Westchester Commuter and Corporate Cars, Sprinters and Coaches

Commuter country with its own corporate center

Westchester County is built around three Metro-North lines — the Hudson, the Harlem and the New Haven — and most of its towns grew up around a station. Scarsdale, Bronxville and Chappaqua sit on the Harlem Line; Rye, Harrison and Larchmont on the New Haven Line. For a daily trip to Grand Central the train is hard to beat.

But the county is also a business destination in its own right. White Plains is the county seat, with courthouses, office towers and hotels, and the office parks along I-287 and Westchester Avenue, together with the corporate headquarters campuses in Purchase, draw visitors from the airports and from Manhattan every weekday. Those visitors, and the executives who host them, are much of what a Westchester car service carries.

When the train is not the answer

The car earns its place on the trips Metro-North does not serve well. An early flight from LaGuardia means leaving before the first useful train; a day of meetings across Manhattan means four stops, not one station; a late dinner in the city means the last train home. Door to door, Midtown is typically 45 to 75 minutes from central Westchester by the Hutchinson River Parkway or the Major Deegan, and the chauffeur waits between stops when the car is booked by the hour.

Luggage, family and colleagues change the arithmetic too. Four people with suitcases heading to JFK are better served by one Escalade than by a train, a subway and a terminal train, and a visiting executive landing at LaGuardia reaches a Purchase headquarters without anyone arranging a transfer at the station.

Offsites, client visits and company groups

Westchester's group trips are mostly corporate. A department heads from a White Plains office to a client or an offsite in a 14-passenger Mercedes Sprinter; a deal team uses the 14-seat conference-table Sprinter so the meeting continues between Purchase and Midtown; and a company brings visiting clients from the airport to a headquarters and on to dinner in one vehicle.

For larger groups there are mini buses seating 23, 29, 32 and 38, a 40-passenger charter bus and a 55-passenger motor coach, for a company-wide offsite, a conference shuttle or a team outing to a game in the city, with several vehicles running on one booking when the headcount needs it.

Buses route differently here. The Hutchinson River, Saw Mill River, Bronx River, Sprain Brook and Taconic parkways are closed to buses and commercial vehicles and have low bridges, so a mini bus or coach uses I-287, I-95, I-684 or the Major Deegan instead, with the route and campus loading point agreed before the day.

Parkways, bridges and the airports

Cars use the parkways that make Westchester quick to cross: the Hutchinson River north toward Connecticut, the Saw Mill and the Taconic up the middle of the county. I-287 runs east to west through White Plains to the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, I-95 follows the Sound, and the Major Deegan heads south into the Bronx. LaGuardia is the closest of our four airports at about 30 to 50 minutes; Teterboro is 40 to 65 minutes over the George Washington Bridge; JFK and Newark are longer runs.

Westchester pickups are outside Manhattan's congestion relief zone. A trip only picks up that charge if its drop-off is inside the zone, which we check and confirm when the trip is booked.