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Mayor Pulido and Members of the City Council <br />April 2, 2018 <br />Page 3 <br />Those existing conditions include the distance of the driveway from Cabrillo Park Drive to <br />the entrance to •the Xerox Building parking structure, the length of time it.takes for the gate <br />arm to rise to allow a car to enter, the number of cars that can enter in a given period of <br />time, and the actual number of cars that, under existing conditions, queue on Xerox Centre <br />Drive while awaiting entrance to the parking structure at peak times of the morning. <br />That information must then be supplemented with estimates of the number of cars that <br />would be leaving the new parking structure at the same time, how long the wait would be <br />for each car to have the gate rise, and how deep the backup would be within the new <br />structure. The purpose would be not to evaluate the impacts of the existing traffic <br />conditions on residents of the new projects (which is not a CEQA task), but to determine <br />potential impacts, if any, arising from the addition of cross -traffic to the existing conditions. <br />Questions to be addressed would include whether the cross -traffic would unacceptably <br />slow down entrance to the Xerox parking structure, whether a slow -down would add to <br />unacceptable queuing on Cabrillo Park Drive, and whether delays in exiting the new <br />structure would be long enough to cause impatient drivers to take unsafe risks to cross the <br />incoming cars. <br />The fact that the traffic modeling does not address on-site traffic implications that could <br />impact persons on private property does not excuse the EIR from evaluating these <br />inevitable traffic conflicts any more than it would excuse the evaluation of a project's noise <br />impacts on neighboring residents. The point here is that the project's injection of cross - <br />traffic into an existing congested condition must be evaluated. Simply saying "it won't <br />happen" does not comply with CEQA. Because the project will create for the first time traffic <br />that must cross through existing traffic at the morning peak hour, there most certainly is a <br />"fair argument" that the potential for an impact should be evaluated. Absent that analysis, <br />the project's EIR is not adequate. This analysis must be prepared and circulated for public <br />review so that the public, including the owner and tenants of the Xerox Building, has the <br />opportunity to review and comment upon the analysis. <br />Alternatively, the City Council could add a condition that the project's parking structure <br />would be entered only from Xerox Centre Drive and exited only by way of State Fund Drive. <br />This would avoid the potential for morning peak hour cross -traffic, avoid evening peak hour <br />cross -traffic on State Fund Drive, and eliminate the need for a revision of the project's EIR <br />to address the cross -traffic conflicts. <br />