Doubling the hub

John O'Leary trudged through the Downtown Transportation Center Wednesday sipping a McDonald's coffee and scanning the box scores in the sports pages on his way to meet the bus that carts him off to work.

His daily routine hasn't changed much in five years, but beginning tomorrow, O'Leary will hop aboard his Citizens Area Transit (CAT) bus in a new bay, atop new concrete and -- it is hoped -- with a little more elbow room to spread out those baseball statistics.

"They've been working on this place for a while, and it'll be much easier to get in and out of here when they finish," O'Leary said.

The 56-year-old MGM Grand employee is one of thousands of daily riders who crowd the transportation center at the corner of Casino Center Boulevard and Stewart Avenue each morning.

A $1.9 million renovation project -- part of which will be finished today -- will help ease both the bus and commuter congestion in the hub and offer a 24-hour restroom facility.

"We're basically doubling the size," said Fred Ohere, an engineer with the Regional Transportation Commission, which is funding the project.

Nine new bus bays are expected to open Friday to commuters, with the rest of the project finishing up in mid-July.

When completed, the transportation center will have doubled its capacity to 32 bus bays and will have a new drivers' lounge, bus staging area, ticket booth and vault where drivers can deposit fare boxes.

"It's going to be nice when it's finished," said Rodney Henderson while waiting Wednesday for a bus to take him to his job at the Tropicana Hotel. "It's much easier to take the bus than to have to worry about driving and getting stuck in traffic.

"Plus with a bus, I can sleep on the way home from work," Henderson said.

Construction crews haven't had that same relaxed attitude while working on the renovation.

First there was the daunting task of keeping 65 buses an hour moving through the construction zone and making sure all of the commuters remained out of harm's way of welders, masons and backhoes.

"The biggest challenge for us was making sure that they stayed open and keeping all the riders happy," construction manager Bob Horst of Parsons Transportation Group said.

For example, Richardson Construction superintendent Alan Biddle had to wait until one side of the building was re-paved -- allowing eight buses to move to that area -- before he could begin work on the south side of the restroom facility.

If he had tried to work on the building addition with buses on that south side, commuters would have been just feet away from bricks, mortar and potential danger.

"This project is designed with a tough time frame," Biddle said. "Not only don't we have any time to spare, we have to finish one phase before we can begin on another."

The transportation center forms an L-shape, with bus bays extending to the south and west from the central building housing a ticket booth, a McDonald's and a handful of slot machines.

The addition of the new bays, parallel to the west bays already in place, will add another bronze-canopied chute under which eight to nine buses will pick up riders.

In addition to the new bays, all of the current asphalt will be torn out and repaved with a more durable concrete.

"The weight of the buses on the soft asphalt just causes it to buckle when it's hot," Horst said.

The current bays all have mounds of asphalt near the curb pushed up like sand from the weight of large accordion buses. Buses will be re-routed temporarily as each of the remaining two chutes of bays are repaved.

Drivers who work the overnight shifts will now have a restroom facility and lounge -- instead of the portable toilet facilities they currently have to use due to the center's 10 p.m. closing.

This is the first significant renovation of the 12-year-old transportation center, but not the last of the work to alleviate the crowded downtown transportation system.

Ohere said the RTC is considering building a smaller transit hub somewhere on the south Strip to remove some of the additional congestion downtown. The Union Pacific-owned 170 acres of land adjacent to downtown is also being considered for a transit hub.

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