Transit
El Monte Busway & Transit Center
LEED Gold HVAC and BAS for SoCal's largest bus terminal.
Client
KPRS, Inc.
Location
El Monte, CA
Service Line
HVAC and EcoStruxure building automation for the largest bus station west of Chicago — including CO monitoring, evacuation sequencing, and the giant fans that keep an enclosed terminal breathing.
Client: Los Angeles Metro
Location: El Monte, CA
Service Line: Mechanical HVAC & Building Automation
The El Monte Busway & Transit Center is the largest bus facility west of Chicago, moving about 40,000 Metro, Foothill Transit, and Greyhound passengers a day between the San Gabriel Valley and Downtown LA. A 2012 rebuild doubled the old station, taking it to a two-level terminal with 29 bus bays, a regional transit store, a Metro Bike Hub, surface parking, and a service center. Athena performed the HVAC and building automation on the new facility.
Two fans, 160,000 cubic feet of air a minute each, pulling bus exhaust off an enclosed concourse.
An enclosed terminal full of idling buses has one non-negotiable job: get the exhaust out. The heart of our scope was the carbon-monoxide monitoring and exhaust system, built around two enormous upblast fans — each moving roughly 160,000 cubic feet of air per minute, driven by 250-horsepower motors, and weighing about 8,500 pounds apiece. CO sensors across the concourse watch the air, and the fans answer.
We ran all of it on a Schneider Electric EcoStruxure building automation system, and the sequences behind a place like this are anything but simple. Fans that size can’t just run flat-out around the clock; doing that would punish the power bill and wear out the equipment. So the controls ramp them up and down on measured CO, zone by zone, keeping the air safe while drawing only the horsepower the moment calls for. They stage the big motors so they don’t all hit the grid at once, and they balance makeup air against everything being pulled out, so the terminal doesn’t go so negative that the doors fight you. On a high-CO event, the system sheds comfort and switches to evacuation mode, driving the fans to a full purge until the air clears. All of it runs on one front-end, right next to the ordinary comfort control for the retail and service spaces, two very different jobs on the same system.
Beyond the exhaust, we handled the building’s HVAC across the terminal, retail, and service areas. The station opened in 2012 and is certified LEED Gold.
It’s one of two Metro facilities we’ve outfitted, alongside the Division 13 Bus Maintenance & Operations Facility.
Client: Los Angeles Metro. General Contractor: KPRS. Architect: Gensler. Athena scope: mechanical HVAC and Schneider Electric EcoStruxure building automation, including concourse CO monitoring, exhaust, and evacuation sequencing. LEED Gold, U.S. Green Building Council
Like this one? Tell us what you're building.
We work across healthcare, civic, education, manufacturing, and the rest of Southern California's working buildings. If your project sounds something like this, we'd like to hear about it.
