Municipal Transportation Agency - Regular Meeting

Transportation Agency Board of Directors and Parking Authority Commission to order.

Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

On the roll, Director Chen.

Present.

Chen, present. Director Felder.

Present.

Felder present. Director Hemminger. Here. Hemminger present. Director Henderson. Here. Henderson present. Director Hinzey. Present. Hinzey present. Director Kahina. Here. Kahina present. Chair Tarloff. Here. Tarloff present. For the record, I note that Director Hinzey is attending this meeting remotely. Director Hinzey is reminded that she must appear on camera throughout the meeting and in order to speak or vote on any items. Places you on item number three. The ringing and use of cell phones and similar sound-producing electronic devices are prohibited at this meeting. The chair may order the removal from the meeting room. Any person responsible for the ringing or use of a cell phone or other device. Places you on item number four, approval of minutes for the May 5 regular meeting. Directors, are there any changes to the minutes?

Seeing none, we will now open public comment for item four, the minutes, for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There will be a warning at 30 seconds and chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time to provide comment on the minutes. Seeing none in the room and no accommodation requests.

We'll now close public comment. Colleagues, is there a motion and a second?

So moved.

Second. Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

On the motion to approve the minutes, Director Chen.

Aye.

Chen, aye. Director Felder.

Aye.

Felder, aye. Director Hemminger.

Aye.

Hemminger, aye. Director Henderson. Aye. Henderson, aye. Director Hinze. Aye. Hinze, aye. Director Kahina. Aye. Kahina, aye. Chair Tarloff. Aye. Tarloff, aye. Thank you. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Please call the next item. Places you on item five, communications. I have none. Thank you.

Please call the next item.

Places you on item number six, the director's report.

Thank you, Chair Tarloff. Directors, I'd like to invite our acting director of safety, Oliver Guida, to do some recognitions. Oliver, come on up.

Good afternoon, board. I believe this is my first time speaking to you all in this capacity. I'm the acting safety director, Oliver Guida. And there's been some change afoot in the safety division with Melvin retiring and me coming in the acting role. But today, we're recognizing two individuals that have been for multiple decades in the safety division. The first one is Susie Nakaguchi. She retired after nearly 30 years of service. She quietly retired and is not here today. But we wanted to recognize her for her continued support over 30 years within the safety division. And today, we do have also Rita Donahue, who's here. And she has a very large fan club. Rita had worked with AT&T for over 35 years. She has 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She's been with the safety division for two decades. And she is a leader amongst the staff that are there doing the administrative work. She was instrumental when we transitioned our safety data tracking platform from TransitSafe to Inalex. But I'll turn the mic over to Rita.

I just want to say thank you for the presentation and the honor just to be here today. I just want to say thank you.

We wanted to recognize Rita with the certificate of appreciation signed by Julie Kirschbaum and the chair of the board.

So congratulations.

On behalf of the board, I would just like to say thank you so much for your years of service. It's truly wonderful to see the agency recognize all of the people who have devoted themselves to the work of the agency. And congratulations, and I wish you a very happy and long retirement.

I was like, I know. All right.

Directors we're gonna move on with the rest of our reports and first and foremost I want to talk about parking garage reservation systems and a new parking meter app. So I'd like to tell you that we just expanded a new online parking reservation system to most city-owned parking garages and When you reserve with our online system, you're guaranteed a parking spot at one of our SFMTA garages. You can, on a drop-down menu, choose them from your list. Very convenient if you're going to the opera at the performance arts garage, for example. So that's where we first piloted, and we just received an incredible amount of positive feedback. People can learn more in reserve parking spot at sfmta.com forward slash reserve parking. That's sfmta.com forward slash reserve parking. I also want to mention and remind everyone that we now have two parking payment options for paying at metered parking spaces throughout the city. Those two apps are called ParkMobile and Hotspot. They let drivers pay for meters and manage time from their phones via the app, web browser, or by calling a toll-free number that's available on our website. Both of these apps send expiration reminders to help drivers avoid parking tickets. So when your meter is about to run out, you can set it that it vibrates in your pocket, something I find helpful. and are actually widely used throughout the United States and Canada and other places in the Bay Area. So some of you might already have those apps on your phone. The parking app we previously had a contract with, Paid by Phone, will be phased out later in May. So I want to encourage everybody who is driving and parking to download the new apps and start using them before then. And of course, it goes without saying that people can still pay their meters by cash, credit card, and other options. The next item on today's director's report is Fix-It Week. Yesterday was the first day of our second Fix-It Week for 2026. During Fix-It Week, we close the subway early, so teams have more time to perform essential subway and rail infrastructure work. From Monday, May 18, through Thursday, May 21, the Market Street subway between Embarcadero and West Porio stations will be closing at 9.30 p.m. of course bus shuttles will replace trains serving all stops on market street from 9 30 through the normal end of train service at midnight alba service and t train service will remain unchanged so while the subway is closed we're replacing overhead wires and supports repairing stations improving lighting inspecting and cleaning chains and cleaning tracks. We're also doing work that will support the future of the train control upgrade project, which will modernize the Muni Metro technology and improve subway efficiency. Fix-It Week projects improve the rider experience by making Muni Metro faster, cleaner, safer, and more reliable, and we've certainly seen that in the data. For more information, see our Fix-It Week webpage at sfmt.com forward slash Fix-It Week. Now on to Senate Bill 63, Financial Efficiency Review. As you may recall, Senate Bill 63, also known as Connect Bay Area Act, requires an independent financial efficiency review of AC Transit, BART, Caltrain, and Muni as a condition of regional transit funding framework. The review was conducted by an independent consultant team on behalf of MTC and documents the many cost-saving strategies our agency has taken since 2020. These add up to about $250 million in operating cost savings. The report identifies a set of opportunities that would deliver a comparatively high impact for riders and or the agency's bottom line and are feasible to implement within the next several years. The report also lays out initial steps that will position Bay Area transit agencies for successful implementation of longer term reforms that may take more than three years to fully implement and fully realize. The final Phase 1 report has been submitted to the SB 63 Financial Efficiency Review Independent Oversight Committee. Mouthful, the body charged under statute with review and approving the report, and Director Heminger, of course, you represent us on that committee. The Independent Oversight Committee is scheduled to consider the final report for approval later this month. May 22nd is the meeting. Actually, it's Friday. And following that action, we will return to this board on June 16th to seek adoption of the early action policies identified in the report that the MTA will pursue. This work is consistent and reinforces the agency's larger ongoing efforts around financial sustainability and creating a culture of efficiency. The review is in many ways an external validation of the path that we have already been on for quite some time, and the June 16th action will be an opportunity to formalize our commitment and the next set of steps. And then I want to touch on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month cable car ride. Very exciting. We're decorating one of our cable cars in honor of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which is this May. We're excited to honor the AAPI community in San Francisco and all of our AAPI employees. Tomorrow, May 20th, this cable car will depart from the cable car kiosk on Hyde and Beach Streets near Fisherman's Wharf for its inaugural ride. And the event begins at 2 p.m. and the ride is at 2.30. It's leaving for Union Square. So I want to especially thank the AAPI Heritage Foundation president, Claudine Chang, and community leader, Rose Chang, for partnering with us on this inaugural event. It was a great idea. So we'd love for members of the board to join us for the special cable car ride, and then the car will be in regular service for all the public to enjoy it all throughout the month of May. And that concludes my director's report.

Thank you very much, Director Wise. Before I open public comment, I would like to remind members of the public that they may provide comment on the topics Director Wise addressed. Those were the special recognition of staff, parking garage reservation system, and parking meter apps. the May 18th through 21st Fix-It Week, SB 63 Financial Efficiency Review, and the AAPI community cable car ride on May 20th. 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 agenda, please wait to make your comment until that item is called. With that, public comment on the director's report is now open for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There'll be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers in the room can come up to the podium at this time to provide comment on the director's report. I'm seeing none in the room, but we do have an accommodation request. Speaker, you have two minutes.

This is Herbert Weiner. I really have nothing to add on this item. Thank you.

Thank you. No other speakers?

Thank you. Public comment is now closed. Director Hemminger, may I call on you to share more with us about the SB63 committee that you serve on? Thank you very much.

Thank you, and thanks to Victoria for getting all the groundwork done. And I'll just make a couple of comments. As she indicated, one of the major tasks of this effort was to validate whether the transit operators were saving the amount of money they said they were saving. And in fact, that has been validated by this review. And the numbers range from 76 million for Caltrain all the way up to 516 million for BART. The MTA is in between at around 300, although I thought I heard you say a different number. So we'll have to coordinate after the meeting is over. But it's a very large number of savings, which is the important point to make. The report also includes a series of early action strategies which go beyond what the agencies have done during and now post the pandemic. And I think I could group them into really two major categories. There's a lot of detail in this report that would be worth your while if you've got some time to burn. But the first one is really for the two bus operators who are part of the review, AC Transit and the MTA here, although I know we also run rail service. But the opportunity here is to deal with an issue that has, I think, bedeviled us for some years now, and it's too bad Julie's not here. She went through the wars on this, and that is trying to get some kind of loosening or deferral of the zero-emission bus mandate of the California Air Resources Board. Nothing comes for free. And the trade-off here is if we were to reduce or defer that requirement, it would save us a bunch of money because we're getting out of the strategy precious little money for very significant cost uh... in terms of acquiring these electric buses and as you know we run a lot of buses that have been completely clean for years uh... and we're trying to squeeze the last little bit out of the orange uh... and the question we've raised for years now is whether it's really worth the squeeze. So that's one thing. Obviously, we would need cooperation from the state, because where we would gain a cost savings, they would lose some urgency and some schedule. And I'm sympathetic to that. I think this board is, and our board of supervisors has been a leader on these kinds of strategies. But at some point, you've got to wonder whether we're chasing our tail a little bit. I think for the rail operators, BART and Caltrain, the biggest opportunity for BART is to realize the potential from its property holdings. I think there was in the legislature in passing this bill a sense that there was a lot of real estate just dying to be developed. And we just needed to say go, and there we could go. And it's not, as you all know, from the Potrero yard. It's not that simple at all. But the idea here, BART by far has the most property, and they have been staffing up. But what I worry about, and I'm going to bring this up at our meeting on Friday, is even though this is admittedly a longer-term strategy, it may be that the market is swinging our way in the next few years, and we need to be ready for it. In my opinion, if we've made a mistake, it's that we're not ready when – the development opportunities are ready. And by the time we get through all the red tape, We've lost the opportunity. So that, I think, is really BART's big mission. And let's see how well we can talk them into it. The other one on Caltrain, and as you know, I sit on that board by virtue of your appointment as well. Caltrain, as you know, has gone through a multi-billion dollar project to upgrade their system from diesel to electric. And they are just now scratching the surface of what the real benefits for that will be. Just as an example, Right now, the railroad is generating excess power. And it'd sure be nice to be able to sell it to somebody. And we're not there yet. We have a lot of cooperative partners on the peninsula where a lot of these generators are. But we've got a lot of work to do. But the good news is there's still a lot of gain to be made there. In a way, it's sort of the opposite of the zero emission bus mandate because we've got more to do. And finally, as Victoria mentioned, this is phase one of the study, which is scheduled to wrap up this week and then get back to the boards for their ratification. But the second phase of the study only happens if the voters approve the regional revenue measure. Although I would say if the revenue measure fails, we'll be turning over every rock we can find to find additional cost savings and control costs. But let's not think too long about that subject and just hope for the best. So, Madam Chair, that's my report. And as Victoria indicated, it will be back before this board next month.

Thank you. That's extremely helpful, Director Hemminger. Are there any other comments or questions from the board on the director's report? Very good. Secretary Silva, can you please call the next item?

Directors, that places you on item number seven, the Citizens Advisory Council report.

Good afternoon, directors. Good to see you again. I was not at the meeting this month, but in my absence, I did pass one recommendation. And this was in regards to the high injury network presentation that was given at the May meeting. The SFMTACAC recommends that the agency evaluate protected bike lanes on 9th and 10th streets in SOMA to close these crucial gaps in the street safety in street safety on the high-injury network. To curb sidewalk riding and riding against traffic flow, we recommend bidirectional bike lanes. So a bit of a niche recommendation, admittedly, but there's been longstanding concern on the CAC about safety for bike riders in South of Market. I also wanted to thank Chair Tyerloff for coming to address the CAC at our meeting this month. And I would extend, again, to all of the members of the board to attend a meeting. We have a lot of new members who are very interested in serving. And it would be great to hear from you how we can best provide direct input from the public to the decision making that you do here.

Thank you so much, Chair Leifer. Before I move to Director comments and questions, I would like if staff could maybe provide some context for the recommendation. in SOMA and bike infrastructure would be very helpful. Victoria, would you be able to do that?

Of course. Thank you, Chair Tarloff. Thank you, Chair Leifer, for your recommendation and for all the work of the CAC. We very much care about the bicycle infrastructure and safety generally in SOMA because, of course, the street network is connected to the freeway and is in a high-injury network, many of the streets. We do have good bike infrastructure, if you think about it, going from the waterfront, like on 2nd Street, on 7th and 8th. On 5th, we do have infrastructure, bike infrastructure. It is not protected, but I want to say yet, because we do have general obligation funding from the 2024 bond that we will be using to harden the existing bike lane on Fifth Street. So we're just at the beginning phases of designing that. We have additional money in that geo bond for additional potential bicycle facilities in Soma as well. So we're looking at it. And then, of course, we have the east-west route, and we're going to finish the Folsom bikeway in short order at the end of this month. So there's quite a bit of bike activity that, or facilities, frankly, that are already there, but we know that's not enough. So we're working on additional ones, and we have funding to do that. And then on top of that, something to mention is we have Prop L funding for some arterial traffic calming project, which we could use to take a look at some of the safety issues that the CACA is talking about.

Great.

Thank you. That's very helpful. Why don't we go to public comment first, and then, Chair Liefer, I think we'll probably have some questions for you. Sure. Public comment for this item is now open for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There'll be a warning sound at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time to provide comment on the CAC report. Seeing none in the room and no accommodation requests.

