sfmta's staff. i now call the june 18th, 2024 regular meeting of the municipal transportation agency, board of directors and parking authority commission to order. i would like to make one announcement at the beginning of this meeting upfront. and that is that items 10.2 c and item 11 will not be heard at today's meeting at the request staff and will instead be scheduled for a future meeting. we understand that members of the public may be here to speak on these items, and now that these items are not part of our formal agenda for today, you may of course, feel free to speak on them under item nine. that is general public comment and i believe secretary silva will repeat this announcement when we get to item nine. secretary. so would you please call the roll? director henderson i'm sorry, director henry. we'll come back

to director henry. she appears muted on the video. director tarlov here to present director karina. here to present chair ekin here. ekin present. coming back to director henry, i do see her on camera. director henry, can you unmute? director henry, on the roll call, present. very good. we are not, director hemminger is not expected today. and we are expecting director henderson to join us shortly. for the record, i note that director henry is attending this meeting remotely. director henry 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 similar sound producing device places you on item number four. approval of minutes for the june 4th regular meeting. thank you. directors are there any changes to the june 4th meeting? minutes if none, we'll open it to public . comment on item four. would anyone like to speak on item four? the meeting minutes from june 4th. okay seeing none close public comment. is there a motion and a second. so moved. second. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve the minutes. director henry. i hensey i director tarlov i tarlov i director kahina. i karina. hi, chair. ekin. hi. can i thank you? the minutes are approved. places you at item five communications. i have none. moving on to item six. introduction of new or unfinished business by board

members. colleagues, are there any items of new or unfinished business today? okay, i'm just going to raise one. a director checking in with you. any items from you? nope okay. not at this time. thank you. okay. i'm just going to raise one item, which is signage for our bicycle network, this is something i've been paying a little bit of attention to, and i've been reflecting a lot that signage is an issue of inclusivity and accessibility and equity, and there's, i think a little bit of a sense of people know how to get around. so we don't need you know, i don't know if that's intended or not intended, but it comes across that we sort of have a sense that people know and then the signage is not quite as intuitive as i'd like it to be. in an area that i've been noticing repeatedly is right at the end of jfk

promenade. when you get to that decision point of the car free space, do you go straight or do you go left and take the car free route that staff have so innovatively created all the way to ocean beach? and i'm out there a lot, and i just notice a lot of families like really confused right at that intersection because our signage says go direct to get to ocean beach, but it also says slow streets go that way. and it's just it's just so confusing. and i've helped a lot of families go, you know, there's a car free route come this way. and they go, oh, thank you so much. that's so helpful, and that just made me think about this question of signage as a way for people who are less, you know, are newer to bicycling, newer to our city, have come to coming to this world class destination. we've created, get around and navigate. and so i just wanted to raise that up because i find it confusing. i consulted my 17 year old informal youth commission advisory member. she finds it very confusing, and would love to just make sure that this amazing asset that

we've created is intuitive and accessible to a lot of people. so i just wanted to raise that up. for the record, are there any other comments of new or unfinished business? if none, we can open public comment on new and unfinished business. plus one for that. sorry. plus one for that comment. thank you. the slow street signs do not include skateboards, small wheels. these are the typical ones used by the people at un plaza. these are used for transportation, both sensitive to transitions and various forms of turbulence in the built environment that are not planned for either in nacto guides or by this mta. despite the fact that skateboards are protected in the sf vehicle code as non-motorized user propelled vehicles. we've

got three people walking with a scooter, or with a stroller and one person walking and still no skateboards. there's abundant real estate on this sign to include people who can only afford low maintenance, low cost forms of transportation like skateboards. and yet we continue to be left out of the conversation. even more on that soon. thank you. thanks for your comment. any other speakers on item six? okay, seeing none, we can close public comment and move on to the director's report. welcome back, director tumlin. item seven, the director's report. thank you. and it's good to be back, i've got a couple relatively simple updates for today's director's report, including an update on our taraval project, along with a bunch of event notices. so let's start with taraval and secretary silva. if you can bring up the photos, we're glad to announce that we're, continuing to make excellent progress on the final phase of the l taraval project. we've also been able to complete the additional special track work, which you all authorized a few

months ago. that work is now done ahead of schedule and has allowed us to save millions of dollars by doing that work now, rather than doing that work years from now, while also minimizing disruption to the service. so we're really glad to have been able to do that work, all of the disruptive work on the project is done. done. so, as you know, the project involved replacing all of the underground utilities, the sewer and water mains that were all at risk of failure for all of that underground infrastructure is complete. and is designed to last at least another 50 years, so that we're super proud of. and the pavement work is now fully complete. the work that remains to be done is all the fine finishing work. so the mosaics and artwork on the platforms, the landscape and then the final adjustments to the wire and the signals that

will then allow us to move into testing. we are still on schedule to resume, l taraval muni service this fall. and when we do so, that service will be faster, more reliable, safer, better, more accessible to people with wheelchairs than ever before. this has been an incredibly important project, also one that has been disruptive to the local merchant community. we've learned a lot of lessons, and we are glad that the worst of the project is over, next up, we've got some fun announcements, because libraries and muni are two great tastes that go great together, the sfmta, has partnered with the san francisco public library for muni discovery day on june 28th. a really big weekend. so there'll be an event that starts at 1:30 p.m. at the bayview

linda brooks burton branch library, where kids ages ten and up can meet muni operator hours and staff and learn tips about how to ride muni. there'll be a bingo card that kids can take on muni on their way to the excelsior branch library to redeem for prizes. and the aim, as always, is to encourage not only more youth ridership, but also making sure that youth understand that muni is a place where we all need to respect each other and get along, and also about how important muni is for making all of san francisco work and how young people can explore everything that san francisco has to offer. so we're happy about that partnership, next up, i wanted to just note that we joined, mayor london breed with our motorized cable car for the juneteenth parade last week. we had a good contingent of mta employees. and secretary silva, i think we've got some photos of that as well,

we also had had, state senator scott wiener, board chair ekin, as well as director henderson and her family were able to join with us, along with human rights commission executive director cheryl davis, i think you can see in the photos our staff were enlisted into duty to shake pompoms to celebrate this remarkable national holiday, next up, in terms of celebration and pride is pride weekend, one of the biggest events of the year for muni and traffic. the sfmta, along with df staff, rec park, the san francisco puc and the airport will join as one contingent in the pride parade. i will be joining with them. we also have a significant number of staff who will be participating in the trans march, next friday, june 28th, showing our unwavering support

for lgbtq rights, include honoring and making visible the trans staff that we have at the agency. this is also a huge event for us. we've got pretty much all of our parking control officers and their supervisors out there on the streets directing traffic, helping tens of thousands of visitors find their way around the city. and it is also, of course, yet another event where we celebrate the real spirit of san francisco. and finally, i can't believe i'm getting to announce this. this is so exciting to me. it's also a request. one of the biggest requests that came out of the board budget workshop in january was the development of a merch store. and so we finally, as of today, have our first muni product out that will be

available to the public. and of course, it is the muni ugly holiday sweater. we're very proud that and secretary zola. yeah, you can bring up the image . we're very proud that we were able to have staff design this in-house to capture the true spirit of san francisco and public transit and muni. you're gonna make her cry. christmas came early. the design is based on the green, green, and red color of f-line car number 1055, which is painted in philadelphia's 1947 livery. it features cable cars in honor of the cable cars 150th anniversary. it features the transamerica building in honor of the renewal of this iconic building. it has parrots and seals and dungeness dungeness crabs, and it costs $5,055,

which is less than bart's. not to mention not that we have a rivalry. we may be a little late out of the gate, but we're catching up, it costs $55 plus shipping and handling, and it is the first part of what we hope to be a much expanded merch store with the real aim of building community and connection to muni. what is clear is that people from all over san francisco love muni more than they have in all of the years that we've been doing community survey work, every year since 2001, people understand what muni has been through and how we've recovered the ways in which we have fought in the worst economic time to make sure that muni is fast, frequent, reliable, clean, safe and accessible to the people who need it the most. and we've not used any agency money in order

to make this happen. everything will be done. pre-sale. the sweaters will ship in october, so order now because they are certain to sell out and what is the url sfmta.com/sweater? sfmta .com/ sweater. order yours today while supplies last. thank you, thank you, director tomlin. colleagues what questions do you have for director tomlin on the director's report? any questions or comments? so happy about the sweater. a lot of great highlights, but yes, like i lobbied hard for this sweater. so i'm really, really happy about it. and, just went to the website really quickly. and just really congratulations to the team, on being able to, to source the design and put this all together to make it super accessible for folks. to be able to, give this to their family

members during the holidays, i did also want to, congratulate the team on all the incredible work they did on the l taraval. like, i think it's so great to hear that all the disruptive pieces of it are done, and i just wanted to. i give you space, jeff, to talk about a little bit more. like. what does that mean for, the folks that live along taraval, folks that. what does that mean for, merchants? what does that. so if you could help us just paint a picture of what is what is done look like for the folks that have been living with this project for, a number of years now? yeah, we i think, really need to acknowledge just how incredibly disruptive underground utility work is, and while all the project has been branded as a muni project, the muni work has been the easiest part of it, replacing the sewer mains along with all of the water and sewer connections to

every property, has been extremely disruptive to the corridor. that has meant not only c street. that was like, you know, jaggedy and dug up, but also significant rolling losses of parking while the crews were working on every individual block. and that loss was certainly felt by the local merchants. we are glad that we will not have to ever do this again, at least for another 50 years, and, and, you know, really want to acknowledge how hard this was for the local community, but also how necessary the work was, particularly to fix that underground infrastructure that was at risk of complete collapse, as well as to make sure that the muni line was accessible to people with disabilities. for the first time in its history, as you'll recall, you know, two years ago

and you took the l taraval, you would step off the train literally into traffic with absolutely no way to board a wheelchair or a scooter or a stroller or, you know, for somebody using a walker. so this is really one of the most important projects that we had to do in order to comply with the law, and also to make sure that that service was allowed to continue to operate the track work underneath the pavement were, were were basically rotting timbers set into sand. this was the original infrastructure from when the sunset district was rolling sand dunes and, and, you know, was built by real estate speculators, perhaps not to the highest standard. the work is now both for the trackway, the street, the water, the sewer,

the power, the telecommunications line, the overhead lines are all being built now to correct modern standard. that's great to hear. thank you jeff. that's all. chair thank you, i think i think that's a really helpful sort of understanding of the project, that you started to describe director tumlin and i think about it as connected also to the, the mayor's housing goals and that we want to welcome new people to san francisco. this has been a very important part of the mayor's leadership. and that we want, naturally, for people to be able to be served by high quality transit. so that corridor is an important part of growth. and as you said, maybe some of the easiest work was the actual transit work. some of that underlying work is really about welcoming and supporting new people. to be able to live in san francisco. so and that is about really modeling our value of inclusivity. so that difficult work is about much more than this transit line. i'm

thinking about it that way. i just wonder if you think about it that way as well. yeah. that's right. so the city is committed to building 80,000 new housing units as part of our requirements to the state, but also part of our requirement in order for san francisco to continue to welcome immigrants and misfits and weirdos, which has always been a critical part of san francisco's role in the world, our lack of housing production over the last decades has made it so much more difficult for newcomers to find their way here, and it is also created significant transportation problems. so the best transportation policy is always a good housing policy. so all of this work together, both the transportation and the underground infrastructure work, unlock the ability for this corridor to do more. it unlocks the ability for us to run two car trains with far greater frequency on taraval street. as the corridor is ready to do that, so that we can make sure

that we're supporting the city's economic and housing growth without exacerbating our traffic congestion. and it also makes sure that there's enough water and sewer capacity and power in order to meet the needs of new residents, but also to make sure that the existing residents can continue to flush their toilets. yes thank you, and just as we did with, i guess just as we did with van ness, it would be nice at some point. i'm sure the team is doing kind of like a postmortem of what did we learn and what lessons could we carry forward as we keep continuously improving with new projects at some point in a director's report or whenever you deem appropriate? it'd be interesting to, if you wanted to share any of those lessons learned. actually i would really like to do that and to invite the project team once everything is done to come and explain not only the how we succeed, we learn from the mistakes of previous projects like venice, but also what it taught us in terms of the next things that we

need to get done. i think that the work that supervisors engardio and chan did to identify a city wide pool of funding to mitigate the impact of major construction work on small businesses, was a very interesting potential. policy shift and perspective from a city wide level that i think could help all of the departments that have to do major infrastructure work to be able to do that work while minimizing negative impacts, and also respecting the fact that as departments, we have very little flexibility on the use of funds. so the public utilities commission in particular, cannot use ratepayer funds in order to support small businesses during a construction project. but we could choose to do that as as the city as a whole. and so it raising that question, i think, is one of the important lessons.

