PARKING AT UNION STATION NEW HAVEN PLUS

The brick-and-glass, Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant building comprises two two-story buildings connected by a second-floor pedestrian walkway. (For its work on the project, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., the engineering company that led the station’s planning and construction, won a National Recognition Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies.) The waiting area is also open to the public seven days a week, a rarity among Metro-North stations in Connecticut. But the waiting room, which realtors would happily call “sun-drenched,” is a showpiece with interesting contours and plentiful windows. Granted, it has no newsstand, nor does it have any restaurants or gift shops, and the ticket window itself is unstaffed.

PARKING AT UNION STATION NEW HAVEN PLUS

Most existing MNR stations are unstaffed and, consequently, lack the amenities found in larger stations, yet, like New Haven’s Union Station, West Haven boasts restrooms, water fountains, elevators and a large indoor waiting area, plus a nifty touchscreen train schedule. With the exception of Fairfield Metro four stops west, which opened in 2011, the West Haven station is, astoundingly, the only New Haven Line stop constructed within the last hundred years. The new station and transit hub (the CTTransit B4, B5, B6 and J6 bus lines stop here) is indeed modern. The West Haven station is intended to ease traffic on 95 and provide easier connections to the VA Hospital, the University of New Haven and the Yale West campus that sits a little over two miles away. Plans to build a new MNR stop in either Orange or West Haven go back to the 1990s and, although West Haven was selected as the site in late 2001, the new location here does not necessarily preclude a future stop in Orange, should demand warrant one. That possibility became a reality on August 19, 2013, when the station officially began filling the ten-mile gap between Milford and New Haven Union. Now I can walk here in about 20 minutes.” sponsored by “I used to pay almost $300 a year to park there. Karen, a local resident boarding the 7:24 to her job in Stamford, lives less than a mile away and doesn’t miss driving on I-95 to Milford. Yet, for West Haveners tired of dealing with the hassles of getting to New Haven or Milford just to catch a train somewhere else, the new station is long-overdue. “Rush” is a relative term for this Metro-North-only stop, whose foot traffic doesn’t match that of the busier New Haven Union Station, where Amtrak, Metro-North and Shore Line East converge. Only about 20 people stand on the Grand Central-bound platform as the 7:24 train rolls up, but that’s because its cars won’t reach NYC until after 9:00, meaning the morning’s commuter rush has already happened. B y 7:15 a.m., most of the nearly 650 parking spaces at the West Haven Metro-North Railroad (MNR) station are filled.

Parking at union station new haven