The Law Offices of John Caravella, P.C. does not own this content. This content was created by Dan Zukowski, and was published to Industry Dive on September 4th, 2024. To view the full article, please click here.
The “largest all-electric bus maintenance and transit operations center” in the U.S. will be home to 100 articulated 60-foot buses, a county official said.
Miami-Dade County is on a tight timeline to build what could be the “most innovative and largest all-electric bus maintenance and transit operations center in the country,” says Eulois Cleckley, director and CEO of the county’s department of transportation and public works.
Work on the South Dade Transit Operations Center broke ground June 25 on a 20-acre site that will include charging stations, maintenance facilities, driver training, bus dispatching and an emergency command center for the Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works. The facility will also provide for solar power and a water reclamation system for bus washing.
Workers have 90 days to build one of the first pieces of the all-new bus operations and maintenance center in South Florida: a utility vault to serve a new fleet of 100 60-foot articulated battery-electric buses for Miami-Dade County. Construction is on schedule, assured Angel André Chavarria, senior vice president and alternative delivery project director at WSP, in a recent interview.
The county currently has 800 buses and set a goal of electrifying 20% of its fleet, Cleckley said. The fleet already includes 69 40-foot electric buses, built by Proterra, which declared bankruptcy in 2023. Cleckley said the fleet of 100 articulated buses will come from New Flyer, which has an almost $12 billion backlog in orders, partly as a result of Proterra and another competitor leaving the U.S. transit market. Two test buses are already on hand, Cleckley said.
Building a safe, resilient maintenance depot
Chavarria explained that charging the buses will require about 10 megawatts of available power, while five more MW are needed to run the rest of the facility. WSP has been working with Florida Power & Light since November 2022, he said. After the utility vault is finished, FPL will install, test and commission the necessary equipment.
The charging equipment will be located on the bus roofs. When the buses are parked for charging, retractable platforms will allow workers easy and safe access to the equipment, said Chavarria. But because lithium-ion batteries pose a fire hazard, the structure will be heat-insulated to prevent damage should a fire erupt, he said. Sprinklers will activate in an area just around the fire location rather than the entire building. “Given that it’s a 100,000-square-foot facility, we can’t have the entire building go off,” Chavarria said.
John Caravella, Esq. is a construction attorney and formerly practicing project architect at The Law Office of John Caravella, P.C., representing architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, and owners in all phases of contract preparation, litigation, and arbitration across New York and Florida. He also serves as an arbitrator to the American Arbitration Association Construction Industry Panel. Mr. Caravella can be reached by email at [email protected] or by telephone at (516) 462-7051.
The Law Offices of John Caravella, P.C. does not own this content. This content was created by Dan Zukowski, and was published to Industry Dive on September 4th, 2024. To view the full article, please click here.