Stamford has Connecticut’s busiest station on the New Haven Line. And it has lots of pre-war development. Naturally, this presents opportunities for transit-oriented development, right?
Some $40 million was approved for the project to transform the Stamford Transportation Center (STC), the busiest Connecticut station on the New Haven Line, into a multi-modal commuter complex designed for customer service and satisfaction. The project has three objectives: replace the aging 727-space original parking garage with convenient, low maintenance, long service life facilities with a minimum of 1,000 new spaces; improve multimodal traffic and pedestrian flow around the facility; and promote transit-oriented development (TOD).
In other words, build a new $35 million parking garage — which will improve “multimodal” traffic and ped access. And what is this “multimodal” traffic anyway?
The commission allocated $50 million to replace MTA Metro-North Railroad’s bridge over Atlantic Street in Stamford, which was built in 1896. The project is designed to improve vehicular accessibility, increase the bridges’ vertical clearance from 12 feet, 7 inches to 14 feet, 6 inches, add four new travel lanes and improve pedestrian safety.
Hard to imagine how adding four travel lanes will improve pedestrian safety, or encourage transit-oriented development. Particularly when the project demolishes a beautiful 99-year-old building to make way for turning lanes:
I’m not from there, but I take a train to Stamford a couple of times a year for a client meeting, and the area around there seems like a nightmare for pedestrians. The built environment is all concrete walls and crash barriers and feels like a highway. And demolishing the buildings that provide places to walk to, and services in the area seems like a step backwards as well.
I work in Stamford, and I would say your criticism is only half- deserved. The garage project will rebuild an aging garage right next to the station in a way that prioritizes mixed-used development as part of the project and would put the garage up to 1/4 mile away (detalis are still not final).
On the second point re the intersection widening, we’re concerned too aout the design being one that improves the pedestrian condition as its number one priority. Unfortunately much of Stamford was redeveloped in the 60s and 70s when traffic engineers saw only one way to build roads- many of those people are still making decisions, but things are gradually improving.
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That area of Stamford could be made way less of a transport wall if the I-95 ramps were reconfigured to be center rather than side loader configurations.
I-95 The government gift that keeps on taking.
This sounds like the opposite of transit oriented development.
Looks like a hellhole.