Tech-Notes & Tools: transportation, urban planning, tall building emissions, green building

The Ontario Ministry of Transport has issued the 2012 Transit Supportive Guidelines, a substantially revised version of a previous document. The 200-page edition provides comprehensive guidance on coordinating transit with land use, and has sections on everything from transit corridor planning, to integrating stations into the urban fabric, to complete street planning, to designs for parking. There are 54 sets of guidelines in total. Urban Strategies and GHD were consultants on the project. Click here to view or download.

A professor at Concordia University in Montreal has been studying how the emissions from tall buildings affect other buildings that are in the vicinity and lie downwind. Professor Ted Stahopoulos of the university’s Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, together with graduate Bodhisatta Hajra, used the university’s wind tunnel laboratory for their research. They found that building height and spacing between exhaust stacks and intakes affected how pollution spread, and came up with three guidelines. Their research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Buildng and Environment.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has launched a web-based tool for searching green building activity and trends around the world. The Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG) provides maps and analytics of LEED buildings in different cities, by different building owners (e.g. activities), etc. Click here.