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 and to regional and intercity rail services, the streetcar will give users access to high-quality, low-cost transportation that complements existing travel infrastructure serving Southern California.

As the project management consultant, our team helped fast-track development of supporting material for a New Starts Full Funding Grant Agreement from the Federal Transit Administration. We developed the project’s FTA New Starts evaluation and ratings templates, submitting them in less than three months. Our team conducted a cost risk assessment and value engineering workshop providing recommendations to refine the project and better define the scope, schedule and budget. This work, combined with 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 rating made the project eligible for $149 million in funding from the Section 5309 Capital Investment Grant program.

The project received FTA approval to enter the engineering phase in January 2017, and an FFGA was awarded to OCTA on November 30, 2018. While the third FFGA to be awarded by the current administration, it was the first FFGA based on a readiness review to be conducted by the current administration as well as being the first FFGA for a modern streetcar project, and the largest New Starts award to a streetcar project.

Serving as the owner’s engineer, our team reviews all designs for guideway, stations, systems and utilities for the fleet of eight modern, low-floor streetcars expected to carry an estimated 7,300 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.