Saint John Transit Operations Centre Commercial New Construction

 

The Saint John Transit Commission was created in 1979 to operate scheduled transit service within the City of Saint John. It is the largest public transit system in New Brunswick covering about 350 kilometres of city streets and carrying close to 3 million passengers per year.

 

For many years the Saint John Transit’s home was an old warehouse-type building poorly located, from a logistics point of view, on the City’s west side.  The City had an offer from a shopping centre developer to buy the land where the transit building stood, and things started to look promising for a better facility and location.

 

Work on the new Operations Centre began in 2007 with building design followed by site work which started in 2008. From the beginning, Commission chair, Chris Titus, and General Manager, Frank McCarey, were focused on building a highly energy efficient building.  Ultimately the project pursued a LEED silver designation. LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building was designed and built using strategies intended to improve performance in areas such as energy savings, water efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.

 

The Commission is currently awaiting the results of its LEED silver application.  Frank McCarey says that, if successful, the Transit Operations Centre will be only the second LEED transit building in the country.

 

The Centre includes office space, garage facilities for approximately 70 buses, as well as an expanded maintenance area. It has many energy-efficient features including a highly efficient heating system which incorporates technologies such as heat recovery on exhaust air, in-floor radiant heating and two high efficiency condensing boilers.

 

With its highly energy efficient building envelope and efficient systems the Centre has experienced considerable energy savings for both heating and cooling.  There is natural daylighting and low wattage lighting throughout and widespread use of occupancy sensors which ensure lights are on only when necessary. The Centre also has a Solarwall® that uses renewable energy from the sun to pre-heat the fresh air entering the building.

 

The Commission received support through Efficiency NB’s Start Smart program for new commercial construction.  The program provides incentives to help offset the cost of designing and modelling highly energy-efficient buildings. With its efficient design and construction it is expected that the Operations Centre will realize an annual estimated energy savings of 50 per cent compared to the Model National Energy Code of Canada for Buildings, and an annual estimated energy cost savings of 45 per cent.

 

Efficiency NB chose the Saint John Transit Operations Centre for an award because it had the highest energy simulation score among new commercial buildings completing the program in 2010.