i think no other colleagues i'll open it to public comment on item 11, the director's report, item seven, the directors report. i do have one speaker card, alita dupre. thank you. good afternoon. chair ekin and members. alita dupre. for the record, she and her with team folds. i'm one of those misfits in here. but i ask you to leave to speak. anyway, a very good report. i haven't used taraval in a while. it used to use it every day. so i want to get out there and ride it and see what our disabled access looks like out there. and i appreciate the mentions of pride . very important. i don't plan to be at any of the parades. it's just too hard. but. but thank you for doing it anyway. and i'm interested in the

merchandise store. i have some merchandise on, and, when i go to new york, they have they actually have a new york transit museum in brooklyn. been going to it since 1980. and if you're not able to go all the way to brooklyn, you can buy merchandise, at their annex in grand central terminal, the world's largest railroad station. i go there all the time, but for pride, i think we should put pride stuff on the trains. maybe something. this i found. in new york, it's got colors and numbers and letters and just thought i'd show that to you. and so, these are good things going on, and it's not easy being here. and, so thank you for the mention of disabled access, i've been waiting for taraval for a long time, and,

it's a very special line to me because i spent a formative summer for me here in san francisco, which involved, almost daily use of taraval. so, anyway, i look forward to what we'll do for pride month and advance the cause of equality, equity and welcoming the system. thank you. thank you for your comment. are there any other speakers on item seven, the director's report? okay. seeing none, we'll close item seven, please call the next item places you on item number eight, the citizens advisory council report . good afternoon directors. i am vice chair arvin from the citizens advisory council, filling in for chair leifer. thanks for having me. today. we had two presentations from staff at our june meeting. one was a muni update from director kirschbaum. we did not vote on any motions on that item, but i did just want to call out that, many of our members expressed a

real appreciation for a lot of the work that has been done on muni reliability over the years, and just a feeling that muni is more reliable now than in any recent years that we remember. so i just wanted to call that out. we also had a presentation on the mid valencia bikeway corridor update, we were presented with some work on a updated design that will include side running bike lanes. we really thought it was a thoughtful incorporation of a lot of the feedback that has been given to the sfmta on the project, and really thoughtful consideration of all the different constraints and different, stakeholders involved. and so we did pass a motion that we all voted yes on, so staff will be here later asking for your endorsement to continue proposing a side running lane, continue designing that and implementing that. and we are asking you to give staff that endorsement today. and that's my report. thank you.

thank you. that's very helpful and very clear. we appreciate you being here, colleagues, are there any questions for mr. arvin, director henderson? yeah, just just one question about the , the conversation as it relates to the parklets and the ones that are sort of suspended out in, closer to the street versus the ones that are up against the sidewalk. did you all have any discussion about that? there was discussion on that, and actually, because we have had multiple meetings on this topic, one of the few things we did discuss was actually the parklets, and we did not include anything about the parklets in our motion that we voted on. but i do think there was a feeling from some members that parklets are in some ways a temporary thing. and so to have a bike lane that may shift back and forth depending on, you know, one business moves out, one moves in and wants a parklet was a bit of a concern for us, but not enough to not endorse

continuing with this proposal. thank you. okay. seeing none, we'll thank you for your report and thank you to public comment on item eight, the citizens advisory council report. any comments? okay. seeing none, please call the next item places you on item 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, and as chair, ekin shared at the beginning of the meeting, this is also the time for any members of the public who would like to comment on items 10.2 c and item 11, which have been removed from today's agenda and will be heard at a future meeting. i have a speaker card for alita dupree and flo kelly. hi, i'm flo kelly and i've been volunteering for years with the coalition on homelessness, and i just wanted to let you know. that we have

received a notice from benjamin peterson from the dpw and he says that construction on winston street will not begin in july. so he wrote the various locations of the number 68 project, which includes paving and curb ramp work on winston between buckingham and lake merced, will not be starting construction in july. rather, july is when we expect to issue the notice to proceed to our contractor, which starts the pre-construction process wherein the contractor submits the various plans, schedules and other necessary documents to public works for review and approval. typically, this process takes a few months. in my personal experience, anywhere from 2 to 3 months is very common. so my best estimate for

start of construction is september or october. the various locations of number 68 project includes 38 blocks of paving and 140 new curb ramps throughout out districts one, five, seven, and ten over the course of 546 calendar days. we do not yet know within this project, when our contractor will begin work on winston, these sorts of scheduling conversations typically happen once the notice to proceed has been formally issued. i can't say for sure that our contractor will or will not be open to adjusting their schedule to accommodate sfmta and sox plans for winston. however, on past extenuating circumstances like this. thank you. that's your time. yeah, i know your comment.

okay. thank you. i was just trying to get that last sentence in, miss dupree. using the overhead thing again with your leave. thank you again, chair amanda ekin and members alida dupree. for the record, she and her with team foltz. i took bart today. i didn't do any muni. maybe i'll do some later, but i save $0.40 by doing bart today, so we should work some more on fare integration, mtc talks about that a lot. i go to their meetings about that. so i ask you to think about that. i'm going to go back to march 5th. we're talking about budget. i'm going to show you something in the, overhead that bothered me deeply, and i feel i have the right to speak. continues to

privilege riders who use clipper. continues to privilege riders who use clipper despite demographic data that shows most clipper use riders are more resource than riders who pay cash, i admit that when i read that, i was quite offended. and why we didn't catch that, i don't know. so i use clipper. i have reduced fare. i don't think being a disabled veteran in desert storm is a privilege. yes, i'm glad that i served my country, but i have a clipper program because it helps me. i have some rough times, so i don't think that's your sentiment, but i'm asking, why would somebody say like that and put in a report? it made me not want to ride muni. so i ask of you, when you do these reports to remember that many of us who use clipper were not privileged.

we need it because we have our needs and sometimes we just having a bad day. thank you. thank you for your comment and i'll just share with you. we're not allowed to engage in a q&a, but i have a lot of thoughts and response to that comment. i welcome you to join my virtual office hours any time, that's monday's virtually the day before the board meeting so we can have a discussion about that. thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon. good afternoon. board members alan braddell here, i'm here today to talk about a question, that board member hemminger asked, of sfmta staff at the last meeting on tuesday, june 4th. it was item number 12, and it was about the proposed west portal project, at the three hour, 34 minute and 29 second timestamp, of that meeting, board member hemminger asked, i think we had some testimony that the

horseshoe was originally designed to have the busses in it, and then at some point they were moved out and you don't think it's a good idea to move them back? do i have that right? i think we had some testimony that. and so now what was the response of the sfmta staff member to that? and it was, i don't know if the horseshoe was designed for busses or not. the sfmta staff member said, i don't know if the horseshoe was designed for busses or not. okay. and this sfmta staff member who says they don't know if the horseshoe is designed for busses or not, is in charge of a project proposal that seeks to redesign the public use and design of this public space at the west portal, staff. asian horseshoe okay, let that sink in for a minute. board members that's really important, this sfmta staff member went on to say next, julie kirschbaum has strongly advised against using

this horseshoe for busses because of the negative impacts that it would have for operations. so for years now, sfmta has been using has because of negative impacts on operations, been dropping bus passengers off in the street rather than in the horseshoe. so the question we should all have for julie kirschbaum and we need to bring her here, is what operational impacts are so severe for sfmta and the horseshoe that would cause sfmta to drop passengers off into the street and create rider and pedestrian conflict with automobiles. that's the question for julie kirschbaum. let's bring her here and ask that question. thank you for your thank you. next speaker, please. if you want to speak under public general public comment, you can simply approach the podium. or you, are you filling out speaker card for a future item? yes. okay. any other speakers?

for a moment. sorry. cool. good my name is aaron bridgewater. i'm the ceo of a 27 year old s.f. founded skateboard company making boards for transportation, recreation. i'm an educator. and after care programs and sfusd teaching skateboarding for transportation . i'm an advocate for equitable laws for all small wheeled devices, a member of the policy working group for the walking and rolling plan, formerly the active communities plan, i presented to the sf cta as a subject matter expert on skateboarding for transportation, and i've spent countless hours in meetings like these with the police commission, private sessions

with dpw engineers and commissioners, office hours with district nine supervisor mandelman, and regularly attend meetings with the city's slow streets stewards. two weeks ago, the mta refurbished its installation of botts dots on dolores, a clear indication of how this department intends to address the mobility of skateboarders and small wheeled modes writ large. deborah walker, chair of the police commission, said to me just the other day that stopping skateboarding with police force is not crime fighting. following this logic, we can say that installing dangerous and deadly infrastructure on our streets for legally allowed non-automotive modes is neither in line with vision zero or this department's broader efforts at cultivating, quote, active communities. director tomlin's efforts at preventing skateboarding on dolores have been underway since 2020, and thus far have caused the death of a 50 year old cyclist in the middle of the night, and indirectly led to the expenditure of over $130,000 of police overtime spent sending cops in riot gear to tie up innocent minors and hold them in the cold in the middle of the night, without access to bathrooms or calls to their parents. not to mention the cost of subsequent litigation shown here. the mta's willingness to

indulge the demands of wealthy property owners and dolores park neighborhood must stop, and a new path of pro-social community engagement must be paved immediately. in collaboration between escort rec and park, sfpd and the city's legacy skateboarding businesses. community leaders. lest the same horrors play out again in two weeks time, the city has known about this event for a long time. last year's events were tried to prevent 18 months in advance. no community outreach ever. thank you for your comment . next speaker, please. okay. seeing no other speakers for item nine, we can go on to the consent calendar, please. director, is that places you on item ten your consent calendar. these items are considered to be routine and will be acted upon by a single vote, unless a member of the board or public wishes to consider an item separately. for all speakers providing public comment, please identify which item number you are speaking to. item 10.1 requesting the controller to a-lot funds and to draw warrants

against such funds available, or will be available in payment of the listed claims against the sf mta. those are items a and b and the agenda item 10.2 approving various routine parking and traffic modifications. items a and b also in the agenda. item 10.3 amending transportation code division two, section 801 to update parking restricted hours on portions of 11th street unless authorized by the department of public health or the fire department to conduct inspections of mobile food facilities. item 10.4 authorizing the director of transportation or designee, to execute and file a claim with the metropolitan transportation commission for approximately $300 million in operating assistance, subject to finalization of the state budget and unforeseen economic volatility, which claimed to include for allocations of operating assistance from the transportation development act, state transit assistance assembly bill 1107, bart district sales tax, and regional measure two funds for fiscal year 2025 to support the sfmta's

operating budget. item 10.5 approving the agreement between the city and county of san francisco and l3 harris technologies for radio maintenance services, contract number sfmta 202356 for radio system maintenance services. software updates and, as needed, professional services to maintain muni transit radio system and its constituent components for a term of three years and a contract amount not to exceed approximately $7 million. items 10.6 approving roadway shared spaces. street closures of a commercial street from 107ft to 147ft west of sansome street, sunday, july 21st, 2024, through sunday, july 20th, 2020 5:07 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily and b commercial street between sansom and montgomery streets. lee to store street between sacramento and clay streets. sunday, july 21st, 2024, through sunday, july 20th, 2020 5:07 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily and making environmental review

