With the increased demand requiring engineers to not only focus their energies on creating functional site designs, but rather functional and sustainable site designs, the project requirements have invariably evolved into a complex undertaking of balancing costs and benefits requiring the least amount of special case planning.

In order to address these growing complexities, ParkCAD 4.0 includes innovative Smart L.O.T. abilities to both design and report on the sustainable features within your design to be sensitive to environmental factors and for increasing the recognition of these design features from your regional Green Building Council or organization.

Sustainable design initiatives are now considering:

1. Alternative Transportation
   • Parking Capacity
   • Low-Emitting and Fuel-Efficient Vehicles
     
     
2. Site Development
   • Maximize Open Space
     
     
3. Stormwater Design
   • Quantity Control
     
     
4. Heat Island Effect
   • Nonroof

Sustainability issues and green-centered designs can be achieved by properly utilizing the ParkCAD functionality in the context of your design:

1. Minimize Lot Footprint – Reduction of over paved areas by allowing the software’s Minimize Lot Footprint to move in the boundaries for your parking field, reducing oversized drive aisles to utilize the minimum paved surfacing; this reduction should allow for the maximization of landscaping/green areas while evaluating the minimum required parking capacity within the site.
   
   
2. Creation of Custom Stalls – User Defined Stalls can be developed and assigned to parking spaces to uniquely display and report totals or overall percentages of reserved parking spaces for low-emitting and fuel-efficient vehicles (electric vehicles, hybrids, and car or van pools).
   
   
3. Assigning Island Treatments – Island Treatments (Concrete, Painted, and Landscape) can be assigned to both standard ParkCAD end islands or to custom drafted closed shapes (by placing on the software specified layering convention). These areas are uniquely reported for each treatment type, indicating the total landscape area included both within the parking area as well as anywhere within the site for passive water drainage and retention.
   
   
4. Editing Stalls – Planning and designing adequate green spaces within your parking field through the use of center strips along rows of parking or a floating “stall back” island internal to a parking row (by mixing large and small car parking) provide additional areas within which to plant trees for shade cover both to increase water retention within landscaped areas.
   
   
5. Using Design Manager – Saving and comparing Design Manager iterations during early design phases provides an indication where improvements can or have been made in order to increase design sustainability within your parking fields and site periphery.