Very good. Public comment on this item is now closed. Before I jump in, directors, are there any other questions? Director Felder.

about the recommendation relative to the bi-directional bike lanes on 9th and 10th. Can you just clarify as to whether or not, just given that they're one-way streets, whether the suggestion is that there be bike lanes on each street because in order to get to a bi-directional dynamic, you would have to have a bike lane on each street in each direction? Or is the suggestion that there actually be bi-directional bike lanes on each street?

I would assume that they mean bi-directional bike lanes. on each street.

OK. And could we just get some clarification from staff as to what the best practice typically has been in the city relative to that?

Yes. I mean, it depends on the situation. It depends on the street, right? So when we're building Folsom Street, it's going to be bidirectional. And you're going to be able to then, off of Folsom, for example, go on the north side on 7th and turn right on 8th to use those existing facilities. So it's context specific of how we're going to design those streets. And not only context specific, but also trade-off specific, right? Because if you're putting them on one side of the street, What does that mean for the parking trade-offs? What does that mean? Do we have bus running service on there? Do we need transit boarding islands? So just the design kind of depends, and best practice depends on what the surrounding network is and what the trade-offs are.

I mean, I just think in terms of also common sense, if a bicyclist wants to make a turn, they're going to make a turn. And they're not going to ride down an additional street just so they can go in the right direction. I think people are going to go in what they view as the shortest distance between two points route that they can do.

Yeah, I guess the reason I ask for clarification is that I do think that from a roadway perspective, bidirectional bike lanes on streets that are one way for vehicular traffic does create a level of confusion to motorists, which I find can compromise safety. And it does complicate our signalization of the intersections quite a bit. And so I'm not an expert on this, but I personally would be interested in learning more about what best practices are You know, not just in San Francisco, but around the world, because I candidly, I do think that in South of Market in particular, there are a number of situations that have gotten to a point where the intersections are quite confusing for all users, pedestrians, cyclists and motorists and confusion. I think can be dangerous. And so that's why I just asked for the clarification in terms of what the specific recommendation is. And then I personally would love to get a little more information about how to approach these dynamics where we're talking about one-way streets

I mean, not having been privy to the discussion that happened, but I mean, I would assume that by a protected bike lane, it would be more isolated from the street. So without getting too into the weeds, that would sort of remove a lot of the confusion with motorists, for example. Because I've seen like in Soma, you have like a row of parked cars in between where the bikes are traveling and where the cars are. So hopefully that would make them a little more out of sight, out of mind for drivers.

Thank you for that question. I'd love to talk with you more about it and maybe actually get out in the field and take a look at with you the specific kind of places where you're observing that to see if there's anything we can do at particular locations and or just generally talk about best practices. Because it is true, it does require some additional signal work. Thanks.

Thank you for the question.

And if I could just chime in on that, what you were saying, Director Wise, about it depends. From the cyclist perspective, there's a lot of variation as well. If you live on 9th Street or you're trying to go to a specific destination there, of course, you'd want a protected bike lane all the way to your destination. If you're more like me, where I'm often on Folsom and some of the other bike lanes that exist going north-south in Soma, I'm very, very much looking forward to that construction concluding, because it's been a long time. And I'm given to understand that it's going to be pretty fantastic when it's done. But if you're just going through, I don't know how other people do it, but I am asking Google Maps to tell me how to go, and I've got the volume on my speaker turned up way high, and I'm just turning where it tells me to, and it knows that I want to be on protected bike lanes for as much of the route as possible. And I'm not caring about like, oh, well, it looks like 9th Street is going to get me there faster. You know what I mean? So it's so dependent. But the trade-offs around parking, of course, are something that needs to be looked at very carefully, and just the question of exactly how much infrastructure is the right amount of infrastructure. So speaking on behalf of the board, we really appreciate the CIC's attention to this. And I would just like to say that it was a pleasure to come and visit your body. And there are quite a number of new faces. And it was really good to meet them. And I would encourage my colleagues to go and to the CTA CAC as well. I think the more our different bodies that address transportation issues, the more that we know each other as actual human beings, the better. And so Director Chen.

I think Director Hinze had a question.

Pardon me, you're right. Chair Liefer, if I may, and sorry if I'm putting you on the spot here, but with regard to our agenda later today, with regard to the 29th sunset, I seem to remember the CAC had that item and had a recommendation for it. Do you happen to remember off the top of your head what that is, or do you have that handy somewhere?

I believe we supported the 29th sunset changes. Okay.

Thank you. That was it.

Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

Thank you. Director Chen.

Thank you, Chair. Hello, Chair Leifer. Good to see you here. If I recall, there was a recommendation maybe a couple years ago about looking at the one-way streets in Soma. Does that match your recollection?

I'm sorry. What about the one-way street?

Maybe about, like, Looking at converting one-way to two-way streets in SOMA for safety while keeping circulation?

I think there was some conversation about that. I don't think it materialized into a recommendation.

Got it. OK. Because if it's the same member who I think who authored this recommendation, right, then I think that- You would probably be right. Yes. It sounds the same. But maybe in addition to this conversation about two-way bike lanes, I am curious about what best practices are around looking at the traffic patterns. I think- My understanding of the research, and I'm not the expert, is that two-way streets versus one-way streets, the speeds are safer and you can also get a very similar or actually better throughput in terms of congestion. And I don't know if there are any plans at the MTA or at the CTA looking at at some of these really white arterials and figuring out how to make them safer, especially as more and more people are living in the South of Market neighborhood and in some of these areas. So I don't know if Director Wise, I don't know if you would like to comment, but that's something to throw out to staff.

Thank you. No, I'm not aware of any at this moment.

Thank you, Chair.

Colleagues, any other questions for Chair Leifer? All right, then. Thank you so much for coming, and thank you for the recommendation. We really appreciate it.

First Thursday of every month at 1 South Van Ness. We hope to see you there.

5 PM.

5.30.

5.30 PM. Thank you. Thank you. Very good.

Secretary Silva, please call the next item. Directors, that places you on item number eight, new or unfinished business by board members.

Thank you. Director Hinze, I believe you have a report for us from the last Vision Zero Committee meeting?

I do. This is our day to report on our external supplemental committees apparently. Thank you as always to Vice Chair Kahina and Director Chen for your service on our committee and to the staff who are dedicated to this work and put together our presentation materials. We had a meeting of our subcommittee two weeks ago. Our focus was really the Coincidentally enough, to Chair Liefers' point, the High Injury Network, where we, and as well as the rest of the the first 100-day action, but primarily focusing on the High Injury Network. Staff gave a presentation on the High Injury Network, sort of what the High Injury Network means, how it is a snapshot in time, and also looking at what has been done on the High Injury Network what it means when a stretch of road comes off the high-energy network and vice versa when it's added to the new high-energy network and so we briefly went over some methodology around that and more methodology will come out when the Fatality report comes out from DPH at the end of the year. Staff also briefly went over what, roughly at a high level, what's going to happen work plan wise on the HIN. Things like implementing the quick build toolkit on the new High Injury Network intersections. We also reviewed the list of quick-growth projects that staff is at various stages of developing for the year. And questions from us as a committee really revolve around trying to get a deeper understanding of the data, sort of at a intersection level, like where do the majority of crashes happen, and really trying to do deeper dives into the data that from the HIN and also doing a deeper dive into the plans for the HIN and the context of how it's used to decide where staff deploys them a lot of our resources but also looking at what and asking about what is the plan for other streets where crashes happen that are not on the HIN because we also were reminded that while the HIN is a key planning tool there are uh safety incidents that happen that are not on the hin so what happens what happens there um additionally we heard um some great data on the implementation of speed speed safety cameras one year and we've gotten we've done a lot of publicity on on bad data Um, and those effects, so, um, take a look at, take a look at that. If you, um, when you have a bit of time, there are some reports published on our website, et cetera. Um, so, um, we did, we did look at, um, when are we going to meet next? And we anticipate that largely going forward, our meetings will be quarterly. But we want to meet in December, in sort of late summer, around when our six-month actions are due. And at that meeting, we'll focus primarily on looking at various metrics that we're going to use to, um, map our progress, uh, in these goals. The other thing we talked about is, um, sort of wanting to change the name of our committee. We had, we had the video subcommittee to align with the, um, sort of the street safety initiative, um, sort of language and how it's being referred to now in the city. Uh, the committee wanted to, um, align the name of the committee and begin referring it, uh, begin referring to it going forward as the street safety committee. Doing the same work, but just under a different name to align ourselves with the with the Street Safety Initiative. So that is my report, and my committee members are welcome to add, and we're happy to take questions.

Very good. Why don't colleagues, are there other items for new or unfinished business? Very good. Why don't we have public comment, and then other committee members, if they'd like to maybe elaborate on what Director Hinze talked about, you'd be welcome to do that at that time. I'D LIKE TO OPEN PUBLIC COMMENT ON THIS ITEM FOR TWO MINUTES EACH.

MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC WISHING TO PROVIDE COMMENT WILL HAVE TWO MINUTES EACH. THERE WILL BE A WARNING AT 30 SECONDS AND A CHIME WHEN THE TIME IS UP. ANY SPEAKERS CAN COME UP TO THE PODIUM AT THIS TIME. THIS IS FOR ITEM NUMBER 8. SEEING NONE IN THE ROOM AND NO ACCOMMODATION REQUESTS.

VERY GOOD. IS THERE ANY FURTHER DISCUSSION PERTAINING TO DIRECTOR HINSEY'S REPORT ON VISION ZERO COMMITTEE? Director Kahina.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much, Director Ahunsi, for that really robust overview. Hopefully it gives everyone a sense of the deep discussion that we had about the high injury network and all the different things that come with being part of the Vision Zero subcommittee. Something I did want to highlight just a bit more, the committee did ask staff to bring forth at our next meeting some more information about different policies that perhaps are acting as a hindrance or could help us be a little bit more aggressive with our goals. And so I did just want to sunshine that for the folks in this body, just to understand that that's something that we're exploring. something that we're interested in just taking a deeper dive in, just so that as we look at our legislative update, we could see if we could start weaving some of those elements in. So I just wanted to make sure you all got a little seed planted in you that that's something we might do in the future, and it's something that we're definitely interested in.

Very good. Unless there are other questions or comments from my colleagues, we'll move to the next item. Secretary Silva.

Directors, that places you on item number nine, general public comment. Members of the public may address the board of directors on matters that are within the board's jurisdiction and are not on today's calendar.

Public comment for general public comment. Item 9 is now open for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There will be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time. Go ahead, sir.

Yes. My name is Richard Johnson. I'm a co-founder of HVSAFE. For the past several years, affected residents and small businesses have repeatedly submitted formal inquiries, procedural concerns, public comments, and administrative complaints regarding the shared spaces closure on the 400 block of Hayes Street. Additional recurring uses, including Head West and now a weekly farmer's market, have continued to move forward through separate approval processes, while our formal administrative complaint filed on April 10th remains completely unresolved. A permit that has been non-compliant for 75 consecutive weeks should not be allowed to further entrench a closure that has become deeply political. We have formally requested revocation. Instead, the agency continues to lay our new approvals on top of sustained violations. Despite that complaint, we have received no response from Director Julie Kirschbaum or the Shared Spaces Manager, Monica Monowitz. The absence of any coordinated administrative process or meaningful enforcement has turned what was sold as a temporary measure into a political project. And I'd have to say, in listening to the board meetings here, we've been talking about cost cutting. This shared streets probably cost SFMTA well over $100,000. And then now we're adding in the $400,000 that's being done for the life study. And I would say that... you need to start doing some type of action, because this could be a cost saver for Muni, and also it could help elevate political concerns within the Hayes Valley community. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon. My name is Pete Wilson. I am a District 5 resident and the president of TW Local 250A. I would like to read a resolution, resolution 170103-005, resolved THAT ON RECOMMENDATION OF THE DIRECTOR OF TRANSPORTATION, THE CITY ATTORNEY AND THE SAN FRANCISCO MUNICIPAL TRANSPORTATION AGENCY BOARD OF DIRECTORS APPROVES THE SETTLEMENT LISTED BELOW, DARRELL STITT VERSUS THE SFMTA, U.S. DISTRICT COURT CASE 1203704. YGR filed on 7-16-12 for $8 million and for other material terms such as the SFMTA will notify certain operations including but not limited to pertaining relief operators to review bulletins included in their outfits rather than at the division providing receptacles at each division to drop off overtime cards, prohibiting discouragement, this is a big one, of overtime requests, but confirming operator's responsibility to request overtime. when warranted, continuing to provide drop-off receptacles for defect cards and unused transfers at turn-in, and providing that operators who experience an unusual situation at turn-in that causes significant additional work shall submit an overtime card. I certify the foregoing resolution was adopted by the Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors on January 3, 2017. THIS IS SIGNED BY THE SECRETARY OF MUNICIPAL TRANSPORTATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS. I'M SORRY JULIE WASN'T HERE BUT SHE WAS HERE NINE YEARS AGO GETTING THE RUN AROUND MANAGEMENT SCOLDING ME FOR BRINGING THIS UP. MANAGEMENT SPEAKING CONDESCENDINGLY. YOU GUYS PASSED IT. MAYBE IT WASN'T YOU BUT YOU GUYS PASSED IT AND DISPATCHERS AND MANAGERS HAVE BEEN TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO PAY.

THANK YOU. ANY OTHER SPEAKERS FOR THIS ITEM? Seeing none in the room, I do have one accommodation request. Speaker, you've been unmuted. You have two minutes. Speaker, you've been unmuted. Okay, I think he might be having some difficulties. No other speakers.

Thank you. Public comment is now closed. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Directors, that places you on item 10, your consent calendar. These items are considered to be simple or routine and will be acted upon by a single vote unless a member of the board or public requests that an item be taken off consent and heard separately. For all speakers providing comment, please identify which item number you are speaking to. item 10.1 requesting the controller to allot funds and to draw warrants against such funds available or that will be available in payment of the listed claim against the sfmta or for the city to accept funds based on a collection effort it's listed under 10.1a in the agenda Item 10.2, approving various routine parking and traffic modifications as listed under 10.2A through C in the agenda. And item 10.3, approving parking restrictions to create a parking space for the exclusive use of the San Francisco Adult Probation Department, permitted vehicles on the west side of 6th Street between Brannon and Bryant Street, and amending Division 2 of the Transportation Code to revise parking restrictions on 6th Street. That concludes your consent calendar.

