Municipal Transportation Agency - Regular Meeting

I'm now calling the June 16, 2026 regular meeting of the Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors and Parking Authority Commission to order. Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

Directors, are there any changes to the minutes? We'll now open public comment for item four, the minutes, for two minutes each.

Thank you. Public comment is closed. May I have a motion and a second?

Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you. Please call the next item. Places you on item number six, the director's report.

I would like to just chime in here. Ms. and Mr. Goh, thank you so much for being here on behalf of YTAB. I know from experience that it's actually a pretty large group of but here we are a week or two into the summer vacation, so I completely understand. And also, you know, and I also understand from the appearance of your group members several months ago, that a really great showing came during the school year, which is pretty incredible. And I just want to thank you so much for all your work on behalf of the board. It really adds to what we get to do here. every month to help the agency and

Thank you, Director Kirschbaum. Before I open public comment on this item, I would like to remind members of the public that they may provide comment on the topics that Director Kirschbaum shared. As a reminder, those are the special recognition of the Youth Transportation Advisory Board. Is that correct? the full name, and the passage of Measure A and updates related to Chinatown construction and transit impacts. If you feel the director missed addressing a topic, you may comment on that during item nine, which is general public comment. If you're here to speak on an item later in today's age

Seeing none in the room and no accommodation requests. We'll now close public comment. Colleagues, do you have any questions for Director Kirschbaum? All right. Well, thank you for your report, Julie. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Raising through the agenda. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

We will now open public comment for general public comment.

No, any issue that is not already being heard today.

We will now close public comment. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you. We will now open public comment for the consent calendar for two minutes each.

We will now close public comment for item 10, the consent calendar. Colleagues, may I have a motion and a second to approve? So moved.

Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

Thank you, Ms. Johnson. Thank you, Ms. Hari. I'm going to take public comment on this item. But before I do, I would like to ask Director Hemminger to update the board from his perspective as a member of this committee that has approved this item to send to us for our approval. and take another opportunity to thank you, Steve, for serving on the committee. I really appreciate it. We all do.

It was my pleasure, Madam Chair. You've heard about this efficiency study at a couple of different meetings. And so today is the action item. And it might help for me just to give you a little color commentary. And the overall approach here, I think, that the legislature laid down in the statute is that it authorizes the creation of new revenue if the voters approve, but it also seeks to institute reforms to the revenue that we already collect and try to improve the customer experience, again, with the revenue that already exists. I would highlight four particular areas of activity. The first,

Thank you, Director Hemminger. I will now open public comment for this item for two minutes each.

No other speakers. Thank you. Public comment for this item is now closed. Colleagues, questions, concerns?

Very good. Very good. Secretary Silva. Secretary Silva.

Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you. I will open public comment for this item now for two minutes each.

Thank you. Next speaker. I also would like to just ask members of the audience to minimize any disruptions. If you would like to express agreement or disagreement with a speaker, you can show us visually, maybe with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It's important for us to maintain order. Thank you.

Madam. The issue is you're putting a lot of these young women at risk. Thank you.

Ma'am, your time is up. Thank you. For fairness, everyone gets the same amount of time. Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Thank you. I would like to thank members of the public today for coming and sharing your experiences with us. We take what you have to say very seriously. And I would like to acknowledge that the matters that we are discussing today touch on very serious criminal matters which are under the purview of the San Francisco Police Department and that SFMTA has endeavored to be of assistance to the police department in this issue. We do have a representative from the San Francisco Police Department here today. And I wonder if you might share a few words with us.

Thank you, Lieutenant Flores. Are you in Station to Admission Station, or is there a special address?

