This building is on a boarding school campus. 100% of students live on campus and cannot keep cars there, so they have no choice but to get to the building by foot. We therefore excluded them from our calculation of required bike storage. The preliminary review says this doesn't meet the credit intent and says we need to account for students in our calculation. I don't understand why. My impression was that the credit intent was to reduce car travel. Thoughts?
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Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11478 thumbs up
July 3, 2012 - 4:39 pm
Maura, is this a campus where bikes aren't used? I see tons of bikes on campuses—seems reasaonable to have bike racks.I see your point that there isn't car travel to begin with, so the bike racks don't serve that purpose, but I'm working around the edges of your question and trying to understand why no bike racks?
Maura Adams
Environmental Stewardship Manager177 thumbs up
July 3, 2012 - 4:40 pm
We do have racks, and bicycles are used to a small extent, but don't want to put an excessively large rack at this site just because LEED says so. We have a rack large enough to accommodate the adult users (i.e. potential car commuters).
Lorne Mlotek
BASc., LEED AP BD+C, O+MLeadingGREEN Training and Consulting Inc, Viridis EC LLC
25 thumbs up
July 4, 2012 - 3:51 pm
Hi Maura,
I am just taking a look at a somewhat outdated version of an 'Application Guide for a Campus' that I dug up at the office.
It states:
1. Provide one or more CENTRAL shared bicycle storage, shower + changing rooms that service 3% of building occupants and located within 500m of each LEED building.
OR
2. Provide one or more CENTRAL shared bicycle storage, shower + changing rooms that service 3% of total Campus FTEs within 500m of the building.
AND FOR BOTH OPTIONS:
Provide local secure storage for at least 2% FTEs within 100 yds of the LEED building.
It seems like the LEED reviewer is playing hardball with this credit for some reason or another on your project (It happens to the best of us). I do not think that the aforementioned LEED for Campus method will be of the greatest assistance, but I wanted to make sure you knew all the options. I would respond to the reviewer by stating that you are a campus and if you provided 3% bike racks for this LEED building it should also overlap the 2% local bike rack requirement because it is just a single LEED building.
And as a last resort, if this credit is a LEED certification (IE Silver --> Gold) deal breaker, there are many reasonably inexpensive bike rack solutions. I would even propose a student design/build competition to satisfy the need for bike racks. Let me know your thoughts.
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http://www.saris.com/en/bike-racks.html