findings as an item. 10.7 authorizing the director of transportation to execute the special transit fare fast pass agreement between the city and county of san francisco and the san francisco bay area rapid transit district bart, in an amount not to exceed $9.8 million in a five year term. that concludes your consent calendar. thank you, secretary silva, for covering all of those details, i would like to open up for public comment on item ten, the consent calendar. i have a speaker card for alita dupree, items 10.4 and 10.7. thank you again, chair amanda eken and members. alita dupree. for the record, she and her with team foltz and talk about, 10.4 and 10.7, so it is very important that we file this claim, it does seem ministerial at first, but it is subject to the finalization of the state budget. so i hope that we can lean on, on our friendly folks

in sacramento to get the budget passed and make sure that it includes this item. so we can get that deposit so we can do what we need to do, because muni needs all the help it can get, 10.7 is essential. i haven't been keeping up with the full fares because i've been getting reduced fare for over a decade, but, back further in the day 2009, 2010, i think i did by fast passes. and i had one of those little paper ticket things and had to put extra money on it if i wanted to go to oakland. and, i guess fast track, maybe was one of our first attempts at doing a fare integration. and, there are there are some very distinct advantages to using bart in san francisco, and i don't want bart and muni to be

competitive with each other, but instead to be complementary with each other. and that's why i talk about fare integration. that's why i use bart today. so hopefully this fast pass will help us to create more public transit trips in the city and to further, build on the cooperation between us here at muni and san francisco and our friends at bart in oakland, of which i actually do go to their meetings and write letters. see you there. thank you. are there any other speakers on the consent calendar item ten. okay. seeing none, we'll close public comment. colleagues, is there a motion and a second on the consent calendar minus item 10.2 c, i move the item. is there a second? second? call the roll on the motion to approve the consent calendar. director henderson a henderson i director

hinsey i nci director tarloff i tarlov i director kehena i kehena i ekin. hi can i thank you. the consent calendar is approved. thank you. let's go ahead and call the next item. next item will be item number 12. presentation and discussion regarding the 2024 mid-year state and local legislative update. hi. good afternoon, chair ekin and members of the board, if we could go ahead and bring up the slide presentation, an i'll go ahead and get started . okay. great so each year this board adopts a legislative program with broad priorities and principles to guide our advocacy efforts over the course of the years, federal, state, and local legislative sessions. let me stop for a second there. i think i forgot to introduce myself, didn't i? so i'm monique webster, i'm the acting director of government affairs, so again, each year this board adopts a program and last adopted the

program for 2024 last november. and we're here bringing to you an informational update about the work that we're doing, and before we move into the presentation, there are three, three things that i want to note for you, first, what we're showing here today is only a is a subset of the legislation that we're working on. we're not showing everything here, and a more comprehensive summary can be found in the regular updates that we provide to the board throughout the year, and those are the written updates that come to you. second, a reminder that as a city agency, sfmta does not take positions on proposed legislation. instead, we must seek a city wide position, which is what we do through the city state legislature committee. and that's chaired by the mayor's office and includes representatives from various city departments and the board of supervisors. and last, you'll notice that there aren't any slides in the in the presentation today that cover federal legislation. and that's primarily because given the

split congress right now, there's most of the action. and the largest focus of our team's work is on, getting the political support that's needed to secure competitive federal grant funding, and, and most of those are funded through the, the bill and through the, the iija that were passed by the federal government over the past years. and we'll speak about some of those verbally during this presentation. let's see if i can get these moving. okay. so beginning with the state shown here are the four state priority areas that this board adopted for 2024. those are funding vision zero parking modernization and automated vehicles. and we'll highlight specific bills in each of the in each of the slides as we go forward. so, as you know, funding has been a huge focus for director tumlin and our agencies efforts. you'll recall that in last year's budget, following months of aggressive advocacy and in the face of an

emerging state deficit, public transit won a commitment from the state of a multi year, $5.1 billion package. the bay area is in line to receive $1.1 billion of that and we can't emphasize enough how critically important that funding is. we, along with bart, ac transit, golden gate transit, caltrain and other operators are reliant on that to support our operating budgets and to buy more time until we reach the fiscal cliff, mtc estimates that the state funding, combined with funds that the region will redirect from other uses, will save nearly 3 million. our 3,000,000 hours of service across the region. however, we have to keep in mind that this funding isn't guaranteed, and so the promises are not guaranteed. so we actually have to come back each year and the state has to take the state has to react upon, each, each year in order to appropriate the funds. and so what that means is that the

fight is happening now and it's ongoing, to keep those funds, which gets, of course, you know, more and more challenging in the face of the very large budget deficits that the state is facing right now. so as a highly tangible reminder of that, in late april of this year, the initial tranche of this funding was frozen by the administration. and that was the day before it was set to be released. and that was in order to put it on, to put it on hold so that it could be, held back pending the outcome of state budget negotiations that are currently underway. so we're not at the finish line yet with the state budget, but there is highly positive news in that both the governor and the legislature, his respective budget proposals keep the $5.1 billion intact, so that all indicates options right now are that funding will continue to be maintained this year, another area, though, where the governor and the legislature's budget proposals are not in alignment is the active transportation

program. and that's an also an important program for us. it provides grant funding for safe biking and walking projects. it's chronically underfunded and oversubscribed each cycle. many, many worthwhile projects don't don't get funded. so we've relied on this program to fund a number of important streets projects over the years. and we're looking to it to match, in this cycle, the federal funds for the howard streetscape project. so, as stated on the slide here, the governor proposed a deep cut of $600 million, which would have eliminated which which would have eliminated or or will have the impact of eliminating this next cycle of funding. and the legislature in turn, has has thankfully has rejected that cut and instead proposed to shift the source of funding to the state highway account. so these are our few of many items that are under discussion and under negotiation right now between the between the governor and the legislature. and so we expect a

final three party budget agreement to be adopted by june 30th. so stay tuned, so moving away from the state budget and to give just for a minute, a little bit more orientation to where we are in the state legislative calendar. late last month, the state's legislative year had hit the midway point or the half time point, and any regular bill that did not pass out of its house of origin, with a few exceptions, is dead and can no longer be acted upon. and to give some perspective to that, out of over 2100 bills that were introduced in this session on, about 1400 or 65% survived, all the remaining bills must now make it through the next set of policy committees and final floor votes. by august 31st. sb 1031 is one of those bills, and it was to pay the way for a regional ballot measure in 2026 to raise up to $1.5 billion annually for 30 years, in order

to prevent service cuts where federal and state dollars are depleted. so there's the same state dollars that we were just talking about, and also to improve and stabilize systems over the long term. sb 1031 passed out of the senate, by the deadline. however, it was facing strong headwinds. and as was reported to you at your last meeting in the director's report, was halted by senators wiener and wahab in order to allow more time to build consensus around a new bill for 2025. so that reset was kicked off last week by mtc with the i should say, the metropolitan transportation commission. with the announcement of the formation of a select committee that will meet over the summer and fall with the intent of developing and endorsing a legislative proposal before the end of the year. so i'm going to turn it over now to my colleague, katie angotti, who's going to move forward with the rest of the state legislation. thank you. good afternoon. chair. ekin. board members, i'm katie angotti. i'm the manager of state and federal government

affairs for the sfmta. i'm going on to the next bill related to transportation funding, which was our top legislative priority for this year. is ab 2043, which tries to make sure that public paratransit service providers such as ourselves, are reimbursed for the non-medical trips that they provide. there we go. our next state priority is vision zero, sb 960, which was authored by our own senator wiener, the goal of this bill is to ensure that state roads, which are often main streets like our 19th avenue, venice or sloat, are safe for anyone who wishes to walk, bike or wait for the bus. this bill seeks to accelerate the development of safe state routes and attract more riders to public transit by requiring caltrans to develop a transit priority policy, and requires projects funded by the shop to include complete streets and transit priority facilities,

the next bill that is supportive of vision zero is sb 689, which seeks to reduce barriers to converting a vehicular traffic lane to a bicycle lane, transit lane, or pedestrian walkway for projects that fall within coastal development areas. our next bill related to vision zero is ab 2583, and this bill is very much in line with our traffic safety efforts. it was recently amended so this slide is slightly what's in the bill is slightly different than what's on the slide. but it requires cities to include walk zones in their circulation elements and instead of requiring cities to change all of their school zone signage from when children are present to specific time frames, that's what the bill was planning to do, is introduce it, it now was amended to allow cities the ability to use several different sign types, including those to

the picture on the slide is an example of what we would want to avoid because it's very confusing for drivers. there's a lot of time frames on there to comprehend and to digest. as you're driving through a school zone. and so we worked very hard with the author's office to make sure that that was not the result, that this bill would not result in that, most importantly, and i will not name what city that is in, but most importantly, it would reduce, the speed limit from 25 to 20 in school zones by january 2028. and we know that even small reductions in vehicle speed can substantially decrease the likelihood of severe injury or death in the event of a collision. so we are supportive of that speed reduction in school zones from 25 to 20. although many of our school zones are already 15. but for the remaining ones, it would be reduced to 20, our next legislative priority area was parking, this bill by senator

glazer requires that the late payment penalty for a parking violation cannot exceed 30% of the original parking penalty, and also extends the time that people have to pay the violation , as you know, sfmta receives a lot of revenue from parking citation, late penalties. and we're working to understand the impacts that this bill would have on the agency and what we could potentially do to reduce those impacts. and the final state priority, is autonomous vehicles. so ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles on our streets was a priority that many board members expressed when we met privately prior to the beginning of this legislative session, the sfmta's autonomous vehicle team, the sf fire department, and the sfcta have been really leading on this bill. ab 1777, and deeply involved in shaping its details, this bill makes a number of changes to the california

vehicle code, which are aimed at improving communications between first responders and autonomous vehicles and authorizing law enforcement officials to issue moving violations. fines to be mailed to av companies, which is not currently allowed in law. so with that, i'll hand it over to my colleague joel to go over our local, our local update. thank you. okay, good afternoon, chair ekin. vice chair. karina. directors. joel ramos, local government affairs manager with the sfmta, i've got the unique privilege of working with a team of two other individuals that aren't here today, but are hard at work. chadwick lee and janet martinson are always helping us out, a lot. align and legislate with the san francisco board of supervisors, who are also currently meeting right now, right downstairs, our role in the local government affairs team is to do our best to make

sure that we're getting everything that we need from the san francisco board of supervisors for our legislation. and for them to get what they need from us and staff, for their legislation, the slide that i brought up for you right now kind of prioritize some of the key bits of legislation that we've been working on this year. i won't go over each of them in detail just out of the interest of time, but probably the top four that you see will go into a little bit more, namely the new bus procurement for greener fleets, the train control system upgrade, the speed safety camera implementation and the potrero yard modernization program project, there are bits of legislation as well that i listed here that are coming from the board of supervisors that we're working on, i should say that the special events fees, legislation that is coming, sponsored by the mayor, is making its way through the board of supervisors as we speak and should probably come here soon. and the hope would be that we can talk a little bit more about the nuances involved with that. but, i won't get into much more

than that, but happy to take more questions then the other real important one that i think is a little bit of an update that just happened, yesterday, the vision zero contract streamlining legislation was actually continued to the call of the chair in, the budget, i'm sorry, in the rules committee because there was just so much more work that they felt that they needed to do to make sure that contractors were getting were getting their due in terms of being able to capture all of the opportunities that could come with any of the vision zero projects that we didn't want to leave out. and i shouldn't say we, but the city, because it was supervisor chan's legislation, so i'll talk a little bit more just to refresh your memories on what's ahead. the local priority of bus procurements for a greener fleet. this is our ambition to make sure that we are doing everything we can to do our part of the city's climate plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. gas emissions. you'll recall that we are the greenest fleet in north

