PC 041316 - Laserfiche WebLink

Steve Otto presented the staff report and described the scope, layout, and key elements of the proposal. Commissioner Allen: First of all, I love the design of the plaza and the improved bike and pedestrian access. It makes this feel like a community. The question I have is regarding new traffic data. It looks like in this traffic report we're seeing for the very first time much higher overall trips because we now know the number of employees. So when we received the first report in March, the consultant didn't know the maximum number of employees and they had some estimates on trip rates. Now that we're seeing this, and I'm referring to Table 2 on page 5 of 13. If I'm reading this right, we're now seeing that the net new trips daily are 5,790. Is that correct? Otto: Yes, that's correct. Normally in traffic studies they rely on The Institute of Transportation Engineers to estimate the number of trips based on square footage. That is usually the standard that is used. In this case, the applicant happened to indicate it could have up to 2200 employees in the building which is a higher ratio than you would normally see, so we had that analyzed in the traffic study to see whether that would cause any additional things that would be required. There are a higher number of trips when you use the number of employees but the study indicates that the mitigations are still adequate. Commissioner Allen: Right, so by the way, I'm not holding this up but I think it's an area important to look at. As I think about our meeting last night on the Johnson Drive EDZ, we were talking about what traffic that area would generate which I think was 13,000 daily trip rates if they had a big box store. And I'm looking at this new number which talks about the magnitude of this project which is close to 6,000 daily trips, so it's roughly half the number of daily trips as the EDZ. So it just makes me think there's a lot more traffic that will come into this area and be using the same freeway system that we heard from a lot of folks last night is of concern. It just makes me want to ask questions, now that I'm seeing this for the first time and we have an opportunity to look at it. It's making me want to look at traffic and really validate traffic impact fees and other aspects that we may not have looked at when we saw the project a number of months ago when we were looking at a daily traffic rate of 3,800 or so. My question for staff is, how much in traffic impact fees are we expecting to get from this project and is this something we should continue to look at? Beaudin: So there are a couple of layers to the question that you have. I'll start where I think the start is and try to answer all of your questions. So this is not the way we prefer to do traffic impact analysis. We don't want to try and estimate the number of employees that are going to be sitting in a building. Our preferred methodology is to use our zoning code and use ITE. This is valuable data because what it lets us do is check the circumstances that Workday thinks they will have for this building, but the reality is, Workday could build that building and never occupy it. So what we try and do is build for the ITE standard and what's interesting about this site is, they are projecting a lot of employees coming this way. We think that their transportation demand management program really needs to be stronger than it is. What I would imagine us doing as we get the TDM a little more formal is that we would see some of these trips come out of this pile. But again, I wouldn't want to be looking at employee estimates to generate trip rates and calculate traffic impact fees because just like they have estimated a big PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, April 13, 2016 Page 23 of 33