Reduced Vehicle Trips Is our project eligible for innovation credit(s) for reducing pollution and energy use associated with vehicle trips to the building by taking the following steps: a. E-Government: The City is developing a comprehensive website and will wire the building to allow citizens to conduct much of their City business over the Internet instead of taking a trip downtown. b. Employee consolidation: The new building is deisgned to bring 2200 employees from 12 scattered buildings into one central place. Many of the City employees must now travel between buildings to provide services, such as fixing a computer, or to attend meetings. A City-operated store in the new building will elminate the need for outside vendors to deliver office supplies to separated City offices. Citizens will also have to travel less. For example, to pull a development permit the number of trips will reduce from three to only one.
The general performance approach LEED follows is to identify green designs and then compare them with conventional practice. In the presence of substantial performance gains, a LEED point can be earned. The program consolidation idea solves logistical problems for the owner. The approach would likely be present regardless of whether the project goes green or not. As the effort is considered good practice, and is present in the baseline and design cases, it does not rise to the level of innovation and would not receive a point. The user based, trip reduction idea inherent in the comprehensive website feature is considered an operational improvement. There is precedent for operational improvements receiving innovation credits. The Applicant needs to provide a narrative that spells out the intent; an analysis that shows substantial performance improvements, and documentation of what resulting specific features were included in the capital budget. In this case, analyses showing the reduced utilization and the resulting building modifications would be needed to evaluate the proposed innovation credit. The burden of proof is on the Applicant, and a convincing case would need to be made to capture an innovation point for this approach. Applicable internationally.