I'm familiar with it. Well, thank you for your work, and thank you very much for being here today. Clearly, there's a great need for the residents that are impacted in this area. I think SFMTA is glad to assist any way that we can. But the spillover concerns, I recall, were raised when this was initially brought to us. And indeed, that was correct. If you could stand by, my colleagues may have questions for you or for Mr. Wu. And I'd like to ask Director Kahina if you have thoughts.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for your presentation, Brian. And Lieutenant Flores, thank you so much for being here with us today. I appreciate all the public comment we heard today. I know it's a very difficult situation. It's not easy on a Tuesday afternoon to come out here and be vulnerable with us and share what you shared with us today. So I just really want to appreciate all of you for taking the time to do this. It does seem, based on public comment, I could completely appreciate that this intervention has improved the quality of life for some folks, but not for all. And I heard from you,

So it occurs to me that there's a prevalence of violent acts that are related to sex work and are not related to sex work. And I wonder, and I heard this a lot in public comment, that there's this desire to try to understand if there is a multi-agency and maybe even a multi-departmental approach within the SFPD to explore solutions for the area. Within the last 18 months, have you all Conversed about that, thought about that. Is that something that has come up for you all?

Brian, I don't know if you could step up for a little bit. So curious to understand how we've also been working with Department of Emergency Fire, different emergency responsiveness in that area. I did hear that also come up for some folks. So just want to see if over the last 18 months you've seen something there or something noteworthy or we've made changes to try to accommodate those issues or address those issues.

Operationally, how are we getting feedback from the community?

Are we doing any surveying? Are we working with key community partners? Any of that going on?

All right. OK. What I'm seeing just from public comment presentation, also hearing from you fine gentlemen, is that there is a real need for us to have better metrics to evaluate this pilot program. And what I'm also hearing is that We did actually have in our the last time that we approved this a request for a six-month evaluation report and a presentation to this board and and that also did not occur and so I I do have some reluctance to approve this as is, given all of that. And so I do have an amendment to propose to this legislation. I'm happy to read it into the record if that works for

Thank you, Vice Chair Kahina. Director Hemminger?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Lieutenant, I just had a couple of questions for you. Have we done this anywhere else in the city, closed a street?

We've talked quite a bit about the infrastructure solutions out there. We haven't talked much about... the role that you would play, the PD would play. And just for starters, do you have a set patrol schedule that you're out in that neighborhood visible?

And finally, I have to say I'm quite sympathetic to what we've heard from the other neighbors. You're fixing the problem over there and you're dumping it on us. Do you have any advice for us about where do we draw that line and when do we stop?

So we're going to keep chasing the problem around town.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Director Heminger. Director Hinzey.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Sort of doubling down on Director Heminger's line of thought here, Lieutenant Flores, do you have like a specific plan to deal with the overflow folks that are now being displaced? Do you have like a plan for the displacement? So, yeah.

And your current level of staffing, are you able to do the level of enforcement in those displaced, affected areas that is you consider sufficient, or do you feel like you need to step that up?

You'll continue at the at that current enforcement level you think I'm going to keep trying to keep trying you're going to keep trying okay I I think colleagues I think the the where I'm at is I think the the testimony in favor of keeping the current barricades was compelling we've heard from several residents And I think that their testimony regarding their own quality of life issues and how these barriers helped to address those are compelling. I am, like the rest of my colleagues, particularly Director Kikina, very sympathetic to the sort Displacement issues, this is one of the chronic issu

Thank you, Director Hensley. Thank you, Director Hensley. Director Felder. Director Felder.

Thank you. Thank you. I am generally going to make comments that are consistent with what my colleagues have said. I have a couple of questions for Director Kahina about her amendment. But overall, the two issues I think that I'm most concerned about are A, how we address the potential displacement issues and whether or not there is an opportunity to be incremental in terms of what we approve today such that we can address those issues effectively. The second thing is just in terms of infrastructure. A number of people have touched on the infrastructure and how it's important that that infrast

Right, so it anticipates approval and it establishes a request from SFMT and SFPD to create evaluation metrics for the program. So currently there are no real evaluation metrics that we're using to evaluate if this is a success or not. We're really just relying on being responsive to a handful of community feedback that we're getting. And there is no real way for us to get – there's no feedback loop that we have with the community right now. And so if we are to approve this in the future, I really do think we need to make data-driven decisions. This is not a data-driven decision right now. We

And I guess my request would be that we be clear about why we have those metrics and that we be clear that part of the intent of having these metrics is so that we can evaluate whether we should be making modifications to the infrastructure and modifications to the extent of the program. Because that would address the two issues that we've heard testimony about.

Yeah. Would you like to add to the language? Or is this a, sorry, Susan?

