Hi all,
I'm working on a stadium project in Australia and we're looking at the walkable project site innovation credit.
There are a few definitions which affect the credit (e.g. where a driveway starts/stops) believe affect the credit and would like to see if my understanding of these defintions make sense.
These are as follows -
- All-weather is defined as:
“Usable or operative or practiced in all kinds of weather.”
(https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/all-weather)
This requirement is for a continuous sidewalk (e.g. walkable). So in my opinion a footpath that is usable in all kinds of weather (e.g. hard, non-slip surfaced would be expected for Sydney) must serve all functional building entrances.
My understanding is that this requirement is to ensure that a patron can walk for point a to b in all weather conditions without changing the terrain (i.e. all functional entries have an all-weather pathway to the site boundary). For example, a lady wearing heals would want to remain on a footpath compared to walking on grass.
- Sidewalk is defined as:
“A paved path for pedestrians at the side of a road; a pavement.”
(https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sidewalk)
Additionally, sidewalk width may include features such as street trees, tree gates, planting strips, benches, trash receptacles, bicycle racks, and street lights.
For our project, in my opinion this will include all paths adjacent to the main roads and around the river. Note that the sidewalk width can include the median strip (area between road and sidewalk).
- A driveway is defined as:
“A road leading up to a private house.”
(https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/driveway)
For our project, consider the driveway to be the entire distance between leaving the road and entering the car park. I don’t think we would need to include pedestrian crossings within the carpark, but along the driveway we would.
Kristina Bach
VP of InnovationSustainable Investment Group
151 thumbs up
November 2, 2017 - 10:32 am
I think your understanding of all-weather is fine. My expectation is that this was mainly included to avoid projects counting dirt paths that wouldn't be shoveled/maintained in snowy winter or super rainy climates (as then the path wouldn't necessarily really be available). Assuming that you have a hard-surface pathway that will be functional/useable in all states of your local weather, that seems fine.
I'm surpised that they expanded the definition of the sidewalk to allow you to include non-walking areas (benches, verges, street strees, etc). Typically when I've achieved this credit in the past (as a Pilot Credit), we had to show that the actual clear width of the paved walking area met the minimum requirements. Any additional areas, such as seating/benches or lights, had to be in addition/beyond that minimum walking width. But that expansion should make this much easier to achieve.
For driveway, we looked at just the width of the driveway entrance at the pedestrian crossing along the site edge (in our case, one sidewalk ran around the entire perimeter of the site in addition to separate sidewalks within the site). We didn't include/assume any crossing within the parking lot.