CHA Consulting
The latest design for the second Union Station garage.
The state has a new design for a second parking garage at Union Station.
Unlike the design from a year-and-a-half ago, this one has plenty of spaces for bikes.
At Tuesday night’s monthly meeting of the Connecticut Commuter Rail Council in a fourth-floor office at Union Station, CHA Consulting Project Manager Jeff Parker and state Department of Transportation Chief Engineer Mark Rolfe presented the state’s latest designs for a second parking garage at the city’s main train station on Union Avenue.
The proposed seven-level, 1,015-space garage will replace the 260-space surface parking lot that sits right next to the existing city-run Union Station garage and across the street from the the city’s police headquarters.
CHA Consulting Project Manager Jeff Parker and CT DOT Chief Engineer Mark Rolfe after Tuesday’s CT Commuter Council Rail meeting.
“We think we have a pretty good design,” Rolfe said after the meeting, noting the design updates that the state, the city, local architect Herb Newman, and CHA Consulting have worked on since Aug. 2016, when the state unveiled a plan that local officials and citizens criticized as ugly and anathema to bikes and transit-oriented development.
Parker and Rolfe said that the state will hold a public information session on the new design in December. It is looking to have a final design for the garage done by April 2019, and then have a contractor ready to begin construction by November 2019.
They said that the garage is expected to cost $60 million, and will be funded entirely by the state.
Click here to download the full presentation made by the state on Tuesday night.
The new design’s 1,015 spaces across seven different levels will be a net 688-parking-space gain for the site, Parker said.
He said that the new garage will also have roughly 240 parking spaces for bicycles, which he said would double the amount of existing spots for commuters to lock up their bikes.
Parker and Rolfe said that the new design calls for a third-level bridge that will connect the new garage with the existing garage. While the new garage will not have dedicated ground-floor retail space, they said, the planned sidewalk improvements will also include spaces for mobile retail pop-ups like food carts and trucks.
The proposal predicts an 18-month construction scheduled to begin in late 2019 and finish in mid-2021.
Garage critic Aaron Goode.
Wooster Square resident Aaron Goode, who was one of the few members of the public to attend Tuesday night’s meeting, told the Independent that he thinks the new designs represent an improvement over those presented in 2016. But, he said, the new designs are still far from perfect.
“From a cyclist perspective,” he said, “the new garage design is undeniably an improvement on the previous scheme, which was totally unacceptable, grotesque and insulting in the way it ignored the interests of cyclists. But there is still a lot of room for improvement in addressing negative impacts for cyclists during the two-year construction phase and also the interface with the street, which is vital for making pedestrians feel comfortable, and in the overall architecture, which still looks like an uninspired warehouse for cars
“What I am most excited about,” he added, “is the cycle-track and other complete streets improvements envisioned for Union Avenue.”