By Richard Witt, Jr., Contributing Author
New highways are not often constructed, but when they are, like in the case of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission’s Southern Beltway project, it is crucial to have a maintenance support facility for upkeep services.
Maintenance complexes are essential to keeping America’s roads and bridges in good condition. It’s a home base for maintenance crews, and it’s where they store materials, tools and equipment.
The Southern Beltway came with a 51,179 square-foot support facility. The crew members working out of this complex will attend to the needs of this new 19-mile highway that connects Pittsburgh International Airport with Interstate 79.
Located southwest of Pittsburgh, the Southern Beltway alleviates traffic congestion while fostering economic growth in neighboring townships, including the Energy Commerce & Innovation Corridor (ECIC).
To maintain this essential new highway, crews will house
stockpiles of materials, such as road salt, at the support facility, and they will use the space to store and repair vehicles and equipment.
To some it is just a building, but maintenance facilities are where a dedication to safety begins.
“Customer safety and service are central tenants of our mission,” said Todd Tilson, manager of maintenance and field operations for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “This means not just the day-to-day jobs like clearing snow and ice in the winter and controlling vegetation in the warmer months, but also upkeep improvements like sealing cracks, patching potholes and repainting lines as the roadway ages to ensure its long-term support.’”
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission operates and maintains 565 miles of toll roads in the state. It oversees 17 service plazas, 27 maintenance facilities and more than 1,300 employees.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike generated more than $1.6 billion in annual toll revenue from more than 206 million vehicles in the 2023 fiscal year.
When it opened on Oct. 1, 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike stretched 160-miles from Carlisle to Irwin. Dubbed “America’s First Superhighway,” the turnpike garnered nationwide praise as a pioneering engineering feat, and it set the benchmark for highway design and engineering nationwide.
Today, at triple its initial length, the Pennsylvania Turnpike maintains its legacy of innovation in ground transportation by embracing modern technologies, ensuring faster response times, smoother traffic flow and enhanced safety for drivers.
Function and Form
The Southern Beltway’s maintenance complex was built on a 10-acre site, and it includes administrative, maintenance, storage, salt storage, emergency generator and support facilities for a fully functional, highly efficient and sustainable highway maintenance operation.
The maintenance facility's administrative office space accommodates a team of 22 staff and is optimized for productivity and practicality.
Workers benefit from sustainable and wellness features such as geothermal energy heating, large, translucent windows to provide ample access to natural light throughout, LED lighting with smart controls to save energy and rooftop rainwater collection to support sustainable heavy vehicle washing.
The primary maintenance building includes four bays for vehicle repair. The shelter building can hold up to nine vehicles. Heavy maintenance vehicles can move easily around the site as well as pull through the truck shelter.
“Other maintenance facilities are situated on large, rectangular sites. This facility layout had to fit on an oblong-shaped site, resembling the outline of a fish,” said Fred Santoro, RA, LEED AP, senior project architect for AE Works. “Laying out buildings with large footprints while maintaining proper maneuvering clearances for trucks to pull through and around buildings was a critical challenge for the design team. We were able to solve this design issue in a manner that met the turnpike’s operational requirements.”
The main building houses a hazardous material containment pit, accommodations for vehicular maintenance lifts and wash equipment and an elevated mechanical mezzanine. Wash bays include a fiberglass grated maintenance catwalk cantilevered from the concrete masonry walls.
A challenge to more sustainable operations for this vehicle maintenance facility is the high-volume use of water. The building addresses this challenge with rainwater collection from the roofs of the main maintenance and office buildings, bringing harvested water to an inside 5,100-gallon storage tank to supplement water usage.
The vehicle washing system consists of water storage tanks, air compressor and pumping equipment. Medium pressure water is supplied into the wash bay to hose reels located at floor level and along the catwalk. High pressure water is provided to an automatic undercarriage wash system.
Reliable Power for Continuous Operations
Reliable power is the backbone of highway maintenance. To meet the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission’s operational demands, electrical systems include power, lighting, emergency back-up, fire alarm and low-voltage infrastructure for telephone, communication, and security systems. A new pump/electrical building is positioned at the north end of the site, where site utility connections are located. An indoor diesel fueled standby engine generator powers the backup system.
Designed for a 24-hour runtime at full load, the generator is connected to a dedicated external underground fuel storage tank. For safety and redundancy, the backup system power transfer switches are housed in the generator room while the distribution equipment is located in the main and auxiliary electrical rooms.
Fuel Storage Designed for Safety
The fuel island is situated off the west side of the maintenance building. Underground fuel tanks were strategically positioned to the west to keep the tank covers out of the path of the snowplows.
A 6,000-gallon underground diesel storage tank and a 6,000-gallon gasoline storage tank serve a dedicated fuel servicing pump located at the fuel island. This system includes storage tanks, storage tank monitoring equipment, underground double wall containment pipe, transition sumps as required, fuel level monitoring equipment, leak detection systems, vapor recovery (for gasoline), and fuel distribution monitoring and control systems.
The leak detection, fuel level monitoring and fuel distribution monitoring are integrated with the building management system.
For supplying fuel to the emergency generator, a separate underground storage tank is next to the generator building. This tank serves as the primary storage tank and is connected to a day tank located in the emergency generator room. This system is piped via a recessed supply and return pipe trench to the diesel emergency generator.
Sustainability
Supporting more efficient operations and the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission’s commitment to the environment and sustainability are incorporated throughout the complex through various features.
Sustainability and economics were a large part of the material and building structure selections in the building. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission’s goal was to have a 100-year building to sustain the wear and tear of a maintenance facility and provide a sustainable and economically smart investment that will continue to serve the region for a long time.
The facade was designed for resiliency and appeal and sustainable performance, using rainscreen panels to provide modern efficiencies of continuous insulation on the building's exterior face. Radiant floor heating in the maintenance areas is used as a more efficient and comfortable way to heat the space when staff are working on the vehicles.
A Look to the Future
“There are not many 83-year-old companies in growth mode, but we’ve proven time and again that an investment in transportation will pay for itself in greater prosperity and thriving communities,” said Mark Compton, Pennsylvania Turnpike CEO. “Modernization and innovation have been at our foundation from the beginning and will continue to guide our decision-making long into the future.”
Today, the Southern Beltway is flourishing with the backing of infrastructure facilitates that maintain travel around the bustling Pittsburgh metro area. With future forward goals of longevity and sustainability, the maintenance complex supports continued smooth operation of the Southern Beltway for many years to come. RB
Richard Witt, Jr., AIA, is senior vice president and chief client officer at AE Works.
