The challenge
The site and connectivity credit in a major green building rating system is worth six points and is among the most data-intensive to evidence. Documenting it by hand means digitising a site boundary in GIS software, generating the 400 m study buffer, counting and classifying every rooftop inside it from aerial imagery, then cross-referencing each nearby transit route's published weekday and weekend timetable stop by stop. A senior sustainability analyst is typically given a full working day to produce it — for one credit, on one project.
Our approach
Built a site context engine that geocodes the project address, takes a site boundary traced directly on live satellite imagery, generates the regulatory study area automatically, and extracts every surrounding building from the open Overture Maps dataset — with floor area, storey count and use type estimated per building.
Built a companion transit scorer that discovers qualifying stops inside the walking-distance buffer around each functional entry, aggregates route-level weekday and weekend trip counts from agency data, and scores each entry against the minimum-service thresholds.
Put an explicit auditor-verification step between the machine and the submission: the automated count is shown beside a manual count field, every extracted building sits in an editable ledger, and a justification note is recorded. Nothing proceeds on the software's word alone.
Outcome
Two consecutive runs against the same urban infill site returned a 137.26-acre study area, 385,389 m² of built floor area and a built intensity of 30,223 sq ft/acre — one point via the combined calculation route. The transit module returned 222 weekday and 200 weekend trips at the main entrance, three points under the minimum-service thresholds. BuiltZERO has since applied the toolset on live certification projects, producing the documentation submitted to the certifying body.