Hello all,
We have a project that is attached to an existing facility at a University. Both the new and old buildings are recreational in use; used by athletics and a marching band.
In this credit we used their showers to help us get the credit, those check out and the numbers come out fine that the showers in the exsting facility can accomodate both building's FTEs.
In our preliminary review design comments the reviewer told us that we needed to accomodate the exsting facilities peak users for our bike rack count. This means that we would have to add 22 bike spots to the project. Is this something we should just do or is there a way to show that they are not necessary? The site is removed from campus a bit, near student housing as well as a commuter lot. Most of the users are the marching band participants and carrying instruments with them, from what I understand. The other majority is athletics. They hold tournaments and instramurals in both facilities.
Thank you!
Liz
Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11478 thumbs up
July 25, 2014 - 6:55 pm
Liz, it seems logical to me that if you are looking at the shower facilities as being shared by the two buildings, you would also look at bike racks that way. If I understand your question properly, I would agree with the review comment. The only alternative I could think of is to somehow designate the other building's bike racks as being exclusively for the LEED building, but that doesn't seem like a great idea.
Michelle Robinson Schwarting
148 thumbs up
July 25, 2014 - 7:16 pm
There are a number of LEED Interpretations (such as #1567, #2422, #3130, etc.) that might allow you to exclude some of the building transients from your calculations.
http://www.usgbc.org/leed-interpretations?keys=1567
http://www.usgbc.org/leed-interpretations?keys=2422
http://www.usgbc.org/leed-interpretations?keys=3130
They all make the point that "it is not acceptable to automatically exclude all transient visitors from these calculations as it is reasonable to expect that some of the visitors ... could potentially arrive on a bicycle..." You would need to come up with a good argument explaining what portion of the transients would not likely arrive via bicycle. (Ex. X% of the building visitors play the tuba in the marching band and regularly bring it home to practice and therefore would be unable to ride a bicycle with the tuba. (As opposed to the clarinet players who also take their instruments home but can still carry them while riding a bicycle.) Or the people coming for the tournaments are coming from other cities a few hours away (as opposed to the students on campus who are coming out for the tournament or who play IM.)
But if you can't successfully make that argument, like Tristan said, you'd probably be left having to mark your building's bike racks as only for the use of the new portion of the building -- except that's likely unrealistic since they're attached.