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

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There will be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time. Seeing none in the room and no accommodation requests. Thank you.

We'll now close public comment. May I have a motion and a second to approve the consent calendar?

So moved.

Second.

Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

On the motion to approve the consent calendar, Director Chen.

Aye.

Chen, aye. Director Felder.

Aye.

Felder, aye. Director Hemminger.

Aye.

Hemminger, aye. Director Henderson. Aye. Henderson, aye. Director Hinze. Aye. Hinze, aye. Director Kahina. Aye. Kahina, aye. Chair Tarloff. Aye. Tarloff, aye.

That motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Places you on item number 11. Approving parking and traffic modifications including bus stop upgrades, pedestrian safety improvements, and relocation and consolidation of closely spaced bus stops as part of the 29 Sunset Improvement Project Phase 2.

All right.

Do I need to share screen? It'll go. OK. All right. Chair Tarloff, directors, good afternoon. My name is Steve Boland. I am a planner with the Muni Forward Program, our transit priority group here at the SFMTA. And I'm here today to talk to you about the 29 sunset improvement project phase two. And I just want to note that several members of our project team are sitting in the third row here. So if you're not familiar with the 29 sunset, I think it's one of the more interesting routes we have for a few reasons. One is it's a crosstown route. It doesn't go anywhere near downtown. All it does is connect neighborhoods. Despite that, it has very high ridership, about 18,000 riders per day, which is about 90% of the pre-COVID total. Now, there are a couple of big reasons for this that you can see here on screen. One of them is, I don't know if this is a fact, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I think there's more students on the 29 than any other Muni route. Certainly, if you ride at about 2.30 in the afternoon, you can experience that firsthand. It also serves four of our nine equity strategy neighborhoods, which, as I'm sure you're aware, are sort of historically disadvantaged communities. So there's a strong rider base, again, despite the fact that it doesn't serve downtown commuters like a lot of our busier lines. So the project itself focused on a few things. And this is just a brief summary. We'll get into a bit more detail. Transit travel time and reliabilities, passenger amenities and accessibility, which is something we heard a lot about. And we'll talk about that.

As well as, what am I missing here?

just improving crosstown travel options generally. I think this is part of this larger trend that we've seen post-COVID, where a lot of our neighborhood serving routes have really... Thank you, Brian. A lot of our neighborhood serving routes have really bounced back strong from the pandemic. Also, You can see a brief mention here of a 29R sunset rapid route. I'm sorry to report that's not part of this proposal. It would cost a fair sum of money. It is something I want to make clear to this board that we heard a lot about from the community, a desire for a rapid service. And I think we've had internal discussions. I think it's something that we'd like to see at some point. Lastly, I'll just mention that this is phase two of the project. Phase one, and we'll talk about this as well, was on the west side of the route. We started there because there was a repaving project coming up on Sunset Boulevard that we wanted to coordinate with. And in fact, we've already made pretty dramatic improvements, I think, to bus stops along Sunset Boulevard as part of the quick build phase of that phase one of the project. So here you can actually see what that looks like. And I won't get into too much detail. This is phase one. All the information is on the website. Happy to answer any questions. But you can see a combination of a lot of different things, including removal of a lot of stops, as well as improvements to other stops. I'm sorry. I don't know why we skipped ahead there. As I said, quick build phase already complete. A lot of these improvements have already been delivered. And we've already experienced about up to a 10% peak travel time reduction in the segments where we've made those quick build improvements.

It's skipping ahead.

Sorry for the technical issue. OK. OK, so let's talk about phase two. This is on the south side, roughly from Junipero Serra all the way over to the Bayview. This map, green means go, red means stop, orange and yellow, pretty slow. There are some obvious reasons why the 29th sunset is not the fastest route. Firstly, about 80% or 90% it's still doing that. 80% or 90% of this segment is on neighborhood streets. There are an awful lot of stop signs. There are an awful lot of stops as well. We do have some segments on busy commercial corridors as well that are a little bit tough to get through at certain times of day. But you can see what that actually looks like. I call attention to the key, where you can see we have an average speed in the single digits. Ghost in the machine. Now it's not moving at all. We'll get it figured out, I promise. So I want to take a couple minutes to talk about the outreach process on this project, which was pretty extensive. So phase one. was approved by this board, and several of you were here at that time, three years ago this month, I believe. Since then, we've been doing a lot of outreach, a lot of project development as well. But we spend a lot of time out in the community trying to meet people where they are through a lot of different means. And you can see that listed here. I won't get into too much detail. I will call attention to That last item there, which is a community survey that got about 800 responses, that's about 5% of the total ridership for the route. So that's a really robust response rate. And we feel really good about that. So here's what we found from that survey. And interestingly enough, this kind of aligned with the technical analysis that we'd been doing. Delays, delays, delays. Delays manifest in lots of ways. Reduced waiting time for the buses. The scheduled waiting time for the buses all day long weekdays is eight to nine minutes. I don't think that would be the top priority for improvement if we were actually seeing a bus every eight to nine minutes. But instead, what we find, and we heard a lot about this, Same old story that we've had on lots of routes in the past. And it's gotten better in a lot of places where we've done this kind of work. But it still exists on the 29 sunset. Long gaps followed by bunching. So you might see a 12 or a 15 or even possibly a 20 minute wait. Also, when you get that, you get severely overcrowded buses. We cannot run our 60-foot buses on this route simply because there are some steep hills that we wouldn't be able to crest without bottoming out the bus. So we sometimes get pass-ups. That's the level of overcrowding that we see, particularly in the afternoon when students are getting out of school. Conditions get extremely crowded. And that, in turn, contributes to delays because it takes much longer to get everyone on and off the bus. But we didn't just hear about travel time and reliability. Every one of these Muni Forward projects, we spend a lot of time talking about reducing delays. In this case, we really heard a lot about the quality of the stops. There's been some academic work you may be familiar with that found that, in general, Muni stops on the south side of the city didn't have all the amenities of a lot of stops on the north side of the city. There's certainly some historic legacy inequity there. A lot of the stops are literally some paint on a pole. We have no seating. We don't always have adequate street lighting. We heard a real desire just to make that waiting experience for the bus more comfortable and convenient and dignified. We also heard a lot about accessibility for persons with disabilities. So the proposal is built around, this is our to-do list. I'm going to walk through the proposals. Hopefully you can kind of see the connection. We'll draw a line from these things to our actual package of proposals today. One more thing from the survey. We always ask this question about are stops in the right place whenever we do this kind of survey. And we typically find results that are similar to this, which is pretty broad support for the idea in the abstract of removing some lightly used stops. If then we end up with distances between stops that are two, three blocks further, people might have to walk or roll an extra five minutes. What they get in return for that is they get fewer delays. They get more reliable service. We get pretty broad support whenever we ask this question. Your mileage will vary depending on your personal circumstances, your personal mobility circumstances. And so we are very sensitive to that. OK, let's get into the actual legislation that we're asking you to vote on today. Two maps I'm going to show you. This one covers pretty much all of the proposed improvements except moving stops around, which is a separate map I'll show you momentarily. So you can see a lot of improvements to the stops in the form of bus bulbs or sidewalk extensions that both create a better waiting environment for passengers as well as reduce delays, because then buses don't have to, or bus operators don't have to pull out of traffic and then merge back into traffic. I think there are a total of 14 in this proposal, as well as a couple of boarding islands, which work in a similar fashion, as well as new and longer bus zones, which are boxes that we paint on the street at a lot of stops. You can also see not necessarily every single location called out, but some categories. of improvements there at the bottom. Pedestrian safety, we want to make sure there are marked crosswalks at all of our stops. The bulbs also, by the way, represent a pedestrian safety improvement because they reduce crossing distances and improve visibility for people trying to cross the street. Better transit signal priority, you know, more improvements to stops in the form of additional shelters, at least at a few priority locations. And the agency now has a citywide stop lighting pilot program. Some new technology, I think you've heard about this as well, that we think has a lot of potential, relatively inexpensive solar powered pedestrian scale lighting at bus stops. And we want to add a few locations along the 29 in response to what we heard about stops being perceived to be unsafe, being dark at night. Lastly, there are a couple of street segments that I want to call your attention to where, in both cases, we were proposing to remove one lane of traffic. Now, in both of those segments, we have two through lanes of traffic in one direction, but only one in the other, right? The reason to do that in the proposal is different depending on the segment. San Bruno, two blocks of San Bruno between Mansell and Paul, so this is in the Portola, right, on the edge of this valley. We have a safety issue, right? We've seen over a five-year period, I want to say it was we found 18 injury collisions. But we've also seen about two dozen muni-involved collisions, most of which are what we call sideswipe collisions. And that's exactly what you imagine it to be. That's an outcome of the lanes being a little bit too narrow for large vehicles, more than anything. So what we'd like to do is remove one lane of traffic. That would allow us to then widen the remaining lanes. Not too much. We don't want them to be too wide. But we want them to be a safer dimension. This would also mean removing one lane of traffic in the northbound direction would have a traffic calming benefit. Anytime you go from two lanes down to one, you take away those opportunities for vehicles to safely pass, or sometimes not so safely, but not necessarily crossing over the double yellow. What you do then is the most cautious driver controls the flow of traffic, right? That's the direct outcome there. On Gilman, we are proposing to remove one lane of traffic, one of two in the westbound direction. That is a leftover from candlestick days, right? That's how you would exit the stick. The problem here is that we've got an elementary school and right next to it a park where we see a lot of double parking. And unfortunately, the double parking is occurring in the only eastbound travel lane. So removing that second westbound lane would then allow us to sort of move the center line of the street over a little bit and create at least a safe space. And, you know, we don't necessarily condone double parking, but a safe space if people are going to double park for other vehicles, including 29th Sense at buses, to be able to pass them without having to go into oncoming traffic. So that's our proposal on Gilman in the Bayview. These next two slides are really just a list of everything I told you, so we'll skip ahead to the stop changes that are proposed. So everything you see in red here is a pair of stops accompanying each other that are proposed for removal. It adds up to about 21. Sounds like a lot, but bear in mind that we're talking about about six miles of route and a total of 87 stops, I believe. So it's a little less than a quarter of all the stops. Why those stops? We have standards. And the next slide, actually, I'll show you as soon as we're done looking at this map. We have a recommended range, a recommended distance between stops, stop spacing, with a recommended minimum around 800 feet, unless you've got a very steep hill and then the standards are a little different, and a recommended maximum that's just a little over a quarter mile. And what we find is the existing locations of the stops, the average distance is below our recommended minimum today. By removing every other stop, you can see in part of the route, all of these stops that we're proposing for removal are among the more lightly used of the stops. We can get that number up to something that's closer to the midpoint of our range. It's still actually in the kind of low to mid end of the range. But we don't want to make changes that are too drastic, that are too radical. We think we've ended up with something that fits our standards, that hopefully finds a balance between that concern about access, particularly for those with mobility difficulties, as well as removing delays.

Move on.

Here you can see those standards. And I just want to note a couple of things here quickly. These were developed jointly with a group called Senior Disability Action that you may have heard of. They also have a number of factors beyond just the distance between stops. So we don't target stops for removal or consolidation for bus stop balancing. If there are transfer points to other routes, if they're adjacent to senior centers, schools, destinations of that nature. The stops that we're talking about removing are relatively lightly used stops in residential areas. Okay, getting close to the end. I mentioned before all the different things we did in outreach. One other thing that I think is important to understand is the process. So we basically had three rounds of outreach. We had just kind of a listening tour of the community, hearing people's priorities. How would you improve this route? Then we came back with some proposals based on what we'd heard in that first round. Right? And then we had sort of a third mini round of outreach talking about revised proposals that are the basis of the recommendations before you today. Just some quick highlights of things that changed based on direct community feedback. We are adding back some stops on Persia in the Excelsior district because we heard a concern that our initial proposal did go a little bit too far given the slope leading up to McLaren Park. Right? We are removing a proposed boarding island at Burton High. That is because administration asked us to come out and together take a look at conditions during pickup and drop off. And based on that, we found that perhaps the need for that boarding island wasn't as great. We didn't necessarily need a lot more room for students. And it could sort of interfere with that kind of complicated interplay that you get during pickup and drop off times around big schools like Burton. San Bruno, I mentioned that there's a proposal to remove one lane of traffic. We would then have some space in the roadway that we could do other things with. Initially, we proposed bike lanes, class two, what are sometimes called door zone bike lanes, the more traditional type. And this is, by the way, something that I has been in previous plans, going all the way back to some legislation approved by your predecessors 10 years ago as part of another project on San Bruno. More recently, in the Portola-Viz Valley community-based transportation plan. Now, at the public hearing for this project, we got a lot of pushback on the idea of both removing the lane of traffic from that community there in the Portola, as well as the bike lanes. The proposal in front of you today still includes, and this is not actually part of the legislation because through a quirk in the way this works in San Francisco, you don't have to legislate parking removal, or excuse me, lane removal, a traffic lane. It's technically been approved as part of our task process. But we're going to look to you for direction on whether or not that's something that we actually want to implement. But the bike lanes are not in this current proposal. And I want to be clear that we're not trying to walk away from the bike lanes. We realized that we need to take, I talked about three years worth of outreach. Unfortunately, I don't think we were able to talk to some members of this particular neighborhood until too late in the process. There was a lot of concern out there that I think we didn't have a chance to really have the conversation with some members of the community. We need to do additional outreach. And so that's our proposal is to defer that proposal pending further discussions with the community. And then finally, there was a stop on Gilman, again, at Third Street going westbound that we were proposing to move across the street. There is a church there, which has its own parking lot. But we went out and met with the folks at the church. They said, we have a lot of funerals here. We use the street parking. It would be a problem losing, I think it was four parking spaces at that location. So we are proposing to improve the existing stop instead. Now, it's in the slide. I think I may have skipped over it. I do want to mention that the proposal removes somewhere on the order of around 36 parking spaces total, parking and loading spaces. There's actually no net loss of yellow zones. There would be a few white zones, one of them in front of a business on San Bruno that had some major concerns about that. That's part of the lane widening safety proposal I was talking about. But again, it's about a 5.7 mile project. And so 36 spaces, you know, certainly less than some other proposals you've seen in this room, right? And that's because we really did do our best not to, we're not touching parking and loading unless we think there's a really good reason. I think the largest impact at any given location would be four spaces. Okay. So I just want to take another minute and talk about what's being proposed on San Bruno, because I think it has been something we've heard a lot about from the community, as well as something that's a little bit complicated. So you can see here what you're looking at. You're facing west. Just out of the frame to the left is Mansell, right? Pretty major intersection. Mansell goes up the hill toward the park, but also an off ramp from 101 at that location. And to the right, you can see Paul. And Paul is how you get from the Portola to the Bayview. So a pretty busy street. There's an underpass of 101 right there. So because there were concerns expressed about the removal of the white zone, which you can see labeled here, we discussed with the business a couple of options. I think they decided those probably didn't work for them in the end. But we are going ahead and including one of those in this proposal, which is what we call a tow-away no parking zone. It's different from a tow-away no stopping any time zone. The difference is that if a vehicle is attended, they shouldn't get cited. I want to point out, too, another thing here. Oh, and the other thing that we talked to them about was a replacement white zone across the street. But they expressed that that didn't work for them. So it's not in this proposal. The other thing that's important to understand, by the way, is that we would maintain space for right turns to be made. There's not a turn lane in the proposal, a right turn lane from northbound San Bruno on to eastbound Paul. But the lane is extra wide at that location in order to accommodate both traffic going through as well as folks turning right. And there can't be a turn lane because it's a tow away, no parking zone. It's kind of a technicality. UM AGAIN THE BIKE LANES DEFERRED PENDING FURTHER OUTREACH THE TRAFFIC LANE REMOVAL YOU CAN SEE THE TWO NORTHBOUND LANES HERE RIGHT STILL IN THE PROPOSAL UM AND I THINK THAT COVERS WHAT'S IN AND WHAT'S OUT CURRENTLY SO LET'S GET MOVING All right. So today's action, I've already talked about all of this, but here we can put some numbers to it. Like I said, 14 transit bulbs, an additional two boarding islands, seven newer extended bus zones, the striping changes I talked about on San Bruno and Gilman, a range of pedestrian safety measures, and all of the stop removals and consolidations, and by the way, a few relocations across the street for various reasons. uh including at mission persia i want to mention that's the busiest pair of stops in this segment and we are proposing to move those stops from the east side of the street where they're on a bit of a steep hill to the west side where things are much flatter hopefully there's a little extra room on the sidewalk for a shelter right um i think that It's sufficient for now, so process. We've gotten pretty good as a program, and I think a lot better as an agency, across the agency, in identifying items that can be implemented on a quick build basis. In a lot of cases, as soon as six to nine months from the passage of legislation. I think in this case, there's an awful lot that we could do as soon as later this year. into early next year. There are some changes that require all those transit bulbs. That's new concrete. It requires a detailed design process. Those processes typically take a few years. I think in this case, we're looking at three to three and a half years to complete that process. But again, we can deliver a lot of these improvements within a matter of months. And so the time to benefits there is greatly improved. That's all. I'm ready for public comment and your questions.

