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Dive brief:
- The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority in California has selected Reston, Virginia-based Bechtel to provide construction management services for the Silicon Valley Phase II extension of Bay Area Rapid Transit, according to one contractor news release. The cost of the Bechtel contract is $490 million, by San Jose Inside.
- BART Phase II consists of a 6-mile extension with four new stations and nearly 6 miles of tunnel, connecting corridors in the San Jose area with the rest of the system, according to the release. Bechtel will begin work on the 10-year project and begin overseeing construction later this year.
- The new rail line will be the largest public infrastructure project ever built in Santa Clara County, according to the release, and will connect northern San Jose and Santa Clara to the Bay Area’s BART transportation system.
Diving knowledge:
In total, the project will be it cost $12.8 billion, according to the San Jose Spotlight. The price is far from the original figure of $4.7 billion in 2014KQED reported.
This isn’t the first time Bechtel has worked on the line: In the 1960s, the contractor led the design and construction of the original BART system as part of a joint venture known as Parsons-Brinkerhoff-Tudor-Bechtelaccording to the transit agency.
The other firms were Parsons-Brinckerhoff-Quade & Douglas of New York City, which created the original BART transportation plan, and Tudor Engineering Co. of San Francisco, according to the agency.
Bechtel later oversaw the engineering and construction of Phase I of BART’s Silicon Valley Line, which first welcomed passengers in 2020, the release said. By 2040, the contractor estimates that the transit system will carry nearly 55,000 passengers each weekday.
The massive expansion is just one of many major infrastructure projects underway in the US, and builders are optimistic about the future of the industry, despite a drop in spending in the traffic vertical.
“Passenger rail and light rail is something that hasn’t [historically] We’ve seen significant funding, so we’re seeing these projects move forward,” Marsia Geldert-Murphey, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, told Construction Dive earlier this year.
