Orange County Transportation Authority’s OC Streetcar will close a transit gap between Santa Ana and Garden Grove. The 4.1-mile line completes a contiguous transit system through Orange County, creating vital connections to employment, healthcare and recreation. With plans to connect directly to 18 OCTA bus routes, the streetcar will give users access to high-quality, low-cost transportation that complements existing travel infrastructure.

We are leading program management and our finance team helped fast-track development of supporting material for a New Starts grant from the Federal Transit Administration. We developed the project’s FTA New Starts evaluation and ratings templates, submitting them in just two months. Our team performed value engineering and provided recommendations to reconfigure the project. The sustainable and multimodal benefits that are so important to the community resulted in a Medium-High project rating in the FTA’s annual report to Congress in February, 2016. This ruling made the project eligible for 50 percent — roughly $144 million — of its funding from the Section 5309 Capital Investment Grant program.

Less than a year later, the project received FTA approval to enter the engineering phase.

As the owner’s engineer, our team reviews all designs for guideways, stations, systems and utilities for the fleet of eight modern, low-floor streetcars expected to carry an estimated 7,500 riders per day. We are also providing environmental documentation, risk assessment, funding and economics analysis.

Holistically approaching all project needs, we facilitated collaborative workshops with agency staff to create a customized program for the streetcar maintenance and storage facility. The process helped develop more robust initial cost estimates and determine the adequacy of the site selected for the facility. Since the location did not provide adequate space for a streetcar turnaround area, the team came up with several alternatives, which included the use of a Y track, a vehicle turntable, and removing the trucks from the vehicles and rotating them in the correct direction. The final result functioned as the basis of the engineer’s design.