Don’t allow your efforts to document the current levels of alternative commuting at your project building overshadow the importance of developing incentives and helping people use alternative transportation. Incentives can take many forms—including, but not limited to, the following:

Employ effective incentives to promote greater use of alternative forms of commuting transportation at your project building.

Some formal programs use a different metric, called “average vehicle ridership” (AVR). This is the number of occupants who report to the project building, divided by the number of vehicles that arrive at the building during a typical, consecutive five-day period. If you’re using one of these programs, you need to convert the AVR value to an RCCT value for LEED documentation. To do so, you can use the following table. These values have been calculated based on the LEED credit requirements, but this table is more complete than the one included in the LEED Reference Guide:

ACEEE offers a free downloadable spreadsheet of all model year 2000–2009 cars that meet the LEED requirements. You can also subscribe to ACEEE’s online database to research qualifying cars. A 30-day trial subscription is $8.95; an annual subscription is $19.95. The subscription is more useful because it will allow you to search the entire database for any vehicle type to get more detailed information on the ratings of various vehicles.

A hybrid vehicle only counts as alternative transportation if it has an ACEEE Green Score of 40 or above. Not all hybrids meet this criteria, so be sure to check the ACEEE score of each hybrid that shows up in the survey responses.

Project teams often assume they can’t earn this credit because the building isn’t located near public transportation, but there are plenty of less-obvious alternative commuting options, such as telecommuting and the use of low-emitting, fuel-efficient, conventional cars, that may help you earn credit points.

Alternative commuting transportation options include the following:

telecommuting;
compressed workweek;
mass transit;
walking;
bicycling;
carpool;
vanpool;
and low-emitting, fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel vehicles.

South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is the air pollution control agency for all of Orange County and the urban portions of Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties—the smoggiest region of the U.S. SCAQMD’s survey methodology to accurately assess commuting behavior is the best available model for LEED purposes.

There are two primary ways you can document your compliance with this credit:

Participate in a formal commuting reduction program (described in Options 1 and 2 below). Use Option 1 if the program follows SCAQMD standards. 
Conduct a commuting survey of your building occupants (described in Option 3 below). Follow SCAQMD procedures to implement your survey.

To earn points, your building occupants must make at least 10% fewer conventional commuting trips than the calculated baseline. If some alternative commuting is already taking place at your project building, the credit does not require you to improve that rate by an additional 10%. For example, if your initial commuting assessment shows that 4% of commuting trips use alternative transportation, you only need to improve that number to 10% to meet the first threshold for this credit and earn three points. You are not required to improve 10% on top of your original assessment.