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How 'Microcracks' Undermined San Francisco's New Bus Terminal

How 'Microcracks' Undermined San Francisco's New Bus Terminal

4 years ago
Anonymous $ZuTig1gZkQ

https://www.wired.com/story/microcracks-undermined-san-franciscos-new-bus-terminal/

A maintenance worker poking around above the ceiling panels of San Francisco’s brand-new bus terminal found the crack. It was, honestly, hard to miss. Running a foot and a half through a girder holding up the building’s roof, the crack could have led to catastrophe. The $2.2 billion Transbay Terminal, spanning three city blocks, expected to serve 100,000 travelers a day and lead the city and state into the future of transportation, had a broken spine.

So about six weeks after the long-delayed terminal opened, it closed. In late September 2018, buses from 11 regional transit systems—from Marin County to the north, Berkeley and Oakland to the east, the peninsula to the south—rerouted to the utilitarian, parking lot-like, temporary facility they had used since 2010, when the original terminal closed after seven decades of service. And the agencies responsible for constructing the new building set out to understand what happened and what to do about it.