It’s clear that the Bay Area ITE recognizes that transportation planning in a condensed, bustling city like San Francisco is no small feat. They recently designated the Temporary Transbay Terminal, which was designed by a team led by Jacobs Engineering, with assistance from Fehr & Peers, as the “2011 Transportation Project of the Year.”
The original San Francisco Transbay Terminal was built in the 1930s to service electric commuter trains and streetcars between San Francisco and Oakland via the lower-deck of the Bay Bridge. Over the years, rail service to the East Bay was replaced by bus service operated by AC Transit and the terminal’s function was expanded to include MUNI, Greyhound and other regional bus connections. As usage expanded and building codes improved, the terminal became unsuitable for the current needs of Bay Area commuters and travelers. The original Transbay Terminal (which expanded over 3 city blocks) was closed in August of 2010 to make way for a state-of-the-art, 21st century transit center that will be host to numerous transit lines, including the end station of California’s proposed high speed railway system.
This plan presented one major problem: construction of the new terminal was anticipated to take five to seven years, and the existing terminal would have to be demolished in order to construct the new one. Planners were forced to come up with a way for the city to serve commuters and travelers that relied on the Transbay Terminal in the meantime. Fehr & Peers’s San Francisco office gladly stepped up to the challenge, helping to draft plans for a Temporary Transbay Terminal. Located in a nearby, one-block parking lot, the team designed an intricate plan to service all of the bus lines in a space roughly one-third of the size of the old terminal. At the height of rush hour, there can be up to 170 buses that visit the terminal in one hour. This inspired a complicated choreography along with a technologically advanced simulation. The simulation details included arrangement, timing and schedules to ensure that all travelers’ needs were met.
In addition to ensuring the terminal itself would function properly, Fehr & Peers was asked to identify how buses would travel to and from the terminal from the Bay Bridge. Prior to the original Transbay Terminal closure, specific bus ramps were created to service transportation lines on and off of the Bay Bridge. With the closure, these ramps became obsolete, forcing buses that once had a direct route to battle the city’s traffic. To enhance the fluidity of the routes, Fehr & Peers planned “Transit Only” lanes on recommended streets surrounding the temporary terminal.
Roughly a year and a half after the original Terminal’s closure, the Temporary Transbay Terminal is up and running smoothly. The entire project’s cost to the city was only $15 million, a true “steal” in the terms of large-scale transportation projects. The temporary terminal will serve as an integral part of San Francisco’s transportation landscape until 2017, when the new $4.2 billion Transbay Transit Center is scheduled for completion.
