The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) celebrated the opening of its Central Depot District Garage with a ribbon cutting event on May 10. The new state-of-the-art maintenance and fueling facility is designed to accommodate alternative fuel and clean air transit vehicles and replaces the 46- year- old Salt Lake Central Bus Garage, which could only maintain 100 buses at any given time due to a lack of available space.
The new garage will initially be capable of storing and maintaining up to 150 buses but could expand to serving 250 buses.
The project includes a new bus maintenance shop, bus wash, diesel fueling center, administrative offices and charging facilities for a fleet, which includes up to 24 electric buses and 47 Compressed Natural Gas buses. In addition to having facilities for fueling and charging, there will also be new areas for cleaning and maintaining the buses.
The new Depot District Garage will free up land at the site of the old Salt Lake Central Garage for a potential mixed-use Transit Oriented Development that would help address Salt Lake City’s housing shortage. The nine-acre redevelopment project is anticipated to bring hundreds of new apartments, shops, offices, museums, green space and a public market to an economically challenged neighborhood.
The new central district depot covers 118,088 square feet. The maintenance garage itself takes up approximately 70,000 square feet and the outdoor bus canopy area offers another 220,000 square feet of capacity.
To make way for the new garage, UTA repurposed a century-old railroad site, once used as Denver & Rio Grande Western’s locomotive shop, into the state-of-the-art maintenance and fueling facility. As UTA built the new garage, special care was taken to identify, protect and preserve artifacts from the historic D&RGW railroad building.
Ground was broken for the new bus facility in 2018 and demolition of the long- abandoned locomotive shop began in 2019. Once the building had been razed, Big D Construction went to work installing the infrastructure for the Depot District, making sure to follow proper protocols.
The Depot District Garage is the fruition of years of effort and support from previous Utah congressional delegations. Led by the late United States Sen. Orrin Hatch, a five- year search for funding led to $36 million of federal funds targeted for the Salt Lake City Depot District Clean Fuels Tech Center. Combined with $16 million of appropriations from the state of Utah, UTA had enough funding to move forward and complete the project.
The Depot District Garage had been identified by both the Wasatch Front Regional Council and UTA as a critical need to significantly expand public transportation services in Salt Lake and Davis Counties while providing the ability to increase UTA’s fleet of clean-fuel buses.