Thank you so much for your presentation. I'll open public comment for this item now for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There'll be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time. Good afternoon. Oh, please use the mic.

Good afternoon. Thank you for having me today. My name is Kevin Martin. I'm a retired San Francisco police officer. I work security at the Blue Beret dispensary located at 3015 San Bruno Avenue. I've been employed there for the better part of seven years, and I've become very familiar with the area, the neighbors, the commerce in the area, and certainly the traffic and the bus lanes and the bus routes. It's a very, very busy area, and we're very pleased to be there. One of the concerns is that the proposal would possibly, would more than likely, eliminate 36 parking spaces for the residents in that particular area, the two-block area northbound on San Bruno Avenue, the 30,000 block and the, I guess, the 31 or the 2,900 block. One of the concerns is that there's many multi-residents in the area. Parking is a very, very considerable concern in the area for the residents, especially because there are many, many multi- residential areas in that particular area. Also, One of the other concerns is that our shop is very community-oriented based. And we do get a lot of senior citizens that rely on the accommodated parking space for our senior citizens, as well as our many handicapped people and clients that we serve in the area. So I would ask you to please consider the concerns of the residents. the concerns for the senior citizens, the handicapped folks in the area that rely on the White Zone that we have provided for our clients. Thank you very much for your consideration.

Thank you. Any other speakers for this item?

Good afternoon, Board of Directors. Clara Mobley, Director of Advocacy for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. I'm here today to express our support for the Muni Forward elements of the 29th Sunset Improvement Project. However, I am also here to share our disappointment that the bike considerations on San Bruno Avenue were removed after public hearing. Mansell to San Bruno to Paul Avenue is the most protected option for people on bikes traveling from my neighborhood in the Excelsior to the Bayview. Mansell and Paul Avenue both offer protected bike lanes while San Bruno abruptly spits people on bikes into a lane shared with muni buses and vehicles for two blocks. Closing this gap would significantly improve connectivity by bike in the southeast, an area already underserved by safe bike infrastructure. The southbound direction is the most harrowing part of this route because of the hill leading up to Mansell, where you are riding a bike in the same lane as Muni and other vehicles. Due to the incline, people on non-electric bikes are going at a slower pace while drivers and muni buses speed around them. These two blocks of San Bruno are on the agency's North Star network outlined in the biking and rolling plan, and they're also on the city's high-end rate network. The project proposes a lane reduction with scheduled repaving next year, so this presents an opportunity to comply with the complete street standard, and by removing the bike lane improvements, it's failing to do so. Please direct staff to look at this project holistically from all the sustainable transportation perspectives and put consideration for improved bike facilities back on the table for San Bruno Ave. Muni Forward projects that improve multiple sustainable modes at the same time save the agency money, prevent outreach fatigue, and improve safety for all users of the road. Thank you so much and happy bike month. Thank you. Next speaker.

Hello, directors. My name is Robin Pam with Streets for All San Francisco. I'm here to support the Muni Forward elements of this project. We believe that all the Muni Forward projects that have these pedestrian and bike safety features built into them are good for all road users. So we really appreciate staff work to speed up the buses and make the roads safer at the same time. Claire said everything really well. I'll just add a couple of points I wanted to add about the overlooking the bike lane and the important connection on San Bruno Avenue here that is in the biking and rolling plan and does connect the bike network in this part of the city. The first is that There are currently sharrows on this street. And I think that when we look to improve the bike infrastructure on this two-block stretch, we really should be looking at different options for protecting the bike lane. The traffic is going fast. Buses and bikes, as Claire said, there's a pretty big speed differential often between the traffic and people biking on non-electric bikes. So ensuring that the design of the bike lane meets the NACDO standards for an all ages and abilities facility when we revisit this project and do that additional community outreach I think is really an important baseline to set. The second thing I'll note is that I think lane reductions absolutely improve safety because they allow cars to travel a little more slowly. However, wider lanes have been shown to make cars drive faster. So if we are widening the lanes, we might be improving safety in one aspect by removing a lane, but we are also introducing a few more factors that could decrease safety by causing cars to drive faster. Any lane wider than nine feet, which I know is not always possible in San Francisco, does cause cars to drive faster and speed. So let's protect the bike lane. Please direct staff to add those options when they go back to the community for more outreach. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon, Chair Charloff and board members. My name is Scott Feeney, and as both a transit rider, a rider of the 29 Sunset, and a cyclist, I am asking you to both pass this project, but also first amend it to re-add the bike lanes on those two blocks of San Bruno Avenue. This is predominantly a transit project and it's a much needed one. The 29 Sunset is very crowded and definitely will benefit from being sped up for its many riders. However, this also provides an opportunity to improve bicycle safety at no additional cost. The two blocks between Paul and Mansell are being repaved and are having one car lane removed, as you heard, to speed up the bus. This creates space for bike lanes without even removing any parking or additional travel lanes compared to the base plan. These two blocks are a critical gap on the bike network. And I've actually had them on a map that I created of, I don't know if this visual is turned on, but a map of bike gaps in the city's bike network where there are small areas within the city's bike network that prevent connected safe routes from being taken. So you see here in red those two blocks. And north of there, San Bruno Avenue is flat, so it's pretty safe to bike on. South of there, I believe there are bike lanes, and also it's flatter. But I've biked all the way from my home in the Mission District to South San Francisco, which is more than 10 miles. And those two blocks were the most harrowing part of the entire ride. There's also been a serious injury crash there in 2022 and a fatal crash, unfortunately, in 2023. So I don't think we need more outreach. I think that we know what the right thing to do is. There's really no drawback. So I ask you to amend those bike lanes into the plan now and then pass the plan. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi, good afternoon. We're representing the Transit Club for Lowell High School. Much of our work in Transit Club involves talking to students about their experience riding Muni. Lowell is the largest public high school in SF and the 29 is one of the most popular lines for Lowell students and also used by students from many other schools. When we ask students why they don't take the bus, they mention a lack of bus wait time consistency overcrowding and safety concerns. It is not uncommon to hear about multiple 29 buses in a row passing students because they are already full or bus bunching where multiple buses are just a few minutes apart followed by buses 15 to 20 minutes away. And this is especially apparent right after school. This makes it hard for students to ride Muni, and many choose to take other means if they're able to.

It is important that all students have a mode of transport they can consistently rely on to get to school and back daily. Knowing of the improvements as a result of the first phase of the 29 improvement project, we are hopeful that this project will encourage greater transit usage among students, improve reliability for those who rely on it, and improve the feeling of safety for students. We are here in support of this project.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any other speakers for this item?

Right. Hello. Hi. I'm an employee of the business on the corner of San Bruno and Paul, also a resident in the area. And being a resident in the area, I noticed that there is already – it's already a dangerous location for drivers and pedestrians. Parking has already been cut down in the area. On the corners, it's been like – it's a red zone now. I think the proposal is going to make traffic flow more worse for pedestrians and drivers. It's also going to hurt our business. We have a loading zone, like a five-minute parking zone for customers that we just implemented. I think a better idea would be to place the 29 stop on the overpass on Paul Gilman, where the 29 going up Mansell is. Just have it across the street there. Those lanes are already wider. It's already an easier way to turn. I think it will reduce the traffic flow, and it will be a safer option. Maybe adding seats in that area, the solar panel lighting that they were talking about, I think that would be a better solution for the area.

Thank you. Any other speakers for this item?

Hi, good afternoon. My name is Kathy, and I work at Bloomerang as a manager there. I also rent in the Portola, so I'm there seven days a week. I've seen what the neighborhood looked like before Bloomerang opened. There were brazen robberies day or night, no matter the time. Older civilians were getting robbed after getting off the bus. Since Bloomerang has been there since 2020, we've lowered the crime rate by at least 90%, and that can be confirmed based on police reports. We currently have two loading zones for our clients and for our shipments, deliveries. Taking that away... will be detrimental. Our shipments, our deliveries, our drivers with products, If the loading zone is gone, they would have to park up the street or around the corner. And the neighborhood is not the safest neighborhood. Products, cash, everything can be robbed easily. And we're talking about boxes and boxes of products. So that's our main concern. And also, when we had construction on San Bruno a couple of months ago, our business went down by 20% to 25%. That is huge for a business that's barely surviving right now. When we brought this up to SFMTA employee, he said very nonchalantly, business closes all the time. And that may be true, but for a city employee to really not care about the survival of a business or a neighborhood really doesn't sit right. And from living in the Portola neighborhood, I've seen so many reckless drivers not following traffic laws. And exiting off of the freeway, they still don't stop. And so even with the bus stop, stopping at the bus stop, they'll try to pass it, cut lanes and all that. So there's a lot of accidents due to that as well. So expanding the lane with a wider lane drivers will take more chances in trying to cut the buses off. So proposing changing the bus stop to around the corner would prevent, hopefully prevent all that. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other speakers for this item?

Hi, Board. My name is Benjamin, and I do contract work for Bloomerang, the dispensary. I'm here to speak on their behalf on the experience I see, because I've been there working contract work for them for about, since the beginning, so about eight, nine years now. I believe removing the lane will not increase safety. It will probably be more dangerous because I see many accidents where people coming off the freeway, they're in a hurry, they will shoot the gap. So if you give them a wider lane, they will shoot the gap at a higher speed. So I've seen people shoot narrow gaps. I've talked about the people that are on scooters and bikes and stuff. If you widen it, they'll take a higher chance at a higher speed. Right now, they're taking a chance at a lower speed because the way it is right now. So if you give them the opportunity, they will make it more risky. And it will embolden them, encourage them to squeeze in between because it's wider. And also, if safety is your ultimate goal, It's best to leave the San Bruno Avenue lanes as is, but move the bus stop and set up on San Bruno. Have it turn right on Paul Avenue. Because there's the Paul Avenue lanes are way wider. Paul Avenue is way wider. And there's already a good example of the oncoming bus stop on the 29 bus. There's already a 29 bus stop. on the other side on Paul. So if you guys do some looking into that, have the bus stop move around the corner, I believe it will alleviate a lot of the traffic issues right there. It doesn't make sense to stop at the corner and to have the bus turn around the corner and make the bus stop there. I believe that would solve a lot of your issues.

Thank you. Any other speakers in the room for this item? Seeing none in the room, I do have one accommodation request. Speaker, you've been unmuted. This is for item number 12.

Yeah. This is Herbert Weiner. I think that the modifications of bus stops are detrimental to seniors and the disabled. And to walk nearly up to a quarter of a mile to the bus stop is very cruel. So I really call this into question. If you want to speed up the buses, add more buses to the run. This has been a glaring problem. The city has expanded in population and more buses should be added to reflect it. So I think that While bicyclists and younger people might find this to their advantage, all parties should be served. And you do not throw seniors and the disabled under the bus, which unfortunately is the practice of MTA at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. No other speakers?

Thank you. Public comment is now closed. Directors, I see that we're lining up. I have a couple of quick questions, though, for Mr. Boland. One is, just to clarify, one of the things that I heard in public comment, if I heard correctly, is that 36 parking spaces will be eliminated on this two-block section that we just heard a lot about. Is that correct?

That's a misunderstanding. It's 36 spaces over the entire project area.

Oh, OK. So that's a very important clarification. And then I think that's the primary thing. I wanted to make sure we cleared up right away. Director Henderson.

