Doing the Alternative Commuting Transportation Survey

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How to conduct your commuting survey

SSc4: Alternative Commuting Transportation, focuses on documenting your building occupants’ use of alternative transportation modes for commuting to and from the project building. Option 3 allows you to comply with the credit requirements by conducting a survey of your regular building occupants’ commuting behavior over a five-day period. In practice, the majority of project teams who attempt this credit do so with the commuter survey.

It is important to make sure that your survey adheres to SCAQMD Rule 2202 procedures, a set of guidelines that helps you to properly structure your survey and ensure that the results capture an accurate assessment of occupant commuting behavior.

The following strategy will review best practices for developing, distributing, and conducting your commuting survey. You may also refer to the sample survey language in the SSc4 Documentation Toolkit to review a completed example.

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2 Comments

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James Green VP Engineering HInes
Sep 23 2011
Member
21 Thumbs Up

Random Selection of Survey Pool Members

One building's survey pool size was determined to be ~500 out of ~1500 total occupants. Assume survey forms are to delivered to every third person passing into the elevator vestibules (the only ingress). This is the only means of ingress to tenant areas and the point where the tenant flow into the building has become homogenous, regardless of their mode of transportation (note that stairways are locked in the direction of ingress causing all occupants to pass through the lobbies). Is this a sufficiently random sample? How does one account for those telecommuting or otherwise not traveling to work under this scenario?

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Dan Ackerstein Principal, Ackerstein Sustainability, LLC Sep 28 2011 Guest Expert 3067 Thumbs Up

It is a viable strategy James - GBCI has approved the 'elevator survey' in this context and it works very nicely. One thing to be sure of is that you spread your survey out over an extended time period - even if you reach 500 respondents by 8am, the demographics of people arriving later could differ substantially from those arriving earlier (in a building I recently surveyed, financial folks all arrived before 7am, legal folks largely afterward - their survey responses weren't radically different, but they were noticeably so.)

The one down-side to the elevator survey is that you miss out on telecommuters. Just no good way to catch that in the survey tool.

Hope that helps a bit

Dan

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