Yeah, I think that's fine. I think as long as it's that broad, we can obviously include those qualifications within our assessment.

Thank you very much. Before I ask Director Henderson to weigh in, I would just like to maybe provide a little bit of context to your amendment, which is that, just in case it's not clear, The SFMTA board has authority to direct SFMTA staff to take certain actions and in this amendment we are doing that by directing our staff to provide us with some metrics regarding the success of this. program continuing. We do not have authority over SFPD and that is why the language is to urge SFPD to engage with the community and provide us with some metrics that will help us in the future. I would I have

I think for the purposes of this particular legislation, the door is open right now to work with community to establish those metrics. So I don't want to kind of force you to pick one or two. I think that the effort is to try to see with the community what are the metrics that resonate the most. with folks that have been directly affected by the crime issues that have been occurring in these two streets, and then developing metrics accordingly. And so it could be something that is squarely into some of the purview that you have, but it could be something that's within the purview of your other

OK. And perhaps, I don't know, Julie, if you all have worked with SFPD on other similar sort of projects. And perhaps you could speak to kind of the process that you all take when you're establishing these sort of metrics that go cross-departmental, these cross-departmental metrics or evaluation points that you guys have.

It's OK. The point that I wanted to emphasize was just the inclusion in the evaluation, the spillover impacts. And so it sounds like we're covered with the amendment. So I'm OK.

Okay. And I would just say that the thing that's still lingering as a question is the timing for evaluations. And if we approve this today, it's an 18-month extension. And the evaluations, there's been talk of a six-month evaluation that was supposed to occur with the last extension or the implementation and extension from CAP Street. When should we expect an evaluation? It seems to me that 18 months is not quite urgent enough for some of the issues that we're hearing today.

Thank you. And Director Kirschbaum, your comments about the one city approach I think are very apt to this. Director Chen, did you want to weigh in? Very good. So we have a motion to approve as, well, I believe that Director Hinzey's was prior to the additional amendment. So perhaps we need a new motion. And should I ask Secretary Silva, can you just read that one more time with the amendments?

Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the roll. On that motion, Director Chen.

Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you, Ms. Munowich. Let us go to public comment first. I'll open public comment for two minutes each on this item.

Thank you. Secretary Silver, perhaps could you address the question regarding the agenda? I believe the speaker a moment ago was talking about the streets quarterly, which is the next item on our agenda.

OK, so for the speaker who wanted to know about that. That will be the next item on our agenda. And also, there was quite a bit of discussion in public comment regarding the insurance requirement. And I wonder if either Director Kirschbaum or Director Weiss, there could be some clarification regarding that issue.

years to come one of those models I believe is through fiscal sponsorship is that was something I experienced in some community work I've done in the past and I'm it sounds like from your explanation that there are other avenues as well to partner with a larger organization that carries liability insurance and

Thank you so much. And Secretary Silva, do you recall if I closed public comment? I believe I did not. I don't believe you did. OK. So public comment for this item is closed. I apologize for getting ahead of myself. Director Henderson.

I appreciate the presentation and all of the public comment. And a couple of my questions you were able to answer director-wise before I could ask them. Because I think that from what I remember a couple of years ago, there was a lot of cities that would do like sort of public installations in the streets, especially as we were going through the pandemic and some of the protests and things like that. And so I was wondering if there were other cities or sort of best practices that we might be able to turn to to see how they considered the insurance issue, because I do think it's important to to

Thank you. And I have just maybe a couple of logistic questions. One, I'm just curious about the amount of time that this is. Is this a pilot, or is this something that would sort of be kind of forever, unless we change it?

Okay. And so then I would ask that if during that 24 months, if you feel like the sort of pace of the registrations is slow, then I would just ask that we revisit the process a little bit because it may be. this insurance issue. It doesn't sound like people would be not interested, but maybe there's some other reasons that make it slow. And then I think on the flip side, if we see that somehow it's able to take off in certain areas but not others, I would hope that we can look at those as examples to be able to see how we might connect those the areas where it's a little bit slow, connect them

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a couple questions. So if there's a patient safety zone existing already anywhere in the city, is it eligible for this program? Or can you clarify that? I was a little confused.