america. we're very proud of that, however, some of those the vehicles that we have are reaching the end of their useful life, as is pretty much, you know, run of the course, and we are fully anticipating having to get some legislation through the board to procure some more hybrid vehicles and some battery electric busses, i love the fact that this is so diverse in terms of like our vehicle fleet. it's kudos to director kirschbaum for keeping the fleet diverse so that if something goes wrong or if a buyer goes out, we have different types of vehicles to be able to backfill whatever problems we might run into, the next big project. i think that we're spending a lot of time with our board of supervisors is the train control upgrade project. what staff often refer to as teacup, this is a big deal . maybe the biggest pieces of legislation that i think that our current sitting board will ever see with regard to the mta, there is still lots of work to be done in this regard this year , staff has been getting really

close to locking down the agreement with the contractor and there will be some more legislation to get into the contract that we'll need to put into place for designing, building, maintaining, implement , putting, all of that to make our trains just for the public will recall, this is the system that, our subway is running on from. that's as old as, like from the 1980s. we still have the floppy disk that we're using . this is the system that will allow for trains to run more smoothly. efficiently and reliably, not just in the subway, but on the street as well. we're all really excited about this upgrade. and then another big, exciting piece of legislation that we're working closely with the board of supervisors on is the automated speed enforcement. and implementing that where those cameras will go, who will build them, who will maintain them, how the data will be collected and processed. all of these things will require a little bit more legislation from the board of supervisors that we're going to be here to support and make

sure gets implemented as smoothly as possible. and then finally, i think the, the big project that i think everybody is really excited about is this the building progress program and particularly the potrero yard modernization component of that program. this is a really big deal. we've got a huge federal grant, that we're applying for right now, $150 million. this is an opportunity for the public in case they aren't aware of this project, this is us taking our potrero yard, effectively rebuilding it from an really in need of a more than just a facelift, but we would actually rebuild it completely, put new housing up there, store more vehicles, train more staff there, do everything that we need to maintain our bus fleets. there it's going to be an exciting project that really everybody is excited about, but there still is some work that needs to be done on this to make sure that we're maximizing the a that get, getting the right, the right plan that's accepted by the developer that's working with meta, on this. it's really

exciting. and i'm very, very fortunate to be able to work on this with staff who is also very excited to get this project implemented, so that's where i'm going to leave it. just out of respect for time, but i'm happy to take any other questions. my colleagues, acting director webster here is. and, manager katie angotti is also as well. if you have any questions. thank you. thank you, team, for the update. i'm going to open up the public comment first and then we'll have board questions. are there any members of the public who would like to speak on the midyear legislative update? i have a speaker card for alita dupree. thanks again, chair amanda ekin and members alita dupree. for the record, she and her team folds. overall, there's a lot of good things in this report. i am saddened that, sb 1031, imploded. i would have liked to have seen more work on

that because we need funding for transit. and i enlighten you that in new york, there is a crisis going on with congestion pricing, i don't know if any of you are familiar with that, but look it up. it's very complicated. and the future of the subway is at stake. i want us to get the electric vehicles and the train control. i've spoken about that quite a bit. that's one of my most important subjects. so very appreciative for the, jeff and others letting me know when you're going to talk about that, i am thinking about, bill 1777 about autonomous vehicles and i am a user of autonomous vehicles. i've used them 24 times so far. some have used them a lot more than me, i definitely support accountability, and, and i think that any vehicle should be accountable, whether it has a person in it or not, i don't

want this to be a hackable situation where somebody could look me up and seeing that i'm riding an autonomous vehicle, and they know that i go to the meetings and they know that i wear a skirt. they decide to hack into the vehicle and ruin my afternoon. the bill should not be about that. instead the bill should be a way that there can be a collaborative mission, because i don't think emergency response should ever be discriminatory. and so some attitudes really have to change on the part of our emergency responders. i use autonomous vehicles, and i want the best system that we can have for those, which includes accountability. thank you. thank you so much. are there any other speakers for item 12? the mid-year legislative update?

aaron, again, here are the comment on the vision zero update. these are my students at cesar chavez elementary school. here's them learning how to use a wrench to change the wheels on a skateboard for transportation. this is my graduating class of fifth graders on their first ride around the neighborhood. these are my middle schoolers learning how to go fast and make tight turns. this is my community of friends who regularly ride the bus up to the tops of the hills in san francisco. this past weekend, we rode 48 miles all around the city. nobody was hurt. this is san francisco's small wheeled infrastructure. huge cracks in the street, huge cracks in the bike lanes, massive botts dots on dolores minimum viable product, ada accommodations on the curbs, and those same group of students falling when they

try to mount the sidewalk. if we're serious about vision zero and building a massive next generation of people who do not rely on cars and could augment their bus trips and can afford to travel in ways that are almost as fast as bicycles, but don't require owning a bike. knowing how to maintain a bike, locking up a bike, storing a bike, or carrying a bike up the stairs in their apartment. we need to be thinking about small wheels. we need to think beyond the ada. we need to think about what it looks like to prepare for things that have been around for 80 years, and yet are not accounted for. the california law allows cities to make their own skateboarding laws. skateboarding law in san francisco is pretty good, but it's planning for it is abysmal. and y'all are the ones who hold the keys, we often point to the dpw as the reason why things can't happen, and the dpw point right back at you to talk about why things can't happen. so

let's put our heads together and actually make this work for these kids. thank you for your comment. any other speakers on item 12? the legislative update? hi, my name is mark solomon. i served on your cac about a decade ago and i'm a regular cyclist. i don't think it is possible for us to implement vision zero by engineering our way to safety. it's going to require much more than that because we cannot engineer every single street. most streets in san francisco might be scary at times, but they are not particularly dangerous. by the numbers. but we need to be sure that there is an enforcement component in this. and the san francisco police department has declined, and this body has declined to get enforcement happening so that there are actual consequences to motorists who are violating the laws. the source of most collisions and injuries and deaths are motorists not following the law. that has to be paramount here. the concrete contractors love you guys for pouring the concrete, but that's not really moving the needle. as we move forward, please figure out ways

to get both bike lane enforcement that could have solved the entire debacle on valencia street, as well as sfpd enforcement for moving violations. thank you. thank you for your comment. any other speakers on this item? okay. we'll close public comment on item 12. and colleagues, the this is just an informational item, but it is before you for any questions or comments for staff on the midyear legislative update. your presentation was so thorough there seemed to be no questions. is that accurate? okay, okay. thank you for coming to us with the presentation. it's very helpful. please keep at it. particularly solving the funding challenges. we're so grateful for your leadership, with other levels of government. thank you so much, colleagues.

so we have now a special order for valencia street that was noticed not to appear on the agenda before 3:00. so we have to adhere to that schedule, in part, in part inspired by the very last speaker, but in part, it's also something i meant to do. i would like to reopen item six, which is the new and unfinished business, so that the vision zero subcommittee can provide an update to the full board. we had an excellent meeting on june 11th of the vision zero subcommittee, and directors hinsey and hemminger and i serve on that committee. so we'd like to just that's happening, and it's very, very substantive and rewarding. and i realize that you don't have really any insight into what's happening. so i just wanted to share a little bit of an update with you all on that committee meeting, we did have commander nicole jones from the police department come share a very thorough and substantive presentation with the committee and anyone from the public who

chose to attend about the ways in which the police department is using data to target their enforcement in response to a lot of the conversations and feedback that have been out there about the need for enforcement to complement engineering as the speaker just said, this was the first time i had heard. i know commander jones presented, i think, to the board of supervisors or the police commission. this is the first time i had heard that presentation. i encourage you all to take a look at it, or anyone on the public to go to sfmta .com. under our board meetings, you can search for past meetings, and the meeting was on june 11th, so you can take a look at those slides and all the ways in which the police department is trying to target their enforcement to the most dangerous locations. they've identified the top ten most dangerous intersections in the city and are going to be guided by data in terms of how they're going to target their enforcement efforts. and there's a lot of detail in terms of all the different strategies, tactics and approaches that the police department is going to

use to answer the call for additional enforcement. so i came away from that meeting quite encouraged at the amount of thoughtfulness at the performance metrics and monitoring the accountability. i heard about. and commander jones committed to come back to our next vision zero committee on august 27th. we have these quarterly as a way to continue to share information. recognizing this is an interagency collaboration, i will also say, and then i want to turn it over to director hinsey to provide some updates as well, that the team provided several other very encouraging updates around and automated and speed enforcement and how well that is moving along the track to be able to deploy those speed cameras life saving technology by the beginning of next year, as well as i wanted to just extend gratitude to the rest of the vision zero team for providing the very latest update on the numbers in terms of hitting the goal of addressing with safety improvements, all of the 900 intersections on the

high injury network. that was a commitment of the vision zero action strategy, as well as providing a really thorough update on all the quick build projects that are in the pipeline so that everyone knows what's coming, what's on track when it's coming up for, completion. so that's what i wanted to share out with you and just make sure that you had that information, because i thought it was a very encouraging meeting. i want to turn it over to you now, director henry, to share some thoughts as well. sure. thank you, madam chair. and then i'll just recap a couple of other things, the team did also share, sort of a preview of the work that they're doing with regard to what's next, for vision zero upon its ten year anniversary. see, there's going to be a lot of reflection on and i think we, also asked at our 27th meetings

for, a sort of a report on the vision zero retrospective report that we're going to start putting together, and we're going to do some reflection on that. i will also note that there will be public engagement opportunities as it relates to the, this next phase zero. and i believe the team has published a blog on various engagement opportunities available. the chair did, an excellent job of, covering what the police department gave to, the update that they gave to us. we also so requested that other, city department come and give updates at future meetings. i specifically requested the fire department, and we have them also in our next meeting. i will

note that the, team, referenced a controller's, sort of benchmarking and comparison data set that the controller was about to release. this compares san francisco to, i think, 12 other peer cities, as it relates to some vision zero related metrics that has been published in that data set is out now. if, any member of the public would like to take a look at it, as karen mentioned, we are meeting quarterly and our next meeting is august 27th. i believe that i had thank you so much, director henry, colleagues, are there any questions on this update on the vision zero subcommittee? go ahead, director kahina, i know one of the reasons why we created this subcommittee was

really to be able to drill down on some of the barriers we're seeing with meeting our vision zero goals. i'm just wondering if you could, speak a little bit more about what are some things that are floating to the surface, like what are some things that you all are noticing should be we should tackle perhaps policy wise, legislatively or or otherwise. great, i think some of the themes that i've seen are that sort of desire for further inter-agency coordination, that sort of we can't do it alone, was one of the key learnings from the ten years of reflection looking backwards. and so i'm quite encouraged that the police department are coming to these meetings. someone from dpi came and presented on the severe injury trends data, and as well as someone from didn't have a speaking role, but someone from dpw did attend the last meeting. we'd like to make a more central role for dpw in meetings in the future, as well as fire department. the extent to which this can be sort of at least a quarterly touchpoint, where

agencies can come together, reflect together on each of their different roles in this larger sort of problem solving approach, and then share any information, support each other. problem solve together, this seems like a really productive pathway that we're going down. the other theme that i saw and i'll and i'll open it to director henry as well. if you want to share any reflections, what i see in this city is so many people who care so much about vision zero are so deeply distraught about the tragedies and fatalities and want so much to do something, to do anything, to let this doesn't keep happening. and i asked, so i made a point of asking every one of our speakers what what could members of the public do to help you in your efforts? is there anything people can do, even if it's a very small role to be able to feel that they're contributing to a better city? and i was actually and again, i would, maybe we can have commander jones or we can share a more detailed readout for the whole, community here. but i was

encouraged to hear her say she would very much welcome the partnership of members of the public in notifying people about about the upcoming enforcement waves that are coming because they don't want to catch anyone off guard. they don't want this to be a surprise. they want everyone to know there's going to be a lot of enforcement of this dangerous intersection. please drive safely and carefully. so actually ask for partnership and amplifying on social media what are going to be the approaches and tactics of the police department in terms of amping up the enforcement, possibly for a bit of a multiplier effect? and that was one sort of specific thing that she offered that people could do to help out and contribute, and who would own that campaign in terms like managing it and creating a strategy around it? is that something that we would do as an agency, or is that something that police would do or like? what's because i imagine that at the end of the day, somebody has to project, manage that piece, and create pathways for folks to amplify

