Division 13 Will Provide Local Transportation Authority With State-of-the-Art Maintenance Equipment

By Alex Girda, Associate Editor

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is now underway with the development of the new Metro Division 13 Bus Maintenance and Operations Facility. The state-of-the-art construction will be located next to Union Station and will be built over the following two years. While the facility will cost around $72 million by the end of the development process, the MTA received a crucial federal grant from the United States Department of Transportation worth $52.5 million. When finished, Division 13 will have 442,000 square feet of utility and office space.

The project calls for a multi-level parking garage, a maintenance building, bus fueling, bus washing, chassis wash and non-revenue vehicle washing, non-revenue vehicle fueling and maintenance and transportation offices and support areas to be built on a 7.5-acre site at the intersection of Vignes Street and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Three-axis lift systems used to access roof mounted equipment on the Authority’s vehicles, mobile work platforms as well as high-density stacking systems and carousel and vertical retrieval modules for parts are also planned for the maintenance center. Forecasts set the development’s impact in the job market at 1,200 direct and indirect jobs. Part of a growing national trend, the Division 13 facility will be built using sustainable design schemes, as well as energy efficient and environmentally responsible building, pursuing LEED Gold certification.

Specifically, the finished building will employ storm water reclamation and reuse for the vehicle washing system, with those components set to exclusively use 100 percent recycled water. Low-maintenance native vegetation will be planted on the green roof in order to fight negative consequences such as the water run-off and the urban heat island effect. Division 13 will benefit from it being part of the MTA’s Support Services Center, a 1.2 megawatt-generating power station that uses 6,720 individual solar panels.

Rendering courtesy of metro.net