BART Pleasant Hill Parking Garage

Project Summary

The Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority needed to upgrade its Pleasant Hill station parking structure to meet demand in 2004.  BART hired Watry Design Inc. to engineer and prepare the construction documents for the new 8-story, 1,547 space, parking garage addition.  Farrell collaborated with BART engineers, Watry, and Treadwell & Rollo to provide a foundation solution that met requirements for bearing, lateral, and uplift seismic demand.  A major design issue was the drilled pier support of the existing garage.  Farrell had to provide a solution that controlled differential settlement to less than 1/4 inch in 30 feet at the drive aisle connections of the new garage to the existing garage.

BART hired Overaa Construction in 2006 to start construction of the new garage structure.  Farrell’s collaboration resulted in using the Geopier system, a Rammed Aggregate Pier (RAP).  We installed over 800 RAPs including 180 uplift RAPs for the new construction.  The BART tracks were running every day during construction, and Farrell crews performed according to the strict noise and vibration criteria to eliminate disruption of BART’s daily activity.  The project was a success and opened on June 30, 2008.