Liang - Vallco impact on emergency response time should be based on real data

From: Liang C <lfchao@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:14 AM
Subject: Comment on Vallco EIR - impact on emergency response time should be based on real data.
To: "City of Cupertino Planning Dept." <planning@cupertino.org>

RE: Comment on Vallco EIR

Please study the emergency response time for fire protection, police and especially medical emergency with real data.

With an increase of 30% residence population and 50% worker population, the EIR of GPA concludes that
"TRAF-4 Implementation of the proposed Project would not result in inadequate emergency access."

This conclusion is derived simply by mentioning a bunch of General Plan policies, which are often not enforced. There is no real data on the current response time and no data on the predicted response time. No data on the expected expansion needed to provide service to the added population.

The traffic analysis shows that LOS of local streets and freeways would become much worse to the worst level of "Significant and Unavoidable" impact. And yet, the data from traffic analysis is not used at all to evaluate the emergency response time.

Merely reference to a bunch of General Plan policies is not an acceptable way to evaluate the impact.
For example, the following is EIR for GPA Section 4.13. Page 63.

"Because the proposed Project is a program-level planning effort, it does not directly address project-level
design features or building specifications; however, the General Plan includes polices that once adopted
would ensure efficient circulation and adequate access are provided in the city, which would help facilitate
emergency response. Within the Health and Safety Element, Policy 6-8, Early Project Review, would direct
the City to “involve the Fire Department in early design stages of projects requiring public review.....”

"Ongoing implementation of the General Plan policies and the City’s engineering standards would ensure
that adequate emergency access is provided in Cupertino. Therefore, impacts associated with the
implementation of the proposed Project would be less than significant."

This is not good enough. For emergency response time, please study the real impact using real data.

Do not use any personal communication or policies that have not been implemented yet.

Please study the amount of time for residents to reach the nearest hospital in a private vehicle in the event of non-life threatening emergency.

For example, the amount of extra delay in each intersection is already calculated in the LOS study of local streets. The average speed of freeways and delay on freeway on-ramp and off-ramp are also available in the traffic study. Such data could be used to compute the amount of time to reach a hospital from different areas of Cupertino.

Please study the impact on emergency response time for an ambulance to reach a home and from the home to the nearest hospital.

Liang Chao