and get involved in that way. right. so i wonder if there's been some conversation about that piece. share any thoughts, doctor tumlin. yeah, i mean, this in informing people of everything that's going on is one of the greatest challenges that we face as an agency. we have no advertising budget, so we try to use social media to the extent that it is still functional and we try to use a lot of earned media. we also try to collaborate with other agencies to uplift each other's messages, or particularly where we have a shared message, like with vision zero, to be continually reflecting each other's, messages, the other thing, of course, that we try to do is to use our very successful but really underutilized sign up for updates function on our website. so just as a reminder for all of you, when you're out there in community, every single one of our projects has a project web page on every

project web page in the upper right, there's a little button that you can click that is sign up for updates, and your email address goes into our sharepoint database. and the project staff will send regular updates for our major projects. those updates are robust and frequent for minor projects. they're less, you know, frequent. but please do, what you can in order to get san franciscans to sign up. so that we can reach them. i wonder if there's an approach to consider leveraging the trusted advisors that we have in different neighborhoods as well, because oftentimes they they are the focal point in their neighborhoods to amplify messages like this and to be a resource to their community. and so whether it's neighborhood groups, merchant groups, whether it's, cbos that, that play that function, there are different in every neighborhood. there's, there's someone different that plays that role and that that

holds community in that way. and so i do wonder if, you know, we do have an exhaustive list of folks that we do outreach and engagement with, but i do wonder if, like, there's, you know, there are folks that we could really like just curate that list a little bit more, so that there is, you know, a really direct line of communication between enforcement and those trusted advisors on the ground, that do have social media outlets that do have community meetings and, sometimes that can go a long way with a lot of folks. yeah. the piece that we are missing right now is the curation. so we send out press releases every week. but that material is rarely the most important information, similarly, we have contacts with community based organizations and neighborhood associations all over the city, but we're missing that person who kind of can filter for things and provide the pertinent information tailored to the

right audience. that's short enough that it actually gets read right. i think that's editing is the challenge. there's just so much information and not enough really solid editors who can tailor the information in order to actually be received and easily duplicated. just one more thing. i know director charles, but i would say to consider outreach fatigue too. with community. members. right? and so you don't want to you as much as you want to curate the list of folks you're outreaching to, you also want to curate the amount of messages you're sending out to folks, because that does exist. and so, you know, as, as you keep, you know, touching base with the same person over and over at some point, it dilutes the, the relationship and the power and those, those connections that you have with one another to amplify messages. you can only amplify so many things. right. and so i do, it's so great that you guys are having this conversation that you all are focusing on this because and that they noted that

that's that would be a great way for community to step up and help, it would just be wonderful now that you've opened up that space and that dialog, figuring out ways to operationalize that and figuring out ways to start building up, you know, the different infrastructure you need, to, to leverage that tool, if that's if that's going to be a game changer for folks, you know. yeah. another tool that we use that can be very effective is partnerships with members of the board of supervisors. so some supervisor hours have week weekly email updates or regular contact with community based organizations. and they are fantastic editors like we can provide all the content and they will cut it to, you know, all the dorky detail out and reframe it in a way that is actually responsive to community. you know, particularly grateful to supervisors walton and engardio. who are you know, i mean, they all do this function, but the two of them, i think, stand out in terms of being able to edit

and push out. director director tarloff. thank you. chair, so i listened in on the committee hearing, and i agree, it was it was very, it was very enlightening. it was it was heartening that, you know, that so many people are working so hard on this very important issue. and, a couple of things that stood out to me. one one was, you know, commander jones being there, i think was very important. and over and over again in public comment, we hear that a lack of sfpd enforcement is. a is a very important factor in many issues that that happen, you know, before us, but certainly in fatalities and injuries that that occur. and, and it's no surprise for anybody that, you know, enforcement has just gone down to a very, very low, historically low level,

since the pandemic. and so it was it was, really great to hear that commander jones is, you know, heading up a group of motorcycle officers who will be, you know, increasing enforcement . and, you know, i, i read in the media that there is already, you know, active, you know, increases, which i think is, is very important and, and so i'm glad i got to hear that. and then the other thing that i wanted to comment on is the was that, director hinsey, touched on which is this bench marking, page on the sfgovtv sfgovtv gov website, which has metrics comparing san francisco to 12 different peer cities in all

kinds of, benchmarks. so, you know, ridership on transit, people who walk, people who how what their commute patterns are, i, i looked through it and it was just fascinating to see how we compare in to other to other cities. and, and i feel like certainly for us as a board and for any member of the public that's interested in, in this, which, you know, many people here are, you know, i really recommend this, checking out this website. it's, sfgovtv vision, hyphen zero. hyphen benchmarking. and i, you know, spent probably 45 minutes going, wow. oh, my gosh, that's so

interesting. and maybe that's just the geek in me showing, but i think that that anybody who's interested in this subject matter would, would really enjoy spending some time looking at that. so thank you. thank you, director tarloff. director hinsey, did you want to say anything else in response to any of these themes or questions being raised, i'll just say to director tequila's question about sort of themes and policy. questions and sort of places where this board can weigh in, i, look forward to our next meeting where staff sort of talks about their reflections off of the ten year anniversary, i think that there may be some

policy opportunities and recommendations that come from that work that can be first vetted by the subcommittee and then maybe brought to us as a full board, one that i particularly asked about by way of example, is kind of the future of the quick build program, which has been a core, component of our vision zero strategy. so we may have some conversations about that by way of example at future meetings. and so hopefully see more topics like that will surface at our meetings. and maybe we'll have some policy recommendations. thank you. director hensley. and so, colleagues, just to just to orient you to kind of what's coming in the year ahead. and this is slide 35 and the slide deck for that june 11th meeting.

if you want to go take a look, is that the period of sort of april, may spring of this year was kind of the moment of staff confirming the existing work. obviously the budget adoption and confirming the existing work that's already been committed to post 2024, then there's a period of engagement from now through august of 2024. and those are interviews with peer cities, internal group meetings and city agency briefings and more public engagement then staff are in a september october 2024 are going to be consolidating the input and sharing the progress and drafting the deliverables. and then sort of november, december of this year, looking at final deliverables and sort of finalizing what that next phase of vision zero looks like. so i just found that slide to be a really helpful kind of look ahead of what we could expect on vision zero. and again, more progress will be updated and shared out at the august 27th meeting, the last thing i want to do is i just acknowledge all the hard work of staff. there's so much work that goes into preparing for these meetings and

making sure we have the very latest data to share out with the public in terms of all the different metrics and items of interest. so i just wanted to recognize a particular win. no. kimberly leone, shannon hake, ricardo julia, jen wong and of course, secretary silva, who's just taken on an extra committee that she has to manage in all of her free time, for all of their leadership and dedication to vision zero. okay. i think with that, we need to reopen public comment. is that right on item six? if anyone else would like to speak on the new items that i have raised in the conversation, as well as director henry and other directors today, another issue of happenstance, mark solomon again. so in reviewing vision zero, one of the items in the policy document from vision zero foundation says magnify the threats to build political support. when you magnify the threats, you create political bullshit. sorry for my french. when you believe your own bullshit, that's when you're on the wrong track in politics, let's be honest about what our threats are. respond to them rationally and not create these chimera to go after high entry corridors. are these absolute numbers or are they injury

rates? valencia is a widely cycled street. it makes sense that it might have an absolute larger number of injuries, but are these actually injury rates given the number of cyclists on the street that much higher? and should that guide our our interventions? and i see the sfpd enforcing the vehicle code with data is good. but you want every cop for their work plan whenever they see a potentially injuring or dangerous act, a violation of the vehicle code. you want that cop to stop and do this. the sfpd are the only city workers that roll their own work plan, and we need for some civilian oversight on that. in a previous life, i co-managed 2008 prop h campaign that expanded the police commission and gave divided appointments after the issue of police gunning down black people was addressed for a bit. i was hoping we could get some bicycle or ped activists advocates on the police commission to start reworking the general orders, right to actually change the way the police department works from the top down. they will resist this and scream bloody murder. but i think it's time to go ahead and take our three quarters of $1 billion police department and put them to work, keeping us

safe. thank you. thank you for your comment. are there any other speakers on this item? item six. good afternoon everyone, my name is joe carrillo, i'm a pretty much a lifelong skateboarder, been skating in the city for 30 years, so thank you for addressing you know, vision zero, and everything that needs to be done, i'm also a member of the, a board member of the san francisco skate club, which is a after school program, helps youth with tutoring, but we also go out and do, adventure around the city skating. so, as aaron previously mentioned, like, there's a lot of infrastructure needs that need to be addressed, but, you know, as we're talking about, community outreach, you know, talking about outreach to vehicle drivers, it also needs to address, you know, outreach to skaters. anyone who uses another type of mode of transportation, and within that, i just want to reiterate on the

point that we have, oftentimes the dolores hill bomb that happens in july, and there needs to be a lot more outreach about how to make it safer, how to work with the kids who are who are doing this. it's a very grassroots event. not everyone has the same, perspective on on how it should be run, it's a very mish mash group of skaters, but as the older generation of skaters, we're really concerned about making sure that, like, parents are involved, that the kids like, know that the city leaders also care about them, and the city leaders are there to talk to them. before these kind of things happen. but, but yeah, every day we have to make the streets safer as well. so places like the skate club, a lot of the shops, i think they're open to talking with you all and being included in, in the process. thank you for your comment. any other speakers on item six? hi there, i just like to point out that the irony of debating how we reach out to

people who are resourced enough to own cars to warn them of the financial cost of violating the law, alongside the sort of other lack of engagement with young people whose only means of transportation may be a skateboard. along with the explicit efforts to make their journeys more dangerous and deadly, efforts that are driven by wealthy, land owning car drivers who have the time and energy to put pressure on the mta and district supervisors totally separate point the camera is being used are too close to the ground. at 14th and south van ness, the lenses have been painted over at least once. i know the mta loves to save money on changing the signals, but the only way to make sure that these things actually work is to get them above the ground so that people cannot deface them and make them ineffective, and that all marketing budgets aside, the department of public works, last time i spoke with somebody on the commission, has never heard of the active communities plan, has never heard of the walking and rolling plan. the absence of outreach from this organization to the people who are responsible for engineering and building its

infrastructure, is absolutely appalling. and any efforts for vision zero here are baseless. frankly, if ten years in, if the department of public works has never heard of a plan that's been going on for at least a year, you guys are not doing your jobs. thank you for your comment. if there are no further speakers, we'll close public comment here, and i will just turn us into a brief recess. it's 241 right now. please come back shortly before three so we can take up valencia. item 13. good. i am ready. all right. directors places you on item 13. receiving an update on the valencia bikeway project, also known as the mid valencia bikeway pilot, which seeks to improve safety, preserve economic vitality and ensure movement and access of goods and people on valencia street between 15th and 23rd streets. and endorsing, but not approving a shift in the current design

from a center running to a side running bikeway. thank you very much, good afternoon, chair and members of the board. my name is paul stanis and i am the project manager of the mid valencia bikeway project. i'm very excited to be with you. be here with you today to discuss what we've been working on for the past four months, since we last checked in, in february, the project team has been very hard at work, taking your direction from february's check in, and we're excited to share our progress, since we met in february, the project team provided, is provided an update on the center running bikeway pilot, we provided findings on the three month evaluation. and at the time, the board directed staff to continue revising the pilot, adjusting it, and to explore a side running, protected bikeway option. today we're going to plan. we plan on providing a refresher on how we got to today. and we're going to go into and go in and take a look, and how we took the

