’ve always been interested in finding workable solutions to problems and looking for ways to improve our service,” Christine said. “And over the years I either invited myself or was invited to tables that allowed me to be a part of that in all these different ways.”
Outside of the relationships she’s built, some of the things Christine is especially proud of include:
- Leading the TCC’s growth into a professional public safety dispatch center
- Partnering with the ATU Local 1005 to forge operator apprenticeship and mentorship programs
- Championing resiliency- and wellness-focused training
- Initiating programs that directly engage operators in outreach and workforce development
Christine was also involved in opening the METRO Blue Line and Northstar Commuter Rail Line and was tapped to lead operations planning and opening day preparations for the METRO Green Line.
At the time, she recalls having limited knowledge of rail. (“The only thing I knew about our rail system was how to dispatch police to it, and where it ran,” she said.) But as with other assignments she learned, grew, and succeeded.
After the Green Line opened, Christine returned to Bus Transportation where she focused on workforce planning, training development, and the implementation of iDash, a software program that operations managers use to stay up to date on training and employee management tasks.
Metro Mobility provides ‘an explosion of awareness’
Her career took another turn when a leadership role opened at Metro Mobility, the Met Council’s paratransit service for people with disabilities.
Though she had limited experience with disability services, she took the director job, experienced an “explosion of awareness,” and ultimately became a fierce educator and advocate for transit equity.
Her seven years at Metro Mobility overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic, when she helped the service pivot from transporting people to delivering groceries and other essentials to people who were unable to travel.
Her final year was spent as the director of Bus Transportation, where many of the things she’d worked on earlier in her career remained as relevant as ever.
A mother of five, Christine looked back proudly not only on her accomplishments but for the way she used her lived experience to help make transit a more welcoming place for working mothers like her. “I was very much a forerunner,” she said.