There we go. Thank you. I have a couple of questions, specifically about the San Bruno and Paul, and then also that Gilman and Third intersection. But before I get there, I just want to understand a little bit. I'm looking at the past improvement slide. I think it's number four. And I'm trying to understand the progression of how we get here because I know that the 29 has gone through some evolution over I don't know the past 30 years or so you know in terms of the changes and I know the shift onto Ocean Avenue is relatively recent it seems like it happened in 2015 but how long does it take to get how long did it take to get to that point and I think where I'm going with this is that we had a phase one of this project right and then we're here with phase two and And it sounds like that was a three or four year process. And I'm just trying to figure out really set my expectations for how long it might be before we see some substantial improvements to the timing given the duration of the improvements in these different phases. And it sounds like since at least 2014, you've been making these changes.

Yeah, I apologize. That slide got lost in the technical shuffle there a little bit. You're referring to the slide that listed off all of the different things we've done over the years to improve the 29, even before this project. You're right, it was rerouted from the front door of Balboa Park BART to the back, which actually saved a lot of travel time for people traveling through that area while maintaining that connection to BART. Yeah, I mean, we have changes going all the way back to 2014.

As part of the phase one, or that's separate from it?

So the phase one changes were made in late 2023, the quick build changes. And we are still working, like I said, on some of those. And the entire project should be completed by the end of the decade is what we're looking at. And you asked how soon we could see some improvements in the Phase II segment. And the answer is we could quick build a lot of them as soon as later this year.

OK, all right, then getting to the San Bruno and Paul. So can you just speak a little bit about why it's not ideal for the bus to make that turn, especially since you're removing the Bayshore stop and the Wheat Street stop? Is there a particular reason why the bus can't make that turn, stop there? And I think about an example of something similar. I mean, the slope is not the same, but San Bruno and Bacon, there's a stop that's pretty close to, you know, that's sort of... I think it's a 54 stop or something like that, but it's right up against the 101. And so I'm just curious if that is something that you all considered and then said is not an option for this particular corner.

It is. So the speakers are referring to the, at that point, northbound stop that's right in front of their business. And that's currently what we call a flag stop, right? Because if there are any vehicles in that white zone, then the bus stops out in the roadway and the people get on and off the bus in the roadway.

Every time.

So one of the benefits of eliminating parking and loading along that curb would be that the bus could then actually stop at the curb, and it would thus become more accessible. The idea, and we've heard a lot about, well, why don't you just move it around the corner? And we did look at that in a couple of issues. One is our design team had a safety concern, because if you actually, and it's another thing that's a little difficult to explain without the visual. Basically, that right turn is at an acute angle. It's about 120 degree angle. And in order to facilitate that, the corner radius is a little bit bigger than you would see in a lot of more normal intersections. So there was a concern there that the lane is actually not that wide around the corner. particularly because we feel like we need to move the center line of that segment of roadway a little bit for buses going the other way to have a little bit more breathing room for safety reasons. So there's a concern that cars could come around the corner and the buses stopped right there. Right. There's also a concern about the quality of the waiting environment. Folks have talked about the stop across the street. Don't love that stop, right? It's wedged in between the 101 overpass and a gas station parking lot. And we looked at moving that stop, and there would have been a pretty significant parking impact if we moved it around a corner on the San Bruno. And so we ultimately didn't pursue that. I think the concern about taking the stop that we're talking about, the northbound stop, and moving it in addition to a little bit of a safety concern would be we'd just be replicating some of the problems that we already have across the street. We'd be putting the stop not in front of active storefronts, but around on the side of the building right next to the freeway overpass.

Okay, I think that that is, well, okay, and then my other question is around the signal at that stop, because I think, or on that corner, that intersection is one, two, three, I guess. The way the streets, they don't line up, and so there's this strange convergence of vehicles and pedestrians, and that corner in particular is very sharp. And so I think that that bus stop on the corner sometimes makes the cars coming off 101 or wherever they're coming from, but from coming down the hill towards Paul, it makes them try and go around the bus and end up nearly hitting pedestrians. trying to get around to get in front of the bus. And so I'm curious about whether there's some type of different signal that you can have at that intersection to create, at that intersection and actually at Paul Gilman and 3rd as well, to create safer turns and to make the timing such that people are not trying to speed around the bus and nearly hit or possibly hit. And many times I think there have been some issues, particularly at the San Bruno corner.

So the signal timing is something that we're going to look at as part of our detailed design process later on. I thought you were going in one direction, which is a concern that we heard from the community Because in addition to having this very sharp right turn northbound, there's another street just north of the intersection, really part of one large intersection. But Paul is over here. Dwight is over here. And to get from Dwight to Paul, you go through a crosswalk. And the way it's set up right now is cars and pedestrians are going at the same time. So I think that's something that we're going to also be taking a look at. But yeah, we can certainly look at cars turning around the bus from the center lane. First of all, that's an illegal behavior. But there may be some things that we can do to mitigate that.

Yeah, and I guess my concern is that with a wider lane and knowing that that activity happens quite frequently, that there may be even less margin for error because the the cars are turning in that, you know, going into the oncoming, they're going to be going basically into the oncoming traffic lane and then trying to make that turn around the bus. And I just, it concerns me a little bit. And so I would hope that we could at least do something better to make sure that cars are going at one time and pedestrians are going at, a different time, but also trying to make sure that that right turn around that corner is just safer, especially if the bus is there. So moving on to the next intersection is Gilman Paul and Third. And that section has Shero as well, that part where that bike lane is used as a second lane of travel for vehicles all the time. And I think that the treatment that's at that intersection, and then the proposed maybe, or the new actual bike improvements that are higher up on Paul, don't have any protection. And they don't have any sort of deterrent for cars to be in those lanes. And so what I would recommend is that there's – I mean, I know that the little orange posts are not super protective, but they do indicate that this is not a lane for vehicles, but rather for vehicles to park or for vehicles to drive in, but instead for cyclists. And so I think it's important as part of this improvement that you all also consider – sort of defining the cyclist space and the motorist space better because it is because that that part that stretch of paul and that part of san bruno are really the streets that are the spit off of or you know kind of spitting all the traffic out from from 101 so everybody's going fast everybody's ready to go home and we i think it's important for us to make sure that we're designating the portions of the street um sufficiently so that people can get to those places safely and right now it the wider street um but the you know sort of dotted line bike lane is not slowing the the or is not directing the traffic in a safe way um and so you have people going around the 29 to turn right or to turn left or to do whatever at Gilman and Paul. And I think that that's just a dangerous behavior, but that could be maybe deterred by some different type of treatment. So I would recommend that there. And then I think maybe my last point is, and I'm curious about the... I know we're not talking about the rapid today, but I'm curious about the rapid because I think that what this route in particular tells me is that people have a need to go across town but not necessarily go downtown. And maybe what a lot of people are trying to do is also get to BART. And so I think that as we find ways to... As we find ways to partner with our regional partners, I think the consideration of a rapid line, but with the with the intention of, or the understanding that a lot of people are trying to get to BART and trying to use the transit systems, I think is something worth talking about now. I get that there's a cost implication, but it's worth the plan because I think that the way that we, what we can see is that the neighborhood lines are recovering. This is a really good example of that. And so I would want to start that planning process now for when we do get the opportunity or the funding to be able to put some of these good ideas out in the wild that we don't have to go through a whole long 10-year or whatever the timing period will be processed before we can get there. And so especially because, you know, because this is such a long route that I think that it could, whatever small improvements I think could make a huge difference in terms of the ridership when we're dropping people off near other transit. And the last thing I will say is that a couple weeks ago in one of our board meetings, we learned that the highest stop on the Bayview shuttle is 24th Street BART. And so I think that taking some of the information that we have from some of our other lines or other sort of uses and using that to help improve this line, especially since it passes BART, but also passes state and some of the other schools, I think would be useful when we're having the discussion with the public, just to help set those expectations about what we have to prioritize and when, but that we will hopefully eventually get to some of the other ideas that were lower on the list.

Yeah, I mean, we've certainly had internal discussions about what a 29 rapid service might look like.

Yeah.

We would not be starting from a blank slate.

Okay. All right. Very good. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Director Henderson. Director Heminger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I want to get on the 29 rapid discussion. bandwagon here. First of all, I want to say how pleased I am to learn that Lowell has a transit club. We should send our recruiters over to see you guys at the appropriate time of year. So the rapid, how much would it cost?

Back of the napkin okay?

Sure.

On the order of $15 to $20 million annually?

And what's the largest component of that cost?

That's service. So the way we do Rapids and San Francisco, unlike a lot of other places, is we don't greatly reduce the local service, because that still, in our view, is very important. We don't want to take an existing, like the 29, a bus that runs every eight or nine minutes, and then service at, you know, two-thirds or three-quarters of the stop, now it's every 20 minutes. We don't want to do that. There might be a little bit of offset, you know, recognizing that, you know, the overall demand for the local service would be lower, but we don't want to dramatically reduce it more than likely. That's consistent with what you see on our existing rapid routes, right? The 14R, we still have a lot of buses on the 14, right? 28R, we still have a lot of buses on the 28. So really the cost is mostly additive. And it's such a long route. And the other thing about our rapid service is we don't run rapid buses every 20 minutes, again, like they do in some other places. They're generally a lot more frequent than that. So you put together the combination of the frequency and the length of the route, even if It's going a lot faster and, you know, that actually helps to reduce cost because you can complete a round trip much faster. You don't need as many buses to provide the same level of service. But nonetheless, you know, the route is so long. A rapid might not have to go the entire route, to be clear. I mean, one of the things that, you know, we do with some of our other services is kind of different patterns for the local on the rapid. That's something that we would certainly look at. But the operating cost is just a combination of frequency and length.

Madam Chair, I'm trying to remember the last time we talked about the RAPID program sort of as a program. I'm not even sure it's considered a program here at the MTA, but it seems to me it'd be useful to try to build a little momentum, even if quietly, for this route and see what else is out there and try to put together some kind of priority. about where we start and what's next and so on. So I'll ask you to consider that and see whether we can find some room on a future agenda to do that.

I mean, I'll just emphasize that there is certainly broad support within the community for that idea.

OK. Thank you.

Thank you, Director Hemminger. Vice Chair Kahina.

Thank you, Chair Chodlow. I'm also very supportive of the 29 rapid. And I think thinking about this more comprehensively as a program makes a lot of sense because I think there are ways that we could start determining what the criteria is for a rapid route and what are the considerations that we have and start planning accordingly. So I do think that a discussion like this at the board level makes a lot of sense. And to have some staff time just to tee up and prepare us for a potential dynamic where we actually can fund something like this is super helpful. Again, we are constrained with our resources right now. these sorts of initiatives can't happen. But to prepare for them, I think, makes a lot of sense and is really smart for us to do. So we'd love to get Julie's thoughts on that too when she's back. Steve, thank you so much for your presentation. I know I had the benefit of meeting with you and Brian almost a month ago, I think, on this project. So I feel a little special here of having had that touch point ahead of time. I did have some questions around just the specifics around certain intersections that were being asked to consider today. And hopeful that you have some conceptual designs in your back pocket so we can take a more narrow look at some of these intersections that are being proposed for changes. particularly Persia mission, the area around Burden High, and I think even the intersection that Director Henderson was talking about, Paul and San Bruno, like if we can just get some designs to really just visually see what we're talking about. If I'm gonna add to the list if you do have something in your back pocket that shows a map of just like where the locations are of parking loss That would also be helpful just so we could see that and I can give you guys time to pull those up but I would love to just Have us this body review that as we go into our decision-making process

Yeah, I think we can provide that. Yeah, to be clear, we have conceptual designs.

You have them?

OK. Conceptual being the operative word there.

OK. Will they be able to just visually denote where some of the changes are happening and just, OK. And can you present those today, or does the team need some time?

I mean, I'm not sure what the protocol is for a document request at the board.

If you have them, we'd be happy to share them.

I mean, I have a paper copy right here.

You can put it on the projector.

Sure, you can put it on the projector. Sure. Thanks, Steve.

You wanted to see Mission in Persia?

Mission in Persia, yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Excuse her.

Okay. I got some staff here to help, too.

So at top is existing, below is proposed. You can see the locations of the bus stops, both current and proposed. And those numbers in those, oh man, my five-year-old would know this, six-sided hexagon? Anyway, the symbol with the numbers, that represents parking impacts effectively on that corner. One thing at Mission in Persia that bears pointing out is there's an existing bus zone which is sometimes used by the 49 on the west side of the street. There's a yellow zone commercial loading right in front of it. What we would do, is relocate that yellow zone into the existing bus zone across the street, which is probably a better location. One of the issues with that particular stop location is we get a lot of double parking in that bus zone because there's several businesses that front on it, as well as a little market on the corner. Trying to think what else we really want. Well, I'll let you ask questions.

And Steve, are we restoring parking on that segment of Persia between, I think it's a mission in London?

Mission and London? Yeah. So where you see the current bus zone in the eastbound direction, that would become one yellow space and one general parking space. And we worked actually with both the community and the supervisor's office on that. Initially, we wanted to put two zones there, yellow zones. And supervisor's office talked to some of the merchants and said their preference would be one of each. So that's what's in the proposal.

And just for context for members of the board, that area that looks like the bottom part of a triangle where it says Persia Avenue across from it, that in the neighborhood is known locally as the Persia Triangle. And it does act as a transit hub. So as Steve was saying, on the north end, the 49 stops there. On the Mission side, the 14, 14R stops there. It's a major hub for a lot of people folks transitioning from different lines and connecting to different parts of the city. So I think it's a really smart approach to start really framing the Persia Triangle as like a node of a lot of just transitions that happen between lines and for folks to see it as that. So I think that's a really great approach that you all took and appreciate the design there. The other one I wanted to examine a little bit more, if you have some conceptual designs just to help us understand what's happening in the Burden High area. And I can pull up what those intersections are.

I'm sorry, where?

Burden High School.

Oh, so no change is proposed at Burden.

I think there's a bus. You're consolidating some stops there?

Down the hill a little bit, that's right. There is one pair of stops proposed for removal at Mansell. And I was afraid someone would ask me this. I'm still not going to get the name right. Göttingen? Does anyone speak German? And that is on a very steep hill. And we did hear some concerns from the community about removing those stop pairs.