And then sort of on the vehicular requirements and such, are those just to be viewed as guidelines? Should communities apply if they think they have a painted safety zone or area to be painted? Are we going to be enforcing those guidelines pretty strictly?

Excuse me. The guidelines as put in the staff report does seem to include the neighborhood, so it's good to hear that those are just guidelines. Could you talk a little bit about the community agreement that will be signed, not necessarily the insurance part particularly, but just keeping these in good order and what they might be asked to do.

And then enforcement. I know for like shared spaces, for example, sometimes people snap photos and sort of that requirement. And I know a photo is going to be required for at least additional submission for this program. But are we going to require, what sort of enforcement, if any, are we going to have here?

And then if there is a complaint, are there staff that are gonna be able to go out there and look, or how's that gonna go?

Okay and then just to weigh in on me for me personally on the insurance requirement I do think it's important to have an insurance requirement just to protect the city and we never know when things will happen in the right of way etc so just be like looking out as you know responsible board members to the city it's something that I think would begin to have a weakness test, as my colleagues are saying, as we move forward in the pilot. But yeah, I hope that this is a successful program. I'm not going to hold it up in any way. I appreciate the community worked on it, but I am interested to see h

Thank you, Director. Thank you, Director.

Thank you, Chair Tarloff. Thank you so much for your presentation. I am so excited about this program. I know we talked about it at length at our vision through our subcommittee. And so I just really want to thank staff for being responsive to this request that we had at the subcommittee level where we wanted to find ways for folks to really embrace daylit areas and see them as their own and instill community pride in their particular neighborhoods. And so I just really, really want to thank you all for taking the time to figure this out. We presented this challenge. We said, hey, can you guys

Got it. Well, I definitely want to echo what Director Henderson said about just coming back and giving us feedback and to see how it's going. Would encourage maybe the Streets Quarterly as a space where that could happen. But I'm excited to see what happens. So thank you so much.

Thank you, Vice Chair Kahina. Director Chen.

Thank you, and thank you, colleagues, for your excellent questions. I am left with only two. They are related to the maintenance agreement, and perhaps I missed this, but is there a timeline associated with that, or is it completely open-ended? Are there milestones, or is there any more specificity around that?

So what happens after the year? Because my hesitation around this, frankly, is the long-term upkeep of these spaces. And I know that with the best of intentions, things can change sometimes.

And then I share Vice Chair Kahina's enthusiasm for the launch of the landing page. Is there a schedule for that at this time? Or you're waiting for this approval before you get to work on it?

Okay. Unless there are other questions, I would entertain a motion to approve.

Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the roll. On the motion to approve, Director Chen.

Thank you. I think we are ready for a break here. It's 4.45. Let's reconvene at 5 o'clock. Very good. 5 o'clock.

Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you, Director Wise. Let's open public comment for this item for two minutes each.

Thank you. Public comment on this item is now closed. I would like to ask before we move to other board discussion if Director Hinze as the chair of the committee would have anything to say about this quarterly presentation, but in particular any thoughts to share around the name of the committee that she chairs.

Sure thank you madam chair and I'll be quick since Victoria covered the bulk of it I do think that in order to be in alignment with both mayor lori's current executive directive that is called as Victoria said the street safety initiative and We can't forget also about Supervisor Maldonado's Street Safety Act. I do think for the sake of alignment in our work as an agency and to promote sort of a one city approach here, I do hope that when the name change comes to us, I do hope that you do approve it. I think it shows, like I said, a one city approach. And again, the committee did approve it at

Very, very good. Thank you, Director Hinze. Director Henderson.

Thank you. Quick question for you, Director Wise. I saw that you said that there's going to be some new red light cameras that are installed or made operational. And I'm curious if those are in addition to the ones that were in that first batch. Is this the new ones? Or this is just sort of the last phase of that first, I think it was about a year ago that they first launched.

And so the speed, I mixed them up. So my apologies. But the speed cameras are the same ones that were passed at the state level. We don't have any new ones.

Yeah, that's really what I was wondering, is there potential for us to maybe slow down some traffic using the cameras on other streets?

