Dell Children's Medical Center Gets LEED Platinum

BTW, the fact that the streetcar proposal goes to Mueller doesn't change this at all - the streetcar goes that way so that residents of Mueller can get downtown or to UT for their jobs (adding some single-trip passenger load to try to make it more of a success than a mere circulator could); it does virtually nothing to help employees of offices at Mueller get to work, since it won't go to any major residential areas other than Mueller and East Riverside.

shifter, I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. The selection of the site is a choice made by the owner (and the tenant), and the presence of major mass transit service is not a mystery - it's obvious - the major transit corridor in Austin has been in exactly the same place for 50-100 years now.

Assuming that you can pick a site whereever you want, and then transit will magically shift to take care of you, is a fundamentally stupid proposition. Again, bus and train routes aren't like cars. The major bus routes running down Guadalupe/Congress aren't going to detour through Mueller.

And without major transit service, the energy use by patrons will far overwhelm the energy savings of the building itself. Again recall that electricity to power the building can come from renewable and/or non-polluting sources, but the same is not true for the cars that the employees are now forced to drive to work.

So where does the differentiation between the building tenant and owner transition to the city, county, and TxDOT for energy use purposes? LEED for buildings, new construction, and now new development (as well as their other classifications) offers a format for energy efficient and standardized sustainable design.

Energy efficiency awards should continue to stress the comprehensive efficiency of a development and the system in which it fits. Transportation, while of major importance, is a single issue that has far too many variables controlled by many different interests that are almost always outside of the development control. Just because a project doesn't offer full mass transit service does not render its sustainable recognition and design "meaningless".

LEED does encourage urban brownfield redevelopment in addition to comprehensive development density and community connectivity that the Mueller redevelopment entails. These are only some of the factors that should be stressed for this project rather than degrading the lack of transit options available.

Austin as a city isn't doing enough, but that doesn't absolve the site selection process. The childrens' hospital, if downtown, could have supported a very high percentage of workers arriving via transit -- those transit corridors aren't going anywhere.

The inclination of many people (I know you're not among them) to think that we can plop down buildings anywhere and then just run transit to them is quite frustrating - see, also, new trophy library for suburbanites to drive to downtown. Transit is not like roads (just build a new one out here and people can just turn right!). You might get a spur route to you, as Mueller essentially has today with buses and possibly streetcars down the road, but nobody's going to relocate the major transit lines for the sake of one employer or one attractor.

In short: energy efficiency awards should NOT absolve the potential recipient of the responsibility to ensure that their workers have good transit options - we know where the high frequency corridors are that fan out all over the city, and this ain't one of them. The problem is that to people who don't understand transit, saying "Mueller is on two or three bus routes" sounds like they've already done their job.

I agree that not enough focus is placed on transportation in the LEED point system given the high percentage of total energy use consumed by people getting to and from the building. I think part of that is because the LEED point system isn't solely focused on energy efficiency. Part is also probably because an individual building has minimal opportunity to control the ability of people to use transit to get to the building. Site selection, as you mention, is about all there is other than lobbying city government. LEED can't base their whole system on site selection.

USGBC is working on a new "LEED for Neighborhood Development":

http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=148

I think that rating system will focus a lot more on improving public transportation and decreasing automobile dependence.

In any case, LEED is just a tool for encouraging sustainable development, which I think it is doing. Austin as a city isn't doing enough to provide public transportation to areas that should have it and that isn't the fault of USGBC.

If you can get LEED Platinum while being in a place where most of your employees can't use transit to get to work (requiring at least one transfer for most), then LEED Platinum is meaningless, because transportation is the energy sink we ought to be doing the most about these days. Using less electricity is nice, but you can already generate electricity in ways which don't generate CO2 or pollution. Not so much for transportation.