I received a Review Comment questioning the availability of bus routes on the weekend as follows: "it appears that only one bus route is accessible on weekends. Due to the shuttle timing and availability of less than two daily bus routes, the credit is denied".
The idea is to have connection to transportion during the most frequent cummuting hours. The project has a shuttle from the university campus to a central Visitors Center where during the weekdays it connects to 2 bus routes. However during the weekends there is only 1 abbreviated bus route of which the campus shuttle does connect to. I should also mention that the campus shuttle does not run the full operating schedule as the bus route on the weekends.
The question then is if the campus is open on weekdays (Mon-Fri) i.e. regular commuting hours, and there is a campus shuttle which connects until the bus route stops running on the weekdays - why would the credit be denied because of an abbreviated bus line on the weekends?
Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11478 thumbs up
July 17, 2013 - 3:41 pm
I agree, based on our understanding of the credit requirements, which we have been over with GBCI (see FAQ above), I think your solution should pass muster. I would contact GBCI and try to clarify their thinking.
Matthew Cunha-Rigby
Sustainable LeaderHDR, Inc.
25 thumbs up
July 17, 2013 - 5:19 pm
We received the following response from a CIR we submitted regarding a similar bus service situation at a rural site: "If the project team can justify the existing frequency meets the commuting needs of the project, lower frequencies may be acceptable."
If you can demonstrate that the public transit service you describe above is adequate to serve the project, will enourage occupants to use alternative transit and will meet the intent of the credit, then it should be acceptable. However, it is ulitmately up to the LEED review team to determine whether the documentation you provide meets the credit intent.
Donald Green
Sr Project Manager / Operations ManagerProgressive AE
35 thumbs up
July 18, 2013 - 8:48 am
Thanks Tristan.
Matthew - any tips on how you went about justifying the frequency? It would seem to me that since the university provides the shuttle in the first place they are encouraging the use of the available public transportation.
Donald Green
Sr Project Manager / Operations ManagerProgressive AE
35 thumbs up
July 18, 2013 - 9:47 am
Matthew - can you also please provide the number of the CIR you referenced.
Thank you,
Matthew Cunha-Rigby
Sustainable LeaderHDR, Inc.
25 thumbs up
July 18, 2013 - 6:27 pm
Hi Donald - The CIR was project specific, so unfortunately it is not available as a LEED Interpretation that can be referenced for other projects. You may want to consider submitting a CIR for your project to be sure whether a certain approach will be acceptable...but generally, you should be able to follow the advice that we were given, noting that they "may" be acceptable.
For our project, we did not end up pursuing this credit because our client would have had to subsidize additional transit service from the local transit agency (which was a very expensive annual expense). To determine the adequate service, we analyzed the FTE numbers and shift patterns, the visitor numbers and times they would be on-site, the existing transit routes/frequency and the best possible ways to connect to the wider transit network (schedules, routes/connections). We approached the local transit agency and got into fairly serious discussions about how to make this work, but unfortunately it wouldn't make economic sense for the facility. Hope this helps!