Oh, Göttingen.

I'm sorry, what is it? Göttingen. I wasn't that far off. They're about 300 feet from the closest stops, which even on a steep slope is below our recommended distance. A lot of their usage comes from, and again, this is something that we saw when we went out there and visited the site, Students, in order to get on westbound buses, when they get out of class, just start walking down the hill. A lot of them do. Because they want to be able to get on before the other students and ensure they get a spot on the bus. They're so concerned about the bus being completely full and them getting passed up that some of them walk all the way as far as San Bruno in order to make sure they get just a standing spot on the bus. So they'll continue to do that. They'll continue to walk down the hill. But looking at the numbers, it looks like it gets a decent amount of use. We think a lot of that is actually coming from that phenomenon I just described.

of folks walking down. Do you have conceptual designs that just show, like, from University to San Bruno, just what the treatments are going to be there? Again, just to understand how students and, I guess, faculty and other folks are going to, how this is going to change their transit experience.

Well, here's University down to Burton. I'm proposing to add a bus zone, I believe, westbound at University. Oh, and there's one more pair of stops in this segment that would be removed. Again, relatively lightly used residential area. In this particular case, the hill drops off pretty steeply below Mansell. So really, most of the activity is coming from one side of the street. I think there are a few people who climb up the hill from Viz Valley, but they're still going to have stops a little further east where there's more of a connection to the street network.

And for bus stop removals, Steve, I just want to understand what this means for community members and maybe even some faculty. Does this mean that we're restoring parking in those areas? When we remove a stop, do we add parking?

Well, most of the stops are flag stops.

Oh, I see, I see. So parking's going to, got it.

And one thing to be clear about, that 36 number that I gave you, which is our estimated parking loss from the project, that doesn't include spaces that would be daylit, because that's not part of this proposal. And that is, in fact, state required. But there would be some additional parking removed along the corridor as part of our separate daylighting program.

Now the other intersection, Paul and San Bruno.

So that slide that you saw in the presentation was my attempt to simplify this. Because if you look at the drawing, it's pretty complicated.

It's OK. Yeah, here we go.

I guess the main thing that I would point out here, as long as we're looking at the drawings and can add some clarity, is where you see the two spaces proposed for removal right there. Those are the two yellow zones that the business employees were referring to. That tow away no parking zone would extend about 170 feet up. again, in order to provide an extra wide lane that could be used by vehicles trying to go around through traffic to turn right. There are a number of what look to be two-unit apartment buildings in that segment. They can legally block their own driveway. They wouldn't be able to do so under this case. So that's not included in the parking number because it's not curbside parking that's available to the entire public. It's only available to residents of that building. But it is something to keep in mind. YOU CAN SEE SOME MINOR PARKING REMOVAL. I MEAN MINOR IS A JUDGMENT STATEMENT. BUT ANOTHER ONE SPACE JUST FOR SAFETY REASONS AT ALMSTED A LITTLE FURTHER DOWN THE STREET. AND THEN A LITTLE BIT OF A SWITCHEROO. THE 29 ON MANCEL, THERE'S A BUS BULB ON SAN BERNO AT THE CORNER OF MANCEL THAT ARE EIGHT AND NINE BUSES USE. The 29 stop is around the corner, and there is only one lane in that direction. So it made sense to us to just consolidate that activity at that bulb, expand the bulb a little bit so there's room for multiple buses. That removes some parking. But the flip side of that is the current bus zone immediately around the corner on Mansell, that then becomes new parking.

Got it. And so on that corner of Mansell and San Bruno, is that where the negative 4 is at? Thank you.

Yeah, it's negative 4, but then it's plus 4 right around the corner. So the net removal outside of that area near Bloomerang that I referred to, the remainder of the segment, it's one space.

Got it. OK. That's super helpful. Thank you so much, Steve. And zoomed out, do you have a conceptual design of just where the parking loss is going to be throughout this phase of the project?

I can share this. Yeah, I mean, it's at that corner level here. We don't necessarily have each individual space called out, but we've gotten it down to the level of the corners of every intersection.

From a high level then, would you say that there are certain areas that have a clustering of parking loss or is it really spread out throughout the whole project?

It's spread out. Like I said, the location where we see the largest number of curbside spaces removed, there's four, one on each corner, and that's at the corner of Grafton and Plymouth. And angle side and the reason is we're proposing to build Bus bulbs on all four corners at that intersection because it's a major transfer point between the 29 and the 54 Do you mind showing us that intersection?

Thank you, Steve

So you can see it at left here. And this is oriented so that up is west. Got it. This is where the bus takes a turn from east-west to north-south. There's existing stops on all four corners, again, because it's the 29 and the 54. And we would be providing what we call front door bulbs. So it's trying to find a balance between improving the stops, because they're very busy stops, but not having too much parking impact. So that's a good example. It's only one space per bulb, because we

we're not trying to extend that bulb all the way to the back door of the bus got it thank you steve um my next question not really a question but just a moment for you all to elevate this um i did want to just get a better window of your outreach engagement process with the community um perhaps brian can come up but just wanted to to get just like a perspective of what was it like to engage community members in this phase of the project i understand for phase one We had really robust outreach and engagement with students. And we saw some of them today from Lowell High School, from SI even. Just wanted to get a sense of what was it like for this particular phase of the project. I did hear someone say that they went on a bus tour at some point, a ride along. So we'd love to just hear more about that.

Brian, I'll say one thing real quick. I'm so happy that the Lowell students are here today. The Lowell Transit Club, we've actually met with them on three separate occasions. What happens is every year there's a new senior class, and they reach out to us and they want to hear all about the project. Then they graduate, then we go back and talk to next year's senior class. They're great. And by the way, a lot of the reason we're doing this project now, there was a slide about this, but again, it kind of got lost in the shuffle there, was because students at Lowell in 2019 organized an Instagram campaign to put pressure on us to do this sooner rather than later. It was always on the list, always a high priority, but we weren't quite there yet. They basically forced it on us, and we're happy about that. I'll let Brian speak to the rest of the outreach, though.

Thank you, Steve.

Hello, directors. Brian Hogsman, outreach lead on this project. Yeah, thank you for the question. The way that we approached this was similar to what Steve mentioned of first listening, understanding. We heard a lot in the couple of years of outreach on phase one of what are the priorities of these communities and the people who ride this line, and understanding are those the same priorities and same issues that people are seeing on the phase two section of the line before we come up with our proposals to make sure that we hit those goals, understand actually what the goals are. So we did that, and that included a bus tour where we were able to actually include, including SFUSD students, seniors, people with disabilities, people from each of the neighborhoods across the line, but also throughout the project over the past couple years, really trying to meet people where they are. So of course we went to all the groups that would have us at their meetings or that we could host a meeting with. But also doing, of those 20 project events that we did, a lot of them were setting up a table at the corner and talking to bus riders in that listening phase. What are your priorities for this? How could we make this route better for you here? What do you actually see on the line? What are the biggest problems for you as you use the 29 sunset? And throughout the process, as we had those proposals, coming back and saying, did we get this right? What do you think about this? This is what we heard, and here's how we're applying that. We did that throughout the different neighborhoods of the project. We also continued to meet with different groups, of course, in all the different languages of the project area, English, Cantonese, Spanish, Filipino. and continue to work with people throughout the project. And then where there were specific concerns, where we knew at Mission in Persia, at San Bruno, actually canvassing and going door to door with translation and appropriate materials, as it makes sense, to actually talk through, hey, did you see? You got mailers about this. You see posters out here a couple of times. We've been out here. But we wanted to make sure we actually talked to you and make sure you understand what we're proposing, understand your concerns, so that we would be able to reflect that through the project. With school communities, that's looked like working a lot with students. We heard a lot from them, both meeting with students at Lowell, the transit club, as Steve mentioned, as you heard from today. Also, going during lunch hours. We were able to go to Burton and Lick, for example, and actually talk to them, show them the same type of idea, show them our designs, see what their perspectives are on it and what they're hearing. Observe and doing observations too, like Steve mentioned for Burton as an example. Going out there in the morning, going out in the afternoon, seeing what it's actually like. And also working with the school communities as a whole. So going to the SFUSD enrollment fair to talk to families, or PTA, Burton PTA meeting, for example. Or meeting directly with and talking directly with school principals, like at Burton, Principal Thomas, or at Bretthard as well. Before we came out with that idea of what if we removed a lane on Gilman here, We really wanted to talk that through with Bret Hart's principal and staff to understand their perspectives on it. It would work. We saw that, too, throughout the survey, too. I think the numbers, yeah, just about 25% of the people who took that survey, that 800-person survey, were people 18 and under, which reflects what we see on the line.

And Brian, Steve mentioned this in his presentation, too. It seems like there is a piece of this project that needs a little bit more outreach and engagement as it pertains to the bike element of a piece of the project. I think it's in the Bayview or in the Portola area. What's the plan after we make our decision today? What's the plan to re-engage folks and to keep that conversation going?

Yeah.

I think we're still working through that. To the extent that it becomes more of an active focus project, I think we'll want to involve some of our livable street staff in that conversation. And we've had some initial discussions with them. I think we kind of want to see how it goes today, and then we'll transition into that.

All right.

I mean, we'll be talking. We'll be certainly meeting with stakeholders we've already talked to and hopefully reaching some new folks as well.

I just want to thank you all for just the outreach and engagement process that you did on this phase of the project. It seems like it was varied. It seems like it tackled a lot of different age groups. And this neighborhood or these neighborhoods are incredibly diverse in culture, in age groups, and just life experiences. And it seems like you really made a concerted effort to try to meet folks where they're at. And as we implement this piece of the project, it's only going to necessitate even more outreach and engagement, because it doesn't feel real for folks until they actually see curbs getting painted, things moved. And then it's going to necessitate more touch points. In terms of setting expectations for folks during that phase of the project, do folks know that you all are the point of contacts? Do the folks know that this is if they have a concern to go to you? I just want to get a sense of what does it look like? What's the outreach and engagement plan for the implementation phase?

Similar to phase one, yeah, we want to make sure that people know what's happening when and why so that people aren't making up their own understanding or guessing at what we're actually doing on a street. So after today, once we know what the next steps for the project are, it's sharing a general perspective on what to expect when. Some of those changes, like Steve mentioned, that can be quick-builded versus those that require pouring concrete that take a little bit longer. And then making sure that any location where we're making those changes, we're doing appropriate outreach, both, of course, in languages, but also to reach those who would be affected by it, whether that's bus riders, who their stop's going to move across the street, making sure that they're aware. that through email updates and text message updates to our 29 Sunset Riders, stop signage as well, canvassing nearby neighbors or businesses, as it makes sense, and continuing that people make sure that even during, it might not be a busy month for changes on the street that people might be seeing, how that we can continue to engage them and share those updates and also hear their feedback of what they're seeing and how those changes are going so far.

I would definitely emphasize working with our merchant community during this phase of the process, and especially all the different school administrators as well. Just make sure that we have close contacts with folks at Lick, at Burden, at June Jordan, like all the different schools that this route serves. because those are the writers and those are the folks that are going to be the most impacted. And we have a lot of commercial activity in these areas too that might feel the impacts once this becomes a real life project that they're seeing implemented in their communities and might want to talk to somebody or need to talk to somebody to understand how to course correct their activities. Thank you. You can share.

Thank you, Vice Chair Kahina. Director Wise, did you have something for us?

Thank you, Chair Tarloff. I just wanted to circle back on our rapid discussion. I know it's been 10 minutes or so, but nevertheless, we do have some thoughts. We do have plans and ideas that we'd be happy to share with you, either as informational, as part of my quarterly, as part of a memo, whatever the board's preference is. And we have been thinking about that a lot. So I actually appreciate the enthusiasm despite our financial challenges. And then on top of that, I just want to mention that whatever quick build and concrete that is part of this project that we will do will help us in the future, hopefully, enable an R route. Thank you.

Thank you. That is very helpful. Director Chen?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Boland. It sounds like this project has been a lot of work. And I think I also echo Director Wise in saying that, you know, I think 29 Rapid is great. I also know that, you know, if in the future the agency did have more revenue to run service, it would probably be a very long conversation about where that service would go. I think even on our existing routes, we see near me the 24 Divisadero has, like, huge amounts of crowding and traffic. for example, and so I think there would probably be a longer discussion about where we would put that service, but that would be a happy case if we are in that situation. I want to confirm and I want to maybe ask a couple things around the project and then probably want to zoom back into the the San Bruno, Paul area at the end. So just roadmap. So I want to confirm, number one, that this currently, the 29 and Sunset, most of the stops are flag stops, right? So they currently have, there's parking on the, is that correct? Can you repeat that last part? Are most of the stops in the phase two, are they currently flag stops?

The stops proposed for removal, yeah. So unfortunately, there's, limited opportunities to add back parking. I did mention the one at the corner of Paul and Mansell. I think that's... Right.

I'm asking not necessarily about the parking impact, but more about, I think, this agency and also the Board of Supervisors had passed a resolution two or three years ago urging the SFMTA to convert all of its flagstaffs to be clear of parked cars, and that's for accessibility and for seniors. And so I want to make sure that this project is forwarding is pushing in the right direction or is fully compliant with that directive?

Yeah, I mean, we're certainly moving in that direction. I mean, we do still have locations under the proposal where stops might be partially flag stops. I talked about the front door bulbs. It's the same thing, by the way, on Persia and the Excelsior. All of those stops would become front door bulbs. I mean, we're certainly, in the proposal, I would say dramatically improving the quality of stops. I talked about the 14 bulbs, the two additional boarding islands, I think the seven newer improved zones. So is it 100% bus zones or bulbs? Not quite yet.

But I would say front door curbside is, I think, would be great for anybody who is using a wheelchair or who has a mobility device, for example.

Well, and of course, the daylighting program will help advance this as well. OK. Yeah.

Got it. All right. Understood. And then double-clicking on some of the timeline stuff. So I heard that some of the concrete would be in the next four or five years, probably, with our capital plan. And in the meantime, would there be some sort of quick build? For example, I think on Market and Church, the agency has used quick build materials to create that experience.

