Metro Willowbrook/Rosa Parks Station

In what might be the country’s best kept secret, sprawling LA now has the third largest rail and bus transit system in the US—and it’s expanding. The Willowbrook/Rosa Parks Station in South LA is now a major transport hub, serving LA Metro Rail and buses from many regional and municipal agencies, with park and ride facilities and bike lockers. It’s a busy transfer point for commuters that needed upgrading, with enhanced connections to the surrounding community.

Clean and refined digital modeling unveiled the strong and intentional design in both the architecture and landscape architecture.

The newly improved 15-acre site is a mobility hub and a community space for transit users, as well as for local residents and businesses. MIG|AHBE worked with Stantec Engineering Services to expand station capacity, improve multimodal transfers, address safety and security concerns and enhance connections to the surrounding neighborhood. The new station design includes 20,000 square feet of buildings, an extended platform, bus loading bays, park-and-ride area, and a mobility/bike hub that facilitates transfers between light rail lines, connector buses and bike riders.

A new civic plaza offers transit users amenities and better security lighting. A drought-tolerant, regionally-appropriate plant palette will mitigate stormwater runoff and support the resilience of new canopy trees in the main plaza. The irrigation system is connected to an on-site cistern to supply seasonal recycled irrigation water.

Because a portion of the site is Caltrans property, the project team prepared two separate design packages that could be cleared for construction on different timelines—which resulted in on-schedule delivery of two coordinated packages and a cohesive site plan.