Consultants Win Plum Contracts For Saudi Metro Program

Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

Global firms will manage billions in construction for ambitious Saudi metro program.

Several global consulting firms have won plum contracts for a six-line, 131-station, 106-mile-long mass- transit system for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh Metro Transit Consultants, a joint venture of Parsons Corp., Egis and Systra, won a $556-million contract to manage the first two packages— including lines Nos. 1, 2 and 3 and totaling 104 kilometers—for the ArRiyadh Development Authority. The team will oversee construction of the first three lines, including $10-billion and $6-billion worth of work by design-build teams led by, respectively, Bechtel and Spanish contractor Salini Impregilo (ENR 8/12 p. 17).

Louis Berger and Hill International won the $265-million third contract as Riyadh Advanced Metro Project Execution and Delivery. The team will oversee some $7.8-billion worth of work on lines Nos. 4, 5 and 6; that work will be performed by an FCC-led team.

"The biggest challenge will be building through a thriving city of seven million people with activity at all hours of the day," says Tom Topolski, Louis Berger managing director of Middle East operations. The third package covers 67 km of track with 48 km of elevated alignment, 5.5 km of mined tunnel, 22 stations and nearly 13 km of bored tunnel through some of Riyadh's most congested districts.

Line No. 4, which links to the King Khalid International Airport with a mix of elevated and at-grade sections, includes large stretches of low density, notes Topolski. "The expectation is that [the new metro] will be an economic development tool" in those areas, he adds.

Construction on the metro system is slated to start next year; commercial operations are expected to begin in 2018.

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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