Recommendations For Improving Leed Transportation And Parking Credits

By: Todd Litman
Date: August 18, 2008
Source: Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org)

This paper describes ways to improve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) transportation and parking credits. Typical LEED programs reduce building energy consumption 20-60%. Cost effective mobility and parking management programs often provide similar motor

vehicle trip and parking generation reductions, resulting in large economic, social and environmental benefits.

However, the current LEED rating system overlooks some of the most effective mobility and parking management strategies. It encourages practitioners to choose strategies based on their ease of implementation rather than effectiveness. As a result, the current LEED rating system is unlikely to implement mobility and parking management as much as optimal.

This paper recommends a different approach which defines performance targets needed to achieve LEED categories (silver, gold, platinum). Developers would establish mobility and parking management plans that indicate how targets will be met, how performance will be evaluated, and

what additional strategies will be deployed if needed to achieve targets. This optimizes mobility and parking management programs, and responds to changing demands.

What if major sporting events – the super bowl, with world series, your local coliseum could move on this idea and vie with one another over who could empty their parking lots fastest.

Picture the NFL with volunteers manning each row of cars with a flag admonishing their drivers to start their engines as the last row infront of them pulls away. No zippers, no fights over who cut off who, and mostly lots and lots of noxious gases that don’t go into the atmosphere while sports fan sit idling their cars frustratingly waiting to enter a zipper to exit the event. What if?

However, it is unnecessary to wait for a major reform to improve and expand LEED transportation credits; new credits proposed in this paper could be quickly incorporated into the existing LEED rating system.