You know, that's to be determined, I would say. I think at Church and Market, there was really an urgent need for at least a temporary facility for sort of site-specific reasons. I think a lot of the stops where we're proposing bulbs, particularly if there's daylighting and so you have front door access that doesn't involve squeezing in between parked cars, they might be OK on an interim basis in that condition. It's something that, you know, again, the process is, you know, we get our legislation approved here and then, you know, shortly thereafter we enter into detailed design. And a lot of things necessarily get worked out through that detailed design process.

Okay.

And then I think it was maybe Director Henderson who was asking, you know, I think for the writer, right, how soon can they, you know, supposing that the board approves this project today, right, how soon would they see improvements and so forth. There's detailed design, then we have to go to the paint and sign shop, and then we have to make the changes actually happen on the roads and on our maps. For example, the stop changes. Is that a six-month time period? Is that a one-year time period?

Stop removals are definitely something that we can do on a quick build basis. And in fact, we did a lot of that. I mentioned that we completed our quick build in phase one of the project within a few months of legislation. And that largely consisted of stop removals. But again, we saw immediate benefits from that.

Yeah, so writers would be able to see the difference, to see and feel the difference, I think is what I'm getting at.

Yeah, that's the idea. And we certainly, you know, getting back to our previous question, I mean, there's going to be a lot of outreach that goes along with implementation as well.

Yes, okay. Okay, skipping San Bruno. I was reading the public comment and, you know, I think we saw some people positive. I think on Galloway, I think there was a few comments about that, but I think it's mostly fine. Okay. I am going to revisit San Bruno and Paul. Okay. So I'm not very familiar with that area. And so I understand it's a major transfer point. There's the 9 San Bruno that goes down there. And also there's bus stops there. There's the 8 Bayshore. And there's also the 29. So on the biking part, it sounds It sounds from the comment that the hardest part is when people are biking uphill southbound on San Bruno Avenue, biking to get to Mansell. And me being ignorant, do people not use the parallel street on Girard? Or why Girard versus Mansell? Or versus San Bruno, sorry.

Yeah, I'm not the person to answer that question. But I know the community-based transportation plan I talked about also identified that as a location for bike improvements. I don't know if anyone from staff in this room can answer that question. That's the best I can do.

And so in the proposal, before it was modified, the bike lane was taken out, would the proposal be to do bike lanes in both directions, or was it sort of like a shero, downhill, and a bike lane?

Yeah, both directions, although I think it's important to understand that... In the southbound direction, it only would have been 25% or 30% of that two-block segment. And the reason is because we're trying to maintain space for right-turning vehicles going northbound on the Olmstead to Paul block, that doesn't leave room left over for bike lanes there. And then the bike lanes would also stop short of that bulb out I mentioned at Mansell. So in the southbound direction, it would be a partial closure of that gap that was mentioned, but not continuous. Northbound, it would be a longer stretch, right? The idea was that, you know, it would be continuous up until you got to that point where we want to make additional space for right-turning cars, which, you know, at that point it becomes a shero. There's a very high volume of right-turning cars at that intersection. So we feel like that's something that, you know, if we don't make accommodation for that, you know, we really could see some traffic impacts on our buses as well.

Yes. And then, you know, I think we had some folks coming in from the business, the cannabis dispensary, is that right? On the corner over there. So I just, I want to double click and just make sure I understand. So currently it is a white, it's a 10 minute loading zone or five minute loading zone. Is that right? And then, and the proposal is to make it a no parking zone so that people don't dwell there, but they could still stop there.

They could stop there, but someone would have to remain with the vehicle in order to avoid getting ticketed.

And the reason for that is so that the operators can pull all the way over to the curb?

The primary reason for it is widening the lanes a little bit. And you heard some numbers being bandied about there a little bit. Currently, the lanes are 10 feet, which I think is fine in a lot of cases. If you have a high volume of buses like we do, at that width, you do see side swipe collisions. And we've seen a track record of that. The proposal only adds a foot or two. I think it's mostly going from 10 feet to 11 feet. So the lanes wouldn't be exceptionally wide. They would just give us that extra bit of margin that we need to reduce those large vehicle collisions.

Right.

So that's, it's the lane widening that kind of, then the dominoes fall. That drives a lot of other things. You then cannot have, if you want to have that and maintain room for right turners, you then can't have any regular curbside parking or loading on that stretch of the east side of San Bruno just south of Paul. Because there, I mean, you've got more space for through movement for vehicles. A little further up, or a little further down, I should say, toward Mansell, if it became one traffic lane each way, you could have all the parking and loading with those minor exceptions I mentioned. And you would also have some additional space, which under the previous proposal was going to become the envelope in which bike lanes would go. Under the current proposal, that space would be hatched. You can see something similar along the J Church.

Okay, I think I understand. And then the reason why the stop is currently in front of the dispensary on San Bruno, sort of before Paul Street, going northbound on San Bruno before Paul Street. That's right. And the reason why the bus stop couldn't be around the corner, I think it mentioned, was sort of the turning radius, and I think the agency's afraid of people doing a lot of rear-end collisions or safety issues?

I mean, we have some safety concerns, and we also have some concerns about the passenger environment.

Because it's right by a loud freeway?

Yeah, it's right in the shadow of the freeway.

OK. But the westbound is, that's the current treatment on the westbound in front of the gas station.

Yeah. And we looked at potentially moving that stop. And the issue there is there would have been a pretty significant parking impact that went along with that. On top of the parking impact that's already being proposed.

OK. I mean, the agency does have... There are some sad bus stops in the agency network, and I'm thinking of the one on 9 San Bruno that's underneath the overpass. Underneath the freeway, there's a stop, 9 going southbound before it turns onto Silver and San Bruno Avenue, I think, and then it's just like it's underneath. I was there once when it was raining in the dark, and it was just like... We do have some sad bus stops in the network. And so I don't necessarily want to make this bus stop sadder. But I also am trying to figure out, it's like, hey, we do have, it's mostly residential. There's a business. How do we, is there some other thing? And we did have some proposals with bike lanes. But then now a bike lane is, now we're also pausing that. I don't want to be that guy, but would staff be amenable to pausing that parking change What is it? It is item 11, section F, which is establishing the To'o Indo parking zone on San Bruno from Paul Street to 169 feet southerly, to pausing that. It sounds like there's a lot of other changes also happening on San Bruno. Oh, I'm sorry. Director Felder?

Well, I have similar concerns, and I have a thought about how we might be able to address the concerns. So I don't know if... Oh, sure.

Go ahead.

Most of our conversation is around one intersection and around a couple of issues at that intersection, inclusive of the fact that there is a commitment to do more outreach around bike lanes. I think there's some widespread concern over the timing of that. I think everybody wants these things to happen sooner rather than later. And as it relates to the bike lanes, I think we certainly would like for that evaluation to happen quickly. At the same time, we're hearing concerns about a small business, and what I think is a very reasonable small business concern at the specific intersection of San Bruno and Paul. I think we're all fairly familiar with that intersection. There are safety concerns, I think, around particularly the northbound traffic trying to bypass a bus, for example, or other traffic when stopped at that intersection. I'm not thrilled with the specifics around how to prevent that. I recognize that that's an illegal behavior. But I personally would love to see a little more detail around what that could physically look like. So what I'm getting at is, i'd be prepared to put forward a motion that approves this plan as is with an important caveat with the expectation that within 90 days the mta come back to us with alternative designs for that intersection that address the small business concerns we've heard relevant to the location of the bus stop, while also addressing opportunities to quickly add bike lanes on San Bruno Avenue. And while we would be approving the plan as is, it would be with the expectation that within 90 days we'd see an alternative for us to consider that we could approve as an amendment to the plan. Does that... It puts faith and trust that the agency is going to follow through and give us those options that hopefully will improve the situation, but it also allows the plan to move forward as is now.

Yeah. I mean, the legislation can be, you know, modified in order to, you know, remove, you know, that existing tow away or that proposed tow away in a parking zone. And then we could, you know, if we were to end up going ahead with that, we could reintroduce it later.

Yeah.

So I hear Director Felder, and then I also, it sounds like Chair Tarloff and maybe Director Weiss have comments, but it sounds like staff, if it is the will of the directors that staff bring back this intersection, the staff are indifferent about whether or not this Part F goes through or not as part of today's package.

I mean, I'm not sure that's actually, it's my place to answer that question. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Director Weiss.

Thank you. If I may, what I understand the proposal to be is to approve the project as is with the understanding that this board has concerns around the design of that intersection, and particularly with quite understandably the challenge that the business might have with their operations. And given that, what I think you're asking, Director Felder, is for us to go home if you would do some additional homework over the next 90 days and see if there are some solutions to bring based on the discussion that we've just been having around the challenges of the specific location and see if we can bring something back to you that is gonna hopefully remedy the situation that is what i'm understanding and so no changes to the ledge right now just approve as is, but that homework.

And with the homework of coming back to us with bike improvements for San Bruno Avenue as well.

Thank you. I suppose my question, I'm not opposed. I suppose my question is that if we do pass this legislation as it is, would staff be implementing any changes to San Bruno in the next 90 days before it comes back here?

Legislation is not an obligation. Right? And in fact, it does sometimes occur that things are legislated. And then for either reasons of additional outreach or something we uncover through the detailed design process, we end up not proceeding. I think, yeah, if the direction from this board is take 90 days and go back to the drawing board, that's what we do. We're not jumping the gun, making changes in the interim. The tow-away no-parking, by the way, somebody briefly alluded to a repaving project that's scheduled for this portion of San Bruno next year, I believe. So we have a little time. And typically at the end of a repaving project, if you're going to make striping changes, I think someone also mentioned this, that's an opportune time to do that. So I don't think we'd be making any changes on San Bruno in any case in that tight of a time frame. Understood.

Thank you then, Director Felder. I am on board.

So Director Hinze has been waiting quite a while. And I don't know, Director Felder, if you have other comments. But just to ask on the proposal that's being floated here, I have a couple of thoughts. One question is putting a 90-day timeline on it. I have a suspicion that if Director Kirschbaum was here, she might feel a little concerned about, I mean, I don't know if the 90 days is a, it's just a timeline.

It feels like a reasonable timeline to me, but if it had to be 120 days, I wouldn't object. I don't want to get beyond much beyond that, but

That would probably be my preference. If for no other reason, then I'll put us right around the recess time in this board. So just to push, you know, and give us a little more time to also fine-tune the design. But also just, again, I'll put us in mid-August, and that's a little tough. So sometime later in the share would be preferable. Thank you.

So approximately 90 days or as soon as close to 90 days as is required.

And if I may interject, I think the intent of this board is before any implementation on that quarter.

We do have a practical deadline in terms of the repaving project. So I want to double check. But I don't think that 90 days should be a problem in terms of being prepared for the repaving project.

And the other thing that I would add to what I think is amounting to some direction from the board, not a formal change to the legislation, is I understood from your presentation that the outreach to the community in this particular area came later in the process. And I feel like I heard from you a wish that perhaps there could have been more time for that. And I would say that perhaps this grants your wish and the additional outreach.

I think you can say that. Yeah.

And I just want to caution that there may be no alternatives that are feasible. I would be eager to hear more about potential bus stop changes. Look again maybe at going around the corner and what are the trade-offs there. When you were briefing me on this, we talked about perhaps The bus stop could be mid-block at Olmstead on that side. There is a piece of curb there that is not parking currently. I mean, it probably involves some loss of parking, but...

But it's a vacant lot.

It's a vacant lot there.

So it doesn't front on any homes.

Yeah. So something to use 90 days to investigate. But it may be that staff comes back and says there are no alternatives. But I would just say that the bike lane improvements and the repaving that's occurring in a year, I also, having biked that stretch, not happily, I would concur with the public comment that it's needed. And just a lot of shared concerns around business operations for the business at that corner and recognition of what that business has brought to that community. It was something that you said to me as well, and supporting that business if possible. So anyway, Director Hinze, thank you for your patience.

No problem. I won't hold this up and actuate your talk. You said most of what I was going to say. So you represented me well and I appreciate my colleagues for the detailed level of questioning and we clearly have some experts in the area of this project in the uh, product area. So I really appreciated that. I just, I just wanted to, and I am supportive of the, of the 90 day further outreach on the bike lane. And I just did sort of want to say, I, I, um, with the repaving project, I would hate to, uh, miss the opportunity to, incorporate the bike lanes into the beauty forward projects. I agree with the public commenters is that if we're going to do it, we might as we should do it in the most efficient way possible and I think it would be to tag sort of do them as part of the beauty forward this beautiful project and so I do support sort of the 90 or 120 day kind of outreach and director wise or not sure you probably don't want to speak on half of your staff at this point but I'm not sure what livable streets if you want to weigh in on with some thoughts about potential bike lane competitions in the area. That's it. Thank you, everyone.

A brief comment about the 90 days or 120 days. If the goal at the end of that is to share options with the board, I don't see any problems there. The longest, most time consuming item would be the outreach piece of it. I think the design work we could probably easily get done. If we were attempting to adopt legislation at that point, We may have to go through some additional environmental process, which, as you know, CEQA can be a little bit time consuming, depending on the nature of the changes, right? So that's a consideration that I just want to make sure folks are aware of.

Help us understand that a little bit better. So you've already undertaken a CEQA process for the project as is. if there were changes that resulted from the additional outreach and your additional analysis, there would, that would, the benefit of that would be a better project, but the downside is that there would be another process that would need to be undertaken.

That's right. And, you know, none of our environmental planning team is here. So I don't, I want to be a little bit careful what I say. I suspect, based on my previous experience, that this could be a modification to the existing document, which should, in theory, be a relatively straightforward matter as CEQA processes go. So I don't want to scare anyone too much, because you all work in planning in California. I'm sure every time you hear the word CEQA, it gets your attention. Hopefully, this wouldn't quite be that. But we need to be cognizant of it because if we are proposing something different, there needs to be environmental clearance.

Well, if that downside turned out to be, you know, too great of a barrier, that would be another result that you would be reporting to us, I presume.

It could also be a two-step process. I mean, we come back to you with an informational item, effectively, and we get direction from you. And then, you know, assuming it's, you know, acceptable both to this board and the community, it could end up that legislation is even on the consent calendar at some point, so.

OK. Thank you. Director Felder?

