LOS ANGELES, CA An environmentally friendly bus maintenance facility, which will greatly enhance operations for the San Diego, California, (MTS), recently opened in Chula Vista, California, designed by , a leading transportation architectural and engineering firm.

In the first design-build contract for a maintenance facility ever issued by the (SANDAG), the STV/WhitingTurner Contracting Company design-build team designed and constructed expansions at the South Bay Bus Operations and Maintenance Facility. As part of this $50 million program, a new 49,000-square-foot high-bay maintenance building, 12,000-square-foot operations and administration building, and a two-bay bus wash building were added to the existing facility complex.

"Because this project was procured using the design-build delivery method, speed and efficiency were a top priority for the client," said , AIA, Vice President and Project Manager for the initiative. "We utilized a unique collaborative application to help make this as smooth of a process as possible for SANDAG and MTS."

During the design phase, STV implemented a virtual desktop infrastructure system - a private cloud that allows project team members from different offices and organizations to work off of the same building information modeling files and other data in realtime. All of the project's drawings were centrally located and could be easily accessed by the firm's architects and engineers around the country, as well as by outside sub consultants who helped support the maintenance facility.

The facility earned Silver certification and STV coordinated with the sub consultants and contractors to help the client earn LEED credits. The LEED design strategy included natural day lighting, photovoltaic electricity generation, and a high-performance building envelope.

"We're finding that more and more of our transportation clients are pursuing sustainable design elements, even for more industrial facilities like this bus maintenance complex," Peterson said.

Prior to work on the MTS facility, STV provided design and construction phase services for a rail maintenance complex used by Altamont Commuter Express - believed to be the first rail facility of its kind to achieve Silver certification.