board's direction and made adjustments to the center running bikeway design. we're going to share some six month pilot evaluation results, and we'll also talk about our approach over the past few months to a side running bikeway option. we'll talk about some of the trade offs and considerations. including significant amount of parking reduction for a side running option that will be followed by the next steps for the project and the project team, we'll also ask your consideration for a vote on endorsing a side running option. and then finally, because the last time there was a lot of interest in some economic data, we have ted egan, who is the city's chief economics economic economist. excuse me, and he will provide a more in-depth look at, valencia. so, some people have asked us why are we pursuing a bikeway improvements along valencia and valencia serves as the major north south bicycle route, even before the first bike lane was

installed nearly 25 years ago, in many documents, it's been cited as an official element of the of the san francisco bicycle transportation network, and it's been in numerous plans for a lot of decades compared to nearby parallel corridors. valencia is a preferred path of travel for many bike riders, because it's one of the flattest streets in the mission. guerrero, or any other streets to the west are very hilly and would be very challenging for a cyclist with variety of abilities to navigate, mission street to the east is transit focused, while south van ness is one block from bike lanes on folsom. some of the minor streets, such as shotwell, dead end and do not provide direct connections from san francisco neighborhoods or between cesar chavez and market street. valencia also serves as a neighborhood connector and collector, so the street connects downtown and outer mission through market and cesar chavez is an a popular destination for a lot of wonderful restaurants and shops,

but due to its popularity, the painted bike lane that was there previously evolved into a de facto parking and loading lane. and based on our pre center running bikeway data collection, we know that 67% of all loading activity was either in the bike lane or double parked in the vehicle travel lane. of which 40% was occurring in that bike lane. so whenever we're thinking about valencia, we have three major goals in mind. the first is to improve safety for all users of the street. the second is to preserve the economic vitality of the corridor, and the third is to make sure that goods and people are safely moving through valencia. previously, due to the frequent loading of the bike lane, writing a bike on valencia was very challenging and unpredictable. cyclists were frequently exposed to dooring and sideswiping, and cyclists frequently had to merge into vehicle travel lanes very quickly, at the direction of the mayor. in 2019, a side running bikeway was implemented, implemented between market and

15th street, and an extension of those side running bike lanes from 15th to cesar chavez was proposed. in 21, in 2020, but was postponed due to covid, during covid, shared spaces added an economic boost along the corridor and was a vital lifeline for a lot of small businesses up and down valencia. and when we reengage with the project in 2022, we realized that the layout and priorities of the street had changed. so when we picked up the project a few years ago, the team had to consider a number of design constraints, including narrow roadway widths, the presence of nearly 70 parklets up and down the corridor. we also had to consider emergency access and clear widths desired by fire department and police department, but we needed to do something about the rampant double parking that resulted from this increase in curb demand, especially with delivery services such as uber eats, and

on demand delivery. and this like i mentioned, this is further exacerbated by the covid pandemic and the uptick in number of park number of parklets. so i mentioned there are about 70 parklets in the corridor. a few years ago. so that would be about 1 in 5 parking spaces. so there were there were quite a few. we wanted to pursue a design that protected cyclists or upgraded the bikeway facilities and kept as many of the parklets and curbside parking as possible. so considering all the competition for curb space on valencia and the need for a better and improved bikeway, a center running bikeway was recommended and implemented for mid valencia. we have heard a lot about this project, and we've spent the last six months making lots of adjustments based on what we're hearing directly from people who own businesses, travel along the corridor and experience it on a daily basis. so we've heard a lot, obviously,

and, while user so i'll get into some of the some of the what we hear from different people. so some of the things we hear from, people who are riding bikes is that people finally feel some relief that there is more protection, visibility and comfort between people who are riding bikes and people who are driving. some people noted that there's a little bit of discomfort and uncertainty when people drive in that bike lane in the middle of the roadway, so we've heard that from folks as well, we've also heard that businesses are struggling to recover from covid, and the pilot has not made it easier. so we hear that loud and clear. we completely understand and emphasize and empathize with the small business owners who have been having a very challenging and difficult time, that's something that we truly understand and have heard time and time again with some of our outreach in the past few months. we've also heard that there's some confusion around navigating the intersections, some of the

block, the block layout and also, it's kind of unclear in the past how you can park in different areas. we've heard those frustrations. we've been very busy over the past few months trying to make as many adjustments to that as we can. so some of the things that we've actually done, is made a lot of changes to the curbs. so we made over 150 changes to parking and loading zones, and many of these were implemented just before the holiday season late last year. and those included shortening the duration of the loading zones to add more general metered parking for people to park their personal vehicles. we also changed the mixture of the yellow zones, so some are a little bit larger and allow for bigger vehicles. we heard there isn't as much demand for that, so we shorten those provided more, size appropriate spaces. this spring we aim to simplify the parking and loading mix even more by reassessing each block within the pilot area. we

reviewed data and feedback provided by email calls and in person. we worked with the fronting businesses to even to convert even more loading zones to regular commercial and general metered spaces, and we put back more short term parking and actually converted 29 commercial zones to full time personal vehicle parking. aside from that, we also installed more garage wayfinding signs. so we wanted to promote our two sfmta garages in the area. these garages are rarely at full capacity, and in some cases are less expensive than on street parking, we also produced and distributed posters, and we gave those out to businesses just promoting these two garages. and some businesses have actually put those in their window just to help, help their customers find more parking, we've also been hard at work on trying to simplify how people park on the

curb along the corridor. so we did that by bringing back the single space meters to every single space along the corridor, this change helped clarify when specific spaces were reserved for loading and when they were allowed for general metered parking. it also had an added benefit of reinstalling a lot of bike parking along the corridor. we also heard some feedback that a few intersections were the way that they were. the signals were timed, they were causing some backups. so we've worked with our shops to tweak some of the signal timing and provide a little more green time for vehicles. and for bikes to get through the intersection a little bit more efficiently, we've also, installed a few more signs just reminding people that left turns and u-turns along the corridor are not permitted. and we've partnered with the police department just to, emphasize that as well. so a little more

enforcement along the corridor. so while we've been very hard at work adjusting the current design, we've also been hard at work evaluating it. so we came to you in in february and talked about what we saw at the three month mark. and again, that is very early to start making long lasting impressions about how how well a project is working. but we're back with our six month evaluation results as well. so while we just have a short, high level findings today, our full report is going to be published in the next month, so what we have seen so far and i'm going to focus on collision rates right now, but as you can see from this first slide, the overall traffic collisions have been trending down over the past few months, they are still slightly higher than some of the pre-pilot category. his, what we've seen is that when we look at bike

related collisions, the average monthly rate is now slightly lower than pre pilot conditions, and for, for pedestrian related collisions as well, it's a pardon for pedestrian related collisions is about where it was previous to the pilot. when we're looking at scooter related collisions we see that the post pilot rate is higher than pre pilot. and we think partially that's because they're just much more many more scooters along the corridor, so there may be some skew skewing going on there . finally we highlighted at the three month mark that intersection collisions between people on bikes and vehicles because of illegal left and u-turns was an emerging crash pattern. and what we've seen in the next three months is that type of crash has not occurred at all. so that is a welcome finding that we have at the six month mark. but something that we're still keeping our eye out on. looking at term restriction

violation and double parking, we did not see any collisions between bikes and vehicles at intersections. but we're choosing to observe. we're we're seeing we continue to observe illegal movements at intersections and found that vehicles are still violating the left turns and u-turns at a rate of about 1% per hour. so it's about 3 to 4 vehicles every hour , double parking continues to be lower when compared to pre pilot conditions. more importantly, vehicle loading in the bikeway, which previously made up 40% of all loading activity that has dropped dramatically and continues to stay low at a very low rate of about one tenth of a percent for our loading events. we can see this when we look at the corridor, but we've also heard this from people, this makes the bike lane much less stressful and more predictable for cyclists, when we talk about people, when we talk to people along the corridor, this is one of the things that they highlight is that it's much

easier to ride in the bikeway compared to, a year plus ago. we're also continuing to look at the number of vehicles and bicycles that are traveling along the corridor. there's no real change in these numbers from the three month mark. the bicycle number, bicycle volume numbers are about the same, and we're still seeing about a 25% reduction in overall vehicle counts along the corridor. one thing that we introduced during the at the six month mark was an intercept survey. so this was to gather first hand feedback from people who are traveling to and along valencia street. the intercept survey was deployed within the pilot area by a consultant to measure various things, such as people's perceptions of safety. with the new pilot origin and destination information, and then their general purpose for visiting valencia. there are a few things to note with this. the first is

that only people walking their bikes were asked to participate. we weren't flagging people down in the actual bike lane, so we want to do this in a safe manner , we for pedestrians. we asked if they were if walking was also their only mode for that day, or if they traveled by other means. so our survey had over 500 responses. that summary report will also also be published next month, but there are some key highlights. people we found that people who are riding bikes generally reported feeling much safer, with fewer instances of interacting with a vehicle in the bikeway, pedestrians did didn't really express any change in how they feel, with the new configuration in valencia. and then for people who drove, we found that it took about five minutes to find a parking spot and generally speaking, they were able to find a parking spot within two blocks of their destination, finally, we found that about a little more than half of the respondents lived or

worked near valencia street, and about 28% were there to either shop or have dinner. okay, so that is the center running bikeway. we've been very hard at work with that. at the same time, your direction for us a few months ago was to look at a conceptual design for a side running bikeway. so i want to talk about that a little bit as well. so, as soon as we realize or as soon as we receive that direction, we realize that one of the first things we had to do was talk to anyone who owns a parklet on our corridor, so that was our first push in february and march, we went out and met with every single parklet owner, we talked to them about, first of all, just a listening session. talk about senator running bikeway, how it's working or not working, and then also let them know that we're thinking about changing the layout of the roadway and introducing the idea of a side

running bikeway and what that means for them as a parklet owner. so we discussed with them, how they're currently using their parklet and then discuss some trade offs with them and said, are you interested with a side running bikeway design to keep your parklet against the curb? are you interested in pushing it farther out into the roadway, which might get you a little bit more parking on either side of your parklet or do you not use your parklet anymore and you would like it removed, and what we found is that about a quarter of the 30 parklet owners are interested in moving their parklet from the curb, where it is right now, farther out into the roadway. so we have a little bit more homework and follow up with them. but that was interesting based on our initial outreach. so while we initially focused on parklet owners, we wanted to make sure we were talking to as many businesses as possible. so we then went out and went door to door and talked

to over 100 businesses, which represents a little over half of all the businesses along the corridor, and this again was to meet them in their space, have some deep listening, introduce this idea of a side running bikeway. and also stand with them on their front steps out there and just say like, how do you see the block? they are the experts. they're there every single day, so we need to learn from them as team members, most of these meetings were between 30 and 60 minutes, so they took a long time. but it was a way of us introducing the idea and bringing them along. the development of a side running bikeway. we've also been busy, with outreach at other opportunities as some of our teams staffed and energizer station at bike to wherever day. this is a great opportunity to talk to cyclists directly about what's working and not working with the center. running lane, but also introduce the idea of a

side running pivot. so we got a lot of input from them as well. one of the things we realized when we were doing our door to door outreach was we needed to not only talk about this, but show business owners what their block could look like. so what we decided to do was host host block by block meetings with the merchants. so we would take these two block segments, gather all the information we've got from the parklet owners, from the door to door outreach with those 100 businesses, and develop a conceptual design for their block. we invited them to a business along the corridor that was very open to hosting these mini open, these mini open houses, and show them what we've been working on. so taking their input and reflecting it back in a conceptual design. so so not only was that an opportunity for us to engage again and bring people along this whole planning process, but we were able to

facilitate conversations between neighbors and business owners where we knew there might be conflict between a parklet owner and someone who really wants a white zone. so we saw a lot of a lot of success in this model, and it really, again, kind of brought people out together to talk about this as a block and as a community, rather than just as, as city employees. so aside from that, we've also engaged with at least a dozen community groups over the past few months. these include friends of valencia, the bike coalition, kid safe walk, sf spur, liberty hill neighbors association, cuatro cdma, vqma, mission merchants association on, and our own cac. so we've been pounding the pavement, talking to as many people and as many groups and stakeholder groups, as we can, if we get an endorsement from the board to finalize the detailed design of a side running bikeway, will continue to engage with all of

these groups, just to make sure that they're aware of what's going on. so in all of this outreach and engagement, we've heard a lot as well. we've heard both support and concerns for side running option. we've heard that some businesses aren't as dependent on their parklets. while others choose to specifically lease at certain locations based on the availability of a parklet, we've heard that loading is really, really, really important for businesses and some businesses specifically sponsor short term parking and passenger loading zones to keep their businesses viable and to make deliveries much easier. we also heard from businesses that circulation and the familiarity of a roadway layout, which is probably lends itself to a side running bikeway option, is more important than the total parking and loading spaces available. we also heard that the current configuration doesn't really allow for motorists to pass a double

parked or stopped vehicle, and that can really result in backups and a little more aggression and horn honking. and we've heard from cyclists that the center running bikeway makes it harder to access mid-block locations, so you can't really get out of the center running bikeway. at the same time, we've heard that while businesses are interested by the idea of floating parklets, there's still some big questions that they need answers to. and then we've also heard, regardless of whether we pivot or not, to a side running design, we need to maintain separation between vehicles and people who ride bikes. so that to us means we can't go back to the way things were previously, so the next two slides show the typical conceptual designs for the sections between 15th to 19th and then from 19th to 23rd. these designs, like i mentioned, reflect a lot of input from parklet owners and merchants from our one on one meetings and feedback, from our many open houses and stakeholder groups.

