LOCATION
The city of San Diego is located in Southern California along the Pacific coast, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border and about 120 miles southeast of Los Angeles. As California’s second-largest city and the eighth-largest in the country, San Diego is home to nearly 1.4 million residents and serves as the seat of San Diego County, which has a population of more than 3 million. San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) provides bus and trolley service throughout the city and its surrounding communities.
PROJECT SCOPE
For almost three decades, Tolar Manufacturing Company has been fabricating bus shelters, street furniture, and digital advertising solutions for the city of San Diego.
Currently, Tolar Manufacturing is in a multi-year contract to design and supply transit shelters and advertising benches for MTS. Under this contract, 600 shelters and 1,800+ benches are being produced over the next five years and will be installed in communities within the MTS service area.
“MTS is making a huge investment in its amenities for passengers,” said Paul Jablonski, CEO of MTS. “It is extremely important to us and to the cities in which we provide service that our street furniture is aesthetically pleasing, functional and long lasting. Getting maximum value for our investment is also important. After competitive bids, Tolar products best delivered on all of those attributes.”
CUSTOM SOLUTION
MTS’ transit shelters are being custom designed based on Tolar’s Signature Sunset series. The shelters feature MTS custom branding, solar powered illumination, weather and sun protective roofs, damage-resistant seating, large easy-to-read transit information displays, and architectural accent strips.
AWARD WINNING TEAM
This project is being led by an award-winning Tolar team including project design engineer Ernest Romero, quality control supervisor David Van Eyk, and production manager Gabriel Guzman, who work diligently on a daily basis to provide amenities that create a true Sense of Place™ for transit riders and the residents of San Diego and its surrounding communities, as well as for other projects across North America.
SOLAR LIGHTING
The majority of the Signature Sunset series shelters provided under this contract are powered by solar power. Utilizing flexible photovoltaic panels to charge the batteries, the beautiful San Diego sun powers safety lighting under the shelter roof, the two-sided media display kiosk, and the LED branding strips on the shelter posts. And on those occasional less-than-sunny San Diego days, the project engineers at Urban Solar Corp have engineered sufficient system capacity for the illumination to continue to perform.
