3rd Edition not available on ITE website

We noticed the ITE 4th edition shows 0.17 vehicles per student (average peak parking demand) for elementary schools. 25% less would mean 0.1275 vehicles per student. This seems much too low. For our school with 86 students, that means only 11 or 12 parking spaces, depending if you round up or down. However, we have 15 staff and 10 volunteers at peak periods. Even using the above reference of 0.21 parking spaces per student, we barely get 20 parking spaces! We are scrambling to find an alternate parking standard to reference, but this school is very remote, with no city or county zoning. Any suggestions?

Another issue we have is parking to accommodate events in the gym/multi-purpose room. Has anyone determined how to address parking for these spaces? Advice is much appreciated!

Sorry if this is obvious, but are you reading the ITE study right? Could it mean 0.17 vehicles per student on top of staff parking?

That is unclear... I did notice a clause in the ITE study that says, "For all school uses, it is important to collect data on the size of the building and total number of students, faculty and employees in order to accurately measure parking demand for the site."

The ITE study goes on to say "Additional parking demand observations should include evening hours and when special events occur at the site (for example, special programs or sports field usage). If available, the type of the event or number of sports fields in use should be documented."

Sufficiently vague? They mention the importance of adressing school specific parking issues, but offer no guidelines for how to calculate parking to serve those uses over and above the recommended average parking per student.

I double checked the LEED form and all it asks for is "Number of parking spaces suggested by ITE "Parking Generation" study:"

It then requires you to "Provide documentation showing the project team's assumptions used to determine the total vehicle parking capacity relative to the applicable standard listed in the 2003 Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) "Parking Generation" study. Include the relevant sections of the referenced standard."

Any help interpreting all this would be greatly appreciated :)

NCv2.2 referenced Oregon State code but no longer in 2009. I looked at the OR code and it listed 1-1.5 parking spaces per classroom. I was going to suggest using this as an alternative but it might equate to even less than what you have now (not knowing how many classrooms you have). If your site is to have special events, my suggestion would be to conduct a fair estimate and assume single drivers to an event - perhaps 1 per student - thinking of parent/teacher nights. Then take 25% of that number with the hopes that parking stall numbers will be more reasonable. Since your school is remote, it seems fair assuming there is no major public transportation available to students, staff or visitors. I don't think this would become an alternate compliance path since you would be following the ITE guide for the most part. I hope this was somewhat helpful.

Thanks Larry, this sounds like a fair approach. Perhaps we could use the ITE factor for staff parking only, and propose a reasonable methodology for the multi-purpose space parking needs (to cover sports and cultural events and parent-teacher conferences). We could then subtract 25% of that total parking capacity to meet the LEED intent. Has anyone else tried this? We'll go ahead and submit this credit and share what we learn in the review process.

Hi Anya,Do you have any feedback yet on how this approach was received? How did it work out?

Unfortunately, no, we won't have an opportunity to test this method out. We determined that the approach described above still did not cover the parking required by our client. We are attempting to use the client parking requirement (since it came from a gov't agency that oversees this specific region) as local code. Sorry, our approach won't help shed light on the ambiguous issue of how to apply the ITE Parking Study for schools. I hope someone else can help clarify this for future projects.

Hi,
Our project is located outside of the US, and none of our engineers have ITE parking generation study. We have just purchased 2010 edition, because former editions are not available anymore. LEED refers to 2003 ediion, so probably required parking space ratio is less than the current version. Is it acceptable to use parking space ratio indicated in the current version instead of 2003 edition? Any comments are appreciated. Thank you.

Noriko Yasuhara