when we've shared these conceptual designs with the merchants and business owners, we are highlighting the tradeoffs between all of them, and we're highlighting parking changes, conflicts between neighbors areas where we're moving bike share stations to side streets. we're trying to be as transparent as we can when we're talking to folks. so i do want to talk about trade offs, because i think they're really important. i just want to make sure that we're all aware of them. while it's possible to pivot to a side running bikeway design, there are trade offs. and we have to we have to be very transparent and talk about those, pivot would require parking and loading removal for curbside parklets, side streets, driveways, fire hydrants. just make sure that we can all see each other and make sure fire department has access to fire hydrants, the parking loading

reduction per block really depends on the characteristics of the of that block. so how many parklets, what is the distance between driveways? can we squeeze additional parking anywhere, but based on this conceptual design we estimate that 60% of the 255 parking loading spaces would still be retained with a side running bikeway option, with that said, we understand that parking loading plays a really important role for businesses to make deliveries, drop off people and goods, and just allow their people to park their personal vehicles, we are trying our hardest to optimize the total number of parking loading spaces. and while this is just a conceptual design, we've had a lot of great feedback over the past two weeks that these mini open houses so our job through the summer is to try to squeeze everything out of every inch along the corridor. and we do have an eye on the total number of parking and loading spaces. so this is, oh, sorry. i didn't

want to go back real quick. okay, there are more trade offs, so it's not all about parking. loading. okay, so we're also considering the transition zones around the curbside parklets. so whether you're, parklet is against the curb or out into a floating parking and loading lane, there are trade offs with parking. if the curbside parklet is against the curb, we need to transition the bikeway around the outside of that. and that means one to 2 to 3 parking spaces removed, but we're also trying to maximize that space. so we're considering moving bike share stations to side streets, moving bike corrals, and actively working with the police department to explore more. adding back parking spaces adjacent to mission station. one thing that we talk about, is level of comfort in how you experience the street and the section between 15th and 19th is

the sidewalks are wider, so the actual roadway width is constrained and it's a little snug. so what that actually means is because there are 2 or 10 fewer feet in the roadway, the bike lanes and the buffers between parked cars and the bike lane and the vehicle travel lanes are all shrunken a little bit, a little more narrow, in order to get to a side running bikeway design, everyone has to give a little bit. and that is very apparent for these four blocks between 15th and 19th. once you get below 19th, you get ten more feet. everything feels a little more comfortable, and every all the bike lanes, the buffers, the vehicle travel lanes, they're closer to our standards. in san francisco, we've been very focused for the past four months on the blocks and our engagement with the community to understand what their frontage would look like, but we need to spend some time focusing on the intersection designs. so space is also very limited at the intersections. and we need to understand what

the intersections will actually look like and how people will interact out there. we don't know yet, but we might have to tweak some of the signal timing based on where the design lands. but we need to keep in mind that the 13 mile an hour, bike greenway along the corridor is great. and we hear a lot of positive things about that. so we're trying to keep our eyes on all of these different things. i talked a little bit about parklet placement as well. so again, curbside parklets. you probably have to remove some parking. if they're floating, you probably can retain a little bit of parking, that's one side of the parklet conversation. but then there's also how cyclists interact with the parklet parklets curbside. the bike goes around the outside and there's examples of that all throughout san francisco. there's a floating parklet that people, pedestrians, customers who are on the sidewalk would have to cross the bike lane to get into that floating parklet. so we're thinking very, very long and hard about that interaction between cyclists and pedestrians in a floating parklet

configuration, a side running design also means that we would pivot to a roadway configuration that is very familiar and very commonly we, present in san francisco, this alternative of a side running bikeway design would also provide more flexibility for vehicles, including the ability to drive around a stopped or double parked vehicle, or turn into a driveway that's on the other side of the street. and right now we hear that if you're trying to drive into a driveway on the other side of the street, people are very nervous about crossing the bike lane, and it's very uncomfortable. so this is an example of what we've been showing people along the corridor. this is a comparison of a typical typical block within the project area. provides an example of what is there now compared to what could be there in the future. so this gives a visual and a prompt when we discuss trade offs, with with the general public. okay. so what are we doing next, we have

a lot to consider for our next steps, including continuing our outreach, advancing our design. and then we want to talk about when we'll be back to the board for final approval. and then we know construction is really important in that timeline and that duration. and then we're also have to talk about long term studies that we're doing as well. so we still have a lot of work to do on the final design. and this includes, like i mentioned, looking at the intersection ins, the colored curb mix, we have to continue to work with our accessibility partner partners, we have to look and finalize a lot of the questions with parklets. some of the things we've also heard from people is, what are you doing with the left and right turn restrictions? so we need to think about that through the summer as well. we also also have to consider how the signals will operate. and then we also have to consider the overhead wires between 16th and 17th

street. all of this has to be reviewed within the agency and the city family, we also need to keep checking back in with the fire department and police department and all of this design and coordination is necessary to advance from a conceptual design to a final design. and then once we have that final design, we want to share it with the community and we want to share it with you as well, over the next few months, we're going to keep speaking with merchants and stakeholders to share the design as it involves and get more and more input, we know we genuinely know that merchants or businesses are concerned about the construction schedule and the duration and the disruption associated with that. in the next few months, we are going to consider how we can best minimize the duration and the disruption for all the construction activities associated with any pivot to a side running option. we'll continue to work with merchants, to get their input and trying to find the best time to do that.

and as soon as we know, what the schedule is, look like, we want to share that with people and give them, get them prepared and get them ready for any sort of construction activity. so we've been very focused on side running conceptual design, but we also have these long term studies that are out there as well, we have three of them. so the first is looking at traffic and circulation just to analyze impacts related to any sort of circulation changes, from any sort of long term options that work started at the beginning of the year, and we hope that that report is ready, in fall, in the fall of this year. we're also working on a public life and public space study, and we started that. but then we realized maybe we should pause that, because we are doing so much engagement right now that it's probably better if we really focus on this side running design and this engagement, and avoid as much confusion as we can. so we've

paused that. we'll probably pick it up either later this year or early next year, but we don't want to overwhelm folks because we are talking to them a lot. and then finally we have a parking and loading study that started recently, and that's designed to explore curb regulations, policies and anything else needed to implement and support any long term alternative. so just doing some investigative work, on that front. and we think that that study is going to continue through the rest of this year as well. okay. so, today, today we're asking for a few things. we're asking for you to review all of the work that we've been doing over the past four months, exploring a bikeway option. and then we are also asking for action on the next steps for a side running option, as well. so before excuse me. before we get to any public

comment or questions, i do want to introduce ted egan, who's the city's chief economist. he's going to provide a general overview of valencia's economic landscape. and we did present a little bit of this on february, but we wanted to get the expert in. so i'm going to let ted speak for a few minutes okay. thank you. good afternoon, directors again. my name is ted egan. i'm the chief economist in the city comptroller's office and in april, our office was asked by the mta if our sales tax information, could speak to the question of, economic changes in the valencia street corridor, from the state of california, we receive sales tax remittances every quarter for every business in the city. and that includes the address of the information. so that allows us a very powerful way to look at highly detailed economic changes in areas within the city. this

chart comes from that. but let me say a little bit about the context, we looked at sales tax not only in the valencia corridor from 15th to 23rd street, but in 28 other commercial corridors across the city. during the same time period. and that includes virtually every neighborhood commercial corridor in the city. we excluded, however, major city wide retail areas like venice and also major tourism areas, as a whole. as this chart shows on the blue line, if you add up all of the businesses in these 29 areas, their quarterly sales tax, we've seen a recovery of about 91% in sales tax for these corridors as a whole. by the end of last year, their fourth quarter of 23 was 90, 91% of their fourth quarter of 2019. valencia street, however, which is indicated by the yellow line here, has performed much worse. it only reached about 70% of 2019 levels by the end of 2023.

i think this chart is important because it indicates, though, when the gap in that recovery between valencia and the other commercial corridors began in 2021, we began to see sharp growth in the blue line. and that's due to the reopening of businesses. in the starting in the second quarter of that year. this reopening bump, however, was very muted in valencia street, and that's really where the gap appears between those two corridors. and for the past two years, the past eight quarters, sales tax in valencia street and across these corridors have been pretty much in lock step and very flat. this is another look at it by corridor that shows 2023 sales tax as a percentage of, of full year 2019 sales tax. and it shows the corridors in comparison, about half the corridors have at least gotten to where they were before the,

before the pandemic. however, valencia street is the second, weakest of all of the major neighborhood commercial corridors in the city. so clearly the data shows that there has been weakness in valencia street and the businesses there have not recovered from the pandemic as they had elsewhere in the city. in theory, a number of things could explain this, and the mta asked us if we could statistically study if changes on the corridor in the second half of last year were related to the bike. improvements could explain the weak sales performance by the corridor as a whole. so we did this by by statistically, taking into account all of the other things that clearly do affect sales tax, like what neighborhood the business is in. we know some corridors generate more business than others. what's the type of business we've seen? very big difference, for example, between a recovery, for example, between apparel stores and, casual dining, for example, and also the quarter that the sales tax

is for, which reflects the business cycle and that obviously affects how businesses do, so then we could additionally add variables that indicate yes or no. was this business operating in valencia street in 20 and 23 at the end of 23, and so we're sort of flagging those business returns for those quarters from valencia street to see if those that factor stands out statistically from the other ones. i've already i've already spoken to. so these are the models that we built and the results are quite clear, the variables that relate to being on valencia in the second half of last year were not statistically significant. they were not significantly different from zero. and that means that after accounting for these other changes that those bikeway improvements do not contribute to explaining why valencia has had weak business performance, there are other factors. does not have any

effect, either positive or negative. i would like to say, though, that this result of that , the that the second half of 2023 is not sort of an unusual time of weak performance for valencia street. it doesn't mean two things. first of all, it doesn't mean that valencia street isn't suffering. it clearly is a weak recovery. it's just that that weakness is due to other factors and predates the bikeway improvements of the second half of last year. and secondly, and i want to stress this in particular, we're looking only at the corridor as a whole. we can only say that the corridor as a whole suffered during this period when the bike improvements were constructed or in operation. we can't say that no business was affected adversely by the bike lane. we can't say that that every business had no effect. it's possible that some businesses were affected, but if there was any negative impact on a on some businesses, that would have to have been outweighed by positive impacts on others to create this

