Cupertino Over-development and Traffic Problem by Govind

From: Govind Tatachari
Date: Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 4:55 PM
Subject: Cupertino City Traffic and Transport issues
To: citycouncil <citycouncil@cupertino.org>, cityclerk <cityclerk@cupertino.org>, David Brandt <Davidb@cupertino.org>, Aarti Shrivastava AartiS@cupertino.org

Dear Council members and Esteemed Mayor,

Cupertino has a major over-development-bursting-at-its-seams problem. One clear fallout is the current and future traffic surge which threatens to exceed the capacity of local roads to handle it.

The Community Vision 2040 (CV2040) plan has not covered this issue adequately and CV2040 EIR is somewhat misleading because
i) it is not comprehensive enough and
ii) it does not clearly define and differentiate grades of "significant and unavoidable" rating.

Vallco redevelopment plan will totally devastate city's ability to recover from local transport and traffic nightware. It will also exacerbate and over burden Cupertino's infrastructure such as sewer disposal and crowding in the schools amongst others. With reduction in retail space, the residents will suffer since they will need to commute long distance to shop and the City will suffer from loss of tax revenue. 

Many of the residents think that City council's main responsibility is to address intrinsically local issues. Let us first get a City-wide EIR right before City takes on EIR's for specific plans and clears them.

While today's meeting is specific to Vallco, I would like to cover efforts being made by the City towards traffic and transport issues.

VTA's PDA based approach is inappropriate for certain cities such as Cupertino wherein we have very few local transport arteries which itself have limited capacity.

Also many of us disagree with the premise that if Cupertino does not resort to large-scale office and residential development it will anyway suffer from over-development in other parts of the Santa Clara county.

On June 2nd, the council was engaged in discussing the regional transport issues. While regional transport planning is important, it is only going to aggravate land-use issues. Shifting focus to Regional traffic issue will not resolve the Cupertino city specific (local) issue.

We request that City council to dedicate a couple of meetings to focus on city specific issues stemming from over-development, namely, local transport and mobility, overcrowding in schools and local land-use issues which are the real local issues that merit your attention.

 

I will not be able to present this to City council during the meeting today
but I would like that this email be made a part of the public record.

Thank you.

Govind Tatachari

Cupertino Resident