In principle it works. Great magazine writers do it all the time. The thinks is, at every turn of a story, you have to make the reader care. Detail for the sake of detail is just a distraction. If you include a detail it has to be what we call in the trade a "telling detail" it has to point to something larger than itself, it has to align with all the particles of story along the magnetic pole of the things you want the reader to care about, and which the reader can reasonably be made to care about if your expose them in the right way.
Almost missing your train because you are wearing flip flops is a detail, a very human detail, but it is not, in the context in which you have presented it, a telling detail. It does not point in any meaningful way to the your point about eroding services in rural areas. A telling detail for that kind of complaint is a senior who can't drive missing a medical appointment because there is not train that will get them there on time.
You can and should interleave context, anecdote, and reflection in an extended essay, especially one that has an emotional hook, but you have to do it in a way that maintains an arc of caring on the reader's part.