Well, I'm prepared to move the item with the caveat that I described. So I put forward a motion to appreciation for the assistance of the city attorney on this, but a motion to approve the item with the direction to staff to return to the SFMTA board in approximately 90 days and before implementation with an analysis about other options for the proposed changes. at San Bruno and Paul, including small business concerns and bicycle improvements to San Bruno Avenue.

Maybe San Bruno between Paul and Mansell, would that be better? Or does that not make a difference?

I don't know. Okay. All right. I'll move that.

Second. Very good. Secretary Silva, can you please call the roll?

On that motion, Director Chen?

Aye.

Chen, aye. Director Felder?

Aye.

Felder, aye. Director Hemminger? Hemminger, aye. Director Henderson? Aye. Henderson, aye. Director Hinze? Aye. Hinze, aye. Director Kahina?

Aye.

Kahina, aye. Chair Tarloff? Aye. Tarloff, aye. Thank you. That motion passes unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. I propose we take a break. I have 10 to 4. Why don't we come back at 4.05? 4.05. Thank you. SFGov TV.

San Francisco Government Television.

SFGov TV San Francisco Government Television

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

Directors, that places you on item number 12, presentation and discussion regarding a fiscal year 2025-2026 nine-month financial update. BRIMA HORDER Good afternoon, directors. I'm Brima Horder. I'm the CFO of the MTA.

And I'm here to give you our quarterly financial update for this year ending in March. And I am happy to report that all of the trends that we saw at the sixth month have held. All of the good news around revenue has continued. And all of the good news around expenditure control has also continued. So revenue continues to be slightly above our budget, driven by transit and by parking. And expenditure is trending slightly below budget, with a little bit of overexpenditure in labor being offset by savings in non-personnel services. So all of that, I think, is really good news and consistent with what we're seeing at the city level. The good news at the city level is that the general fund is expected to grow more quickly than we thought about a year ago. And that was reflected in our budget that we presented to you last month. The higher general fund projections that we're seeing this year. as well as the higher transit revenue and the higher parking revenue, were all incorporated into our budget. And that's why we, at the end, had to make fewer hard choices than we originally anticipated. But I do want to note that even though the news is good, there is a lot of uncertainty on the horizon. There are a lot of things that could change this picture. I think there's a lot of concern with inflation, particularly because of the war. And those things could really impact the labor market and consumer sentiment, as could what's going on with artificial intelligence. So I think the current picture is good, but we just need to be cautious as we think about the future. So as I said, we're projected to end the year on budget. I think when I present this chart, this $4 million surplus, it's a little, as Director Hemminger often says, it's kind of like making a mountain out of a molehill, because a $4 million surplus in a $1.4 billion budget is literally less than nothing. So I think it's really more accurate to say that we're ending the year on budget. On the revenue side, we have, just as I showed in the six-month, transit, fares, and parking are both projected to come in above budget. And that's offset by some weakness in operating grants. And the weakness in operating grants is caused by lower than expected state and diesel tax revenues, which could change by the end of the year because of everything that's going on with the Strait of Hormuz. For the first nine months of this year, we saw lower sales tax on gas and diesel than we had in the prior year. But because prices have gone up, that may change in the remaining three months of the year. And I think the transit fares, as we'll talk about later, continue to be driven by both higher ridership and higher fare compliance. And our parking revenues continue to be driven by higher utilization and the agency's desire and actions to optimize revenue. So on the transit fare side, there are two components of transit fares, passenger fares, as well as some other miscellaneous revenues, which come from proof of payment citations and paratransit. But the bulk of the revenue is from passenger fares, and those are above budget. Together, those two things are above budget by $14 million. The higher passenger fare revenue is driven primarily by single ride fares. And I think that's consistent with what we talked about during the budget cycle about the way people use transit has changed. And we're seeing fewer monthly fares and more single ride fares overall. I think something that was perhaps a little bit unexpected that we've seen throughout the year but is becoming more pronounced as as more of the year has elapsed, is that our visitor revenues are down a little bit, mostly coming from cable car and our other tourist revenues. But that is consistent with what we're seeing with hotel tax and passenger disembarkations at SFO. So there's just a little bit of distaste for traveling in the United States right now, and that is showing up in some of our passenger fare revenue. On the parking side, we divide our parking revenue into vehicle parking and then other sources of revenue. The other sources of revenue are retail and our garages, commuter shuttle, and mobility permits. But the vast majority of the revenue in this category is vehicle parking. And we divide that vehicle parking up into four different categories. Permits and fees, those would be things like construction permits, RPPs, fees for painting the sidewalk, Citations is citation revenue. Meters is the revenue that we generate at the meter. And garages is, of course, revenue generated from the garages. And as you can see from this chart, revenue is above budget by $14 million, primarily driven by meters. And again, similar to what we're seeing with the single ride versus the monthly fares, I think that shows a difference in the way people are using our facilities. Prior to the pandemic, we saw a lot more revenue in the garages, but now as people are maybe coming in, not for the whole day, but just for a single meeting, we're seeing a lot of revenue in the meters and less revenue in the garages. And similar to the pattern that we've seen all year, most of the growth in garages we're seeing in the neighborhoods. Downtown remains pretty flat, pretty unchanged. But we are seeing a lot of activity in the neighborhoods and a slight uptick here in the Civic Center. But mostly things are being driven by what's going on in the neighborhoods, which, again, I think is consistent with what we're seeing post-pandemic. If you're doing errands and parking at a meter or going out to dinner in your neighborhood or shopping in your neighborhood, you're parking at the meter. You're not parking downtown. I'm sorry, you're parking in a garage in your neighborhood. You're not parking in a garage downtown. On the expenditure side, we are basically on budget, and that has been just a really large effort throughout the agency to be really mindful about what we spend and to maintain our internal controls. So in summary, I think the fact that we are on budget in March and have been sort of consistently in this place of slightly higher than budget revenue and expenditure consistent with budget throughout the year just shows how much progress we've made as an agency and how hard we're working to demonstrate financial transparency and good fiscal stewardship. I think it also shows that the activities of the transit division to provide high quality transit service, to improve fare compliance, those things are working and they're manifested in this higher transit fare revenue. And the things that the streets division is doing to optimize parking revenues are also working and we're seeing those in our parking revenues. We continue to monitor our expenditures very closely, and we anticipate that with continued expenditure control, we will end the year on budget. And in general, the higher revenues that were slightly higher than budget revenues that we are seeing in this current year were incorporated into the budget that you all approved last month. and helped offset some of the harder choices that we thought we were going to have to make at the beginning of the cycle. And I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much, CFO Mahorder. I would like to open public comment for this item for two minutes each.

Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There'll be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time for this item. Seeing none in the room, I do have one accommodation request. Speaker, you've been unmuted. This is for item number 12.

This is Herbert Weiner. I'm glad to hear about the increased revenue. And I am wondering about the panic about the lack of funding that's coming in. Sometimes the city claims that it's in budget straits and some of the funding is discovered. I'm in a reserve judgment about the deficit. And I am skeptical of those measures that have been put before the public on muni funding. I voted against all of them. And I have a feeling I may vote against this one. I have a feeling that somehow Solvency is going to come at the 11th hour and Muni will be saved. So I'm glad that the revenue is coming in and there will probably be more of it and it may make the ballot measures unnecessary.

Thank you. No other speakers.

Thank you. Let's close public comment. Director Henderson.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the presentation, Bree. I have one two-part question. Sure. I was hoping that you could just explain the slight over-expenditure in the salaries category, and if you can attribute that to any, like maybe the special events that have happened or something like that. And then also the part two of that is, do you expect to that even with the hiring of the transit fare inspectors and some of the other more essential positions, that you expect that category to still level out at around what you budgeted by the end of the fiscal year?

So very astute assumption, yes. A large portion of that over expenditure and salaries is due to special events, particularly the special events that we saw in January. Parking control officers and transit operators and transit inspectors who are in the field to support the transit operators all work on overtime for special events. So that just was a little bit more expensive than we had anticipated. And in answer to the second part of your question, we started off, you know, hiring is a constant balance where you're sort of like opening the faucet and closing the faucet. And we started the year off with projecting an even higher over expenditure in salaries. So what I've been doing throughout the year is hiring slightly less than attrition. So that means if 10 people leave, we hire eight. And throughout the year, that's been slowly bringing us. This has actually been a process that's been happening for the last three years. Post-pandemic, we were doing a lot of hiring in anticipation that the city would really rebound and we'd see a lot of revenue come in. And then when I joined the agency in 2023 and looked at the numbers, I realized that the revenue was not coming in. And we had to start cutting back on hiring. But by then, we were already a little bit over our skis. And so we've had to kind of slowly. But we didn't want to impact operations. So as I said, if 10 people leave, we backfill eight. so that we've been slowly bringing our labor expenditure down over time. And we've held non-personnel and materials and supplies spending under budget to offset those costs. So this has all been like a very purposeful management towards, to your point, getting our labor in line with our expenditure. And I do anticipate that for next year, I think we will finally be there.

I am curious about what our thinking is around consumer sentiment. You were talking about the uncertainty around gas price and things like that. Do we think that we might be able to offset that in the sense that people will choose transit over driving and parking because of the cost of gas?

Yeah, that's something that I've been thinking about. And I was actually listening to a program on KQED just earlier in the week about interviewing different transit riders. And it really seems to be, at least based on this one particular article, people's response really seemed to depend on their particular circumstance. how often they drive, how far they drive, what kind of job they drive to, what are the hours of that particular job. So I think it is going to be an interesting trend that we'll watch evolve over the next six months. And it will probably also depend on how long gas supply continues to be constrained. If it's only for a month, maybe you don't change your habits because you figure everything's going to revert. But if six months later it's still happening, then maybe you start rethinking some of your transportation choices. So I think it is something that we are going to watch closely in the coming months.

And also, just to harken back to Director Wise's director's report talking about customer experience improvements at the garages, Those, in the slide that was talking about citations versus revenue, I mean, we'd always rather collect the revenue in a way that doesn't make people upset. So properly parking and paying at a meter is, whether people believe it or not, the preferable route. So I wonder if that growing revenue at the garages in particular, because it's a more seamless experience, is just another virtuous trend that we'd love to see grow. So those were all my comments. Vice Chair Kahina?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for your presentation, Bri. I had a question about, in slide five, that other category. I see that it went up by, or the delta is six there, a positive six, which is great. Curious to know if something I've seen anecdotally is a lot of bus wraps as of late. I'm curious to see if that is in this other category, or if you can explain just what the financial strategy is for that particular work stream.

So other is primarily composed of three things. investment income. So all of our funds are in a bank account that is invested by the, they're pooled with the other city funds, and they're invested by the treasurer tax collector. And the treasurer tax collector, I get a report every month on what our earnings were based on their investments. Some of the revenue does come from advertising, either on our shelters or on our vehicles. And the other portion of the revenue comes from leasing MTA properties. And where this particular... this particular amount of unexpected revenue over budget did come from advertising. I feel like I'm doing such a good job of educating you. You don't need me anymore. Director Henderson knows why we're spending too much on labor, and you know where the revenue is coming from. What a delight. We are seeing more interest in our advertising properties.

Got it. And I don't know if perhaps, director-wise, you could speak to this, or somebody from comms can. But I'm just really curious about that strategy, because I see it often, especially at the intersection of Mission and Geneva. A lot of buses are wrapped now. So I'm just curious to see if what I'm seeing anecdotally is actually what's happening in our books. We're actually seeing that interest has increased by 50%, by 60%. It seems like almost 80% from my anecdotal perspective. But I don't know if you could speak to that, Victoria.

Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. I don't know the exact numbers. But what I do know is during the pandemic, people didn't want to advertise all that much. But what the trends that we are seeing are people wanting to advertise more and more. Like the city's picking up, right? We are on the path to economic recovery. And so there's interest and more value that people are seeing in advertisement. And that is what we're seeing. And that is why I think you're noticing what you're noticing.

Got it. Thank you so much. And I think, you know, I just really appreciate that, and I don't want, this is not a knock on your presentation, that it's a boring presentation, but I think that's an exciting thing, because to be in this position, just like last year, there was a lot more conversation about where we were and how we were tracking things, but I think it's also a testament to to just how great you've retooled your team to do a lot of the work that happens behind the scenes to make sure that we're getting our reports in a more accurate state, that we're tracking and projecting in a way that feels better for us. So I think a boring presentation is a wonderful presentation coming from our finance, our CFO. Just a huge testament to just how great the team is working right now. So also a testament to you So thank you so much Brie.

Thank you. I would say a CFO loves nothing better than to be boring Very good any other questions or comments?

Thank you so much, Brie. Secretary Silva, please call the next item.

Directors, that places you on item 13, discussion and vote pursuant to admin code section 67.10d as to whether to invoke the attorney-client privilege and conduct a closed session conference with legal counsel. I would like to open public comment for this item for two minutes each. Members of the public wishing to provide comment will have two minutes each. There will be a warning at 30 seconds and a chime when the time is up. Any speakers can come up to the podium at this time. Seeing none in the room and no accommodation requests.

Very good. Public comment is now closed for this item.

Would you like to take a motion and a second to go into closed session?

Yes, I certainly would. May I have a motion and a second? So moved. Second. Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

On the motion to go into closed session, Director Chen?

Aye.

Chen, aye. Director Hemminger? Aye. Hemminger, aye. Director Henderson? Aye. Henderson, aye. Director Hinze? Aye. Aye. NZI, Director Kahina? Aye. Kahina, aye. Chair Tarloff? Aye. Tarloff, aye. The motion passes unanimously, and the board will now go into closed session. It'll just take a moment to switch over into closed session. Thank you.

Bye.

SFGov TV. San Francisco Government Television.

Thank you.

The board met in closed session and voted to settle the matter. Places you on item number 15, motion to disclose or not disclose the information discussed in closed session.

Motion to not disclose.

Second.

Secretary Silva, please call the roll.

On the motion to not disclose, Director Chen? Aye. Chen, aye. Director Heminger? Aye. Heminger, aye. Director Henderson?

Aye.

Henderson, aye. Director Hinze? Aye. Hinze, aye. Director Kahina? Aye. Kahina, aye. Chair Tarloff? Aye. Tarloff, aye. That motion passes unanimously and concludes the business before you today.

Thank you, colleagues, staff, and members of the public. We are now adjourned. Our next meetings will be on June 2nd and 16th.

Thank you.