Got it. And then in terms of the this all just your report seems so that the scope of it is just so broad and very ambitious. And I just wonder, is there you know, what is the. Given our constraints, what are the biggest capacity challenges that you see that would impact being able to accomplish all of this?

Very good. Thank you. Excuse me. Very good. Thank you. And then lastly, just in hearing some of the public comment, I just am curious about about the safer schools. Because I think that we have the Y tab and their feedback. We've had, I think, some school and some folks come and talk to us about the transit side a little bit more when they're coming to provide some board comment. But I just wonder, do you anticipate that you'll be able to work with the community to move forward

And what I would ask is that if there's a way that we can be, or that I and others can be helpful in terms of increasing the level of community engagement to be able to support the work that you're doing, to raise awareness and to also hopefully get some people power behind some of the efforts that you have, then please do keep us informed about that. Because I think that that will hopefully, I know it won't fill the gaps in terms of the staffing and just the folks that you need to do this work. But I think that it's so broad. There's so much. And so I want to make sure that even with the comm

Thank you, Director Henderson. Director Felder.

Thank you. I have a couple of questions, actually, which are maybe a little bit beyond the realm of the presentation, but one is on the camera systems. I've noticed that there are a number of cameras around the city. I mean, I can give a couple of specific locations, one on Church at Jersey, another actually at Lion in Pacific, which they appear to be the same cameras that we use for the speed enforcement, but they don't have the light for flash, are those our cameras? So that's more just a curiosity. And then a second question, and we've brought this up before, but just when it comes to stree

The commercial use of the green. Yes, yes, yes.

Thank you, Director Felder. Vice Chair Kahina?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for your presentation, Vic. It seems like you're doing a lot. And I so appreciate how you're packaging the work around schools. And I think that's so important to just understand. And I think it speaks to your time as the head of this department, just seeing where there's areas where you can, through efficiencies, kind of bring the team together and start packaging everyone's work. So I just want to call that out, that it is a little bit of a manager level, just looking at everything from a higher level view and seeing where there's some connections that nee

Yeah, and I would definitely encourage, as a team is defining different work streams a little bit more and just trying to get feedback from different stakeholder groups, to see what folks are saying about safety solutions and moments where these barriers are more prominent. Is it when they're waiting for the bus? Is it getting to the bus? Is it just trying to get a sense of where these hotspots are in their journey to see if there's anything in our toolbox that could be a solution, or if not, again, the one city mantra right now, seeing if some of our sister agencies can support us with addres

I think it would be great as you work with DPH in looking at those trends, perhaps in a future quarterly, if you can just highlight those for us. I'm super curious to see what's been going on and what's coming to the surface. And again, just seeing at a policy level if there's anything we could do to help with the situation.

Thank you so much director wise I Really appreciate these quarterly updates there. They're very very helpful and each time I feel there's a new element that's just increasing our understanding of the incredibly broad work of the streets division I'd like to ask if you could spend a little bit more time talking about the How the agency is developing in its approach to working with the commercial corridors and the merchants there, I am very encouraged by this new work stream. I mean, I think this has come up just this year, and I really appreciate you and your colleagues for going into it. in a

Well, I really appreciate that work. I think it's very, very important. I think that there's a lot of difficulty in those relationships, and there's been a lot of work toward it, but I would say that the general... feeling among merchants on the corridors is that MTA's desire is to take away parking versus, and I'm just talking about parking, and I would say that that's the chief thing that I'm guessing you hear about. But with these merchant walkthroughs reallocating the curb to appropriate uses for what's actually happening today is bringing more parking back. I hope when that group is conve

I do think people are going to think we're running away from Vision Zero, whatever the alternate name was. We just got to be prepared for that.

Yeah, there was a comment that we heard at our Vision Zero subcommittee where someone did note that, that there is a Vision Zero network nationally even, and that changing the name might signal something to those that are part of that network and that see us as like a partner in that. I want to surface that just in case that makes someone feel a certain way, but it did come up during the subcommittee hearing.

All right. With that concern noted, I hope that provides you with the direction that you needed. So thank you very, very much for the presentation. And Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Thank you, colleagues, staff, and members of the public. We are now adjourned. Our next meeting will be on July 21st.