Stamford commuter garage moves forward
STAMFORD — The road to a new commuter garage in Stamford has been far from smooth, but on Monday morning, Connecticut officials celebrated finally moving forward on the perennially postponed project.
Five years after a deal to reimagine the Stamford Transportation Center and its dilapidated state garage fell apart, Gov. Ned Lamont, Transportation Commissioner Joseph Giulietti and a bevy of elected officials gathered to showcase one of the Northeast’s busiest train stations into the 21st century by building a new commuter garage.
“Parking should not be a hassle,” Lamont said from a podium just across the street from the garage-in-progress while flanked by Stamford Mayor David Martin, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Stamford’s delegation to the state legislature. “Parking should be something that's easy, affordable, with a lot of capacity. That's what we're doing right here.”
Engineering crews have already broken ground on the 928-spot garage, a project that will cost the state $81.7 million, according to Giulietti. The entire building, which will feature a bridge that directly connects with one of the train platforms through an enclosed pedestrian way, is scheduled for completion in summer 2023.
The multimillion-dollar car depot will encompass only a fraction of what the state originally planned to replace in 2013. The Department of Transportation that year struck a deal with a private developer to create a $500 million office, housing, retail and hotel complex beside the train station and move commuter parking a quarter-mile away. That proposal drew ire from commuters , who wanted the state to rebuild the existing garage instead.
The new building on Washington Boulevard will replace the existing state garage on Station Place, a 36-year-old structure plagued by problems since the beginning. The state plans to demolish the more structurally deficient half of the garage once the new parking facility is completed.
“This is prime real estate,” Giulietti said of the parcel. “We're looking to go and attract investors so that we can offset some of our costs for going into an operation by maybe putting in something there that will
generate funds for the system.”
Even during the pandemic, the Stamford Transportation Center has remained one of the most frequented locations in the Metro-North railroad system. Data from the system shows that more than 8.4 million people rode Metro-North trains from the Stamford Transportation Center in 2016, making it the second-busiest station behind Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
After seeing a 95 percent reduction in ridership during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the passenger count has since bounced back and hovers at around 50 percent of prepandemic levels, Metro-North President Catherine Rinaldi said at the ceremony. Almost two years after the virus first took hold, 175 trains a day stop at Stamford station. Weekend train service is completely back to normal, and on the weekdays 82 percent of the usual trains visit the stop, she said.
Though creating a better
place for cars is the most obvious component of the garage redesign, the future of multimodal transportation in Stamford was also front and center during the celebration.
Though future plans for the transportation center itself are still incomplete, the state plans to repave and redesign all the roads surrounding the garage and the train station, according to Giulietti. The paving would create dedicated feeder paths for the buses, taxi cabs and rideshares that frequent the station.
On top of that, he said, the new garage will bring pedestrian improvements to the streets to facilitate both walking and biking. The project will also connect nearby pedestrians to the planned Mill River Greenway, the project that will connect Stamford from the South End to Mill River Park.