Santa Monica Downtown Transit Mall
Santa Monica, California, USA

Santa Monica’s recently-completed Downtown Transit Mall Project provided a facelift to a 10-block area, linking important civic locations, widening streets, and establishing dedicated bus transit lanes. Throughout the 14-month construction period, the city and its construction manager, Black & Veatch, maintained access to all businesses and homes within the project area, keeping both a burgeoning tourist industry and a local residential population of 90,000 happy. Strategies leading to project success included:

• Listening to the public. A comprehensive community outreach program – including signage, notification, stakeholder meetings, and a 24-hour hotline – enabled the city to anticipate potential adverse impacts and prevent them. The project’s artistic components, such as color-enriched concrete paving with origami sawcut patterns, ornamental drinking fountains, and tile mosaics, were another crowd pleaser. These features added to construction complexity, but created a positive public relations effect when some onlookers began videotaping the detail work so that they could implement these artistic techniques at their own homes.
• Implementing innovative construction approaches. Careful planning ensured that no street was ever closed. Traffic control was provided to reduce congestion. Staging areas were strategically placed to minimize impacts, and special panels separated pedestrians from construction and reduced noise.
• Fostering unprecedented cooperation. The city developed a number of innovative contract provisions and organizational procedures to foster a true team approach among the project owner, the construction manager, and the contractor. For the project’s duration, thrice-weekly meetings helped ensure a “no surprises” outcome.

The project was completed within the $13.3 million budget and was ahead of schedule. “We intend to implement this proactive approach on future construction projects,” said City Engineer Anthony Antich. “We’ve learned that a major construction project can be a positive experience instead of a public relations nightmare!”