net effect of no of no impact. so i hope that's not too much of a statistics lesson for the board, and i apologize if it is. i'm happy to take any questions, and i would just like to comment that for those who are interested in the full statistical details, we will be posting it on the comptroller's office website tomorrow morning. okay. thank you. do we have more slides to get through or is that the last one? okay, great. thank you, colleagues, this is what i'm going to propose. i don't know how long we have mr. egan with us, but i think we should focus our questions for mr. egan first, then pause to take comments from the public who some of whom have been waiting here patiently for several hours. and then we'll have our board discussion and questions for mr. santos, if that's okay. so colleagues, what questions, if any, do you have for our chief economist at. doctor kahina, just a clarifying question. so the when you describe the corridor that you,

conducted the analysis for, was it from market street all the way to cesar chavez or was it the blocks that are in this project, in particular to 23rd street? okay. and that information. so, usually there's a, there's a bit of a lag in getting data, sales tax data, and so, so, this data is as of sorry, the last quarter. so december of 2024. like that's the october, november, december of 2023 is the latest data that we 23. yes. thank you, okay. perfect and so, did your analysis also were you able to extract why this corridor has been performing? has been lagging in their performance post pandemic. is there something that and i say this mostly if it's not if not for this project, are there other

things that, you know, we should be supporting merchants with or, or the city as a whole should be supporting merchants with in this corridor because it does it's challenging to see this. right. and not want to help and not want to do something. sure. i would say, you know, the purpose of our statistical analysis was not to identify causes, but there are a couple of things that just stand out from looking at the data. the first is the composition of the businesses on the corridor. before the pandemic, were heavily related, like much more heavily than the city as a whole in two lines of business casual dining and family apparel, family apparel is, i believe, the single weakest business type in the city. it simply is not recovering anywhere in san francisco. and so the concentration of valencia street in that is going to affect the corridor as a whole for casual dining, on the other hand, has done well across the city. but i think there you have to look at

the profile of the customer base and valencia street before the pandemic, one of the things that's happened in san francisco is we've suffered a loss of population from 2020 to 2021. we suffered an 8% drop in population overall, which is the largest of any large city in the united states. that loss of population is heavily concentrated in young adults. is the number of people aged 25 to 29, for example, declined by almost 20. a lot of those folks would be patrons at establishments in valencia street had they remained in the city. so i do think that the declining youth population or young adult population in san francisco is contributing to weakness in some of the nightlife areas and is probably part of the problem with valencia street as well. and i imagine you've done some and maybe i'm assuming, but you've done some sort of analysis like this in other parts of the city. were there notable things that

you saw in other commercial corridors that stood out, as these have been wins for certain commercial corridors, is it, you know, the composition of the businesses or is it, you know, if you can speak a little bit more to that, that would be great. i mean, i can say just if i could go back to the chart here and i don't want to speak, pretend that i'm i've done a great deal of analysis on these areas as much as you can. sacramento street has a very kind of different profile and is much more tilted towards the kinds of businesses that have recovered well across the city. japantown is not in our analysis here, but i know japantown had done very well because the restaurants in japantown had done well, better, certainly better than the ones downtown, so i would to answer your question, i haven't done anything as in-depth, as i've done for valencia for other commercial corridors, but i think that there's some indications that, you know, the area around downtown is probably

done at least as bad as valencia street. and that's because there are no office workers and not as many hotel guests, so i think that there's probably simple explanations for most of the, differences in fortune that we're seeing in these areas that have to do with remote work. the demographic, population loss that we've seen and the loss of tourists. thank you so much for this analysis. i think this was one of the missing pieces of the pie that we so wanted to get down to the bottom of, and i think this is so it's incredible information and it offers a really great snapshot of what has been happening there, since this project has had, been implemented there. but also before that and how it fares with the rest of the city. i think this is incredibly fascinating, and i do look forward to seeing that link once it's posted online, because i definitely do want to take a deep dive on that. so thank you so much. sure. thank you. director tarlov. thanks so much,

mr. egan. egan. it was very pardon me, really, really helpful information and, you know, and of course, sales tax information is not the only measure of the of a health of a business. and you know, each business is going to be, you know, incredibly individual in terms of, you know, how much they might be investing into the growth of the business or what they might be doing to adapt to the new realities and learning. you know, how how, how weak the recovery has been, valencia's is really just kind of brings home, why, this has been so challenging and, what i'm wondering about is, if for future projects, there's, you know, the potential for you know, instead of in a

retrospective, way to be able to look at the economic, situation in a commercial corridor before before we embark on a, on a, you know, on a project there. and to be able to be more nuanced in, in terms of timing, and of course, i, i hope that you know, the, the pandemic will be just, a real outlier. but there are, you know, there are many things that could affect, you know, an economic recession and, you know, this sort of nuanced understanding of, of a place where we're going to be doing a doing a project, i think would be really, really helpful. and, and i, and i'd love to hear your thoughts about how there could be maybe more, you know, proactive of, partnership with

the controller's office, in the future. well, thank you for your comments. and i would say on our side, you know, we have been receiving this data from the state, for a very long time, but it's unwieldy and complicated to work with. and we are, i think, beginning to develop with our colleagues at data sf ways of kind of standardizing the data we get a lot of public requests and media requests for sales tax, which can be kind of time consuming, because just the way the data comes to us. so we're working to get something that we can push out to departments like the mta or to other city departments who want this in a more timely and straightforward way to support the kind of analysis that you're talking about. so we are thinking about that. center director henry, any questions or comments from you all? okay. if i see none okay.

well, thank you so much for providing this larger context. it's so helpful. and i also just want to underscore that last bullet that you said that this, that nothing that you found sort of undermines or invalidates any individual businesses experience because as we honor and respect their own individual experiences , and i don't think this means in any way to invalidate anyone's own experience, thank you very much for the presentation. i will open it now to public comment for anyone who wishes to speak on item 13, the valencia street update. i do have speaker cards. william, virgil, nikki dueled edward duran, leif banzer spencer, mark solomon. one quick point, followed by another, floating parklets will be deadly. i'm would be surprised if there is any adult

american who does not know an elderly person who has fallen, broken their hip, gotten pneumonia, and then died. the any entertainment of the floating parklets will ultimately result in this being the upstream effect of that narrative. for countless people and their parents, not to mention any children who are learning how to bicycle being knocked over by various people, carrying plates full of dishes, exploration of that should be abandoned immediately, i want to push back on the idea that narrower spaces are are bad. narrower spaces make driving slower, which means the rest of the space safer for everybody else. i also want to push back on the idea that everybody must compromise in order for this to work. let's just say there's a shy distance alongside every curb. but if instead it was a radiused space and not a not a right angle, more people could get more equitable access to the spaces it designs like this are being explored in seattle. sorry

and it is possible to make safe transitions between curbs and sidewalks that actually make for more space for pedestrians and people who use non-automotive means. and i also just want to push on the question of what it means to be final. all of these drawings just show bollards and paint. i understand that, drainage is going to be a significant limiting factor, and finance is going to be a significant limiting factor on any final plans. but at the end of the day, paint and bollards should not be the final plan, nor should they be the thing that, drain it. basically drainage as it exists today should not be a limiting factor on what's possible. we should be able to be more imaginative and come up with infrastructure that's actually safer for people. there is a way to make more space for everybody. if we're willing to talk to dpw about what it means to actually explore these sorts of things. again, the split between these departments is forcing constraints that need not exist in this conversation. okay, thanks for your comment. next speaker, please. board members mark solomon again, my first public comment was in 1999, urging the creation of the

valencia street bike lanes. and here we are. okay, widening the sidewalks in 2009 caused this problem. it eliminated the center loading lane, which really messed everything up. it added parklets later, which, eliminated sidewalk space both for bike parking and for people to walk down. so we have this kind of like urbanist homer from the simpsons, where it's a car that's comprised of every bell and whistle, and none of it works really well. i was cycling north on valencia between 14th and dubose this past weekend. there was a family hanging out by the greek orthodox church, a toddler was there wandering around a parking meter pole that toddler almost came right into the bike lane. the father yanked the child away at the last moment. this is one of the worst aspects of trade offs. on having the separated bike lanes i mean, there are no silver bullets here. it's all about trade offs. and the trade offs i'm seeing is that sidewalk activities tend to spill into the bike lane, whether it's homeless people's drippings, which can get kind of gross drainage, stuff like that. and if we're going to see surfers coming across the bike

lane with with plates full of food, we're just asking for trouble. valencia is a working, mixed use commercial district. automobility happens to be a key factor in making these districts function, whether we like it or not, maximizing a complex set of systems on one favored variable which happens to be mine, right results in distortions on all other variables. i do not want to see my neighbors suffer just to go ahead and make my life a little bit easier. at the end of the day, each private vehicle is 1/280,000,000 of the emissions problem. the previous side running configuration was just fine with the green wave. it was 13 miles an hour. that is very, very slow. the injury rate was lower and i think that we need to keep it simple. we need to make sure that we don't go for every new bell and whistle that the urbanists tell us is going to lead to a vibrant neighborhood and go for tried and true solutions that have worked the previous one was perfect. it worked just fine. i have not been in the center bike lane because it scares me. thank you. thank you. next speaker,

please. hi, my name is edward ryan and i want to thank the board for being here and putting up with all of us. and jeffrey, i want to thank you specifically because you did actually disseminate some good information about how to get in touch and how to stay on top of the events and things that go on within the mta. and that's really important for all of us, because i think i'm one of those people that fell through the cracks and didn't get any information. well, i come to you from taqueria la cumbre. yes i'm located on valencia street and i've been there since 1967, so it's been a little while. i've seen a lot of things happen and a lot of things go, and i still watch a lot of things. they occur now, and i think some of the deficiencies are some of the things, albeit the center bike lane was well intentioned and it was a great idea from everyone's heart. the idea was to save lives, but in actual practice, what we've seen is that it's been an undue hardship for people that are handicapped, senior citizens, people in wheelchairs. we've noticed that because of the limited space on the side, there's no way for them to actually get into their

vehicles in some of these special needs vehicles. it's just it's miserable and they actually run the risk of getting hit by cars. the other thing, too, is, you know, now the bike lane need has really greatly diminished in the sense that we have the addition of electric bicycles, electric scooters, one wheeled electric vehicles. they travel fast or faster than automobiles. so having that separate bike lane and having them travel at a faster rate than even bicycles is kind of it creates actually a dangerous situation. it's something that we should definitely consider. and really what was alluded to earlier about just going back to the past and going back to the old system is not bad. we spent over $3 million on the center bike lane to try and get together. you know, in reality, a lot of that money could be spent in driver education, bicycle driver or rider education. of course, school youth summer programs, which would be very valuable arts, music and things like that. but all those things are really important. and again, jeffrey, your mention about disseminating information, letting us all know is really important because we want to be a part of the community. and since we've been here since 1967, i feel it's really important. but at the same time, too, i think it's really important that you guys should be acknowledged for your work and how hard you work at

everything. and sometimes it's really important just looking at the past and sometimes knowing that, as jim and miss solomon alluded to earlier, going back the old way is not a bad thing because as santayana once said, if we don't know our history, we're doomed to repeat it. so we might want to entertain the thought of going back to the past. thank you guys. thank you for your comments. your time. thank you. next speaker, please. hello, my name is leaf and i'm here because i'm really concerned that i hear the mta staff and the media talking about the center running bike lane as though it's already got a foot in the grave, it's, it's being out in the past tense. and there's also no upcoming no upkeep being done to this pilot, as though we've already voted down the design and, the build

out was really painful and slow, and i think that maybe put everybody off on the wrong foot, including cyclists, definitely, definitely drivers and businesses. i ride valencia on average twice a day, every day, often with my wife and child and or with friends and their kids. it looks like the overhead turned off. okay. sorry. he's speaking to me. we can see it, so. yeah, when i'm writing it, i feel safe, i feel relaxed, i often have chance encounters with friends. i see cultural parades using the bike lane in the middle of the street. this is, this is a celebration of the third gender in mexico. mooks that i just happened to come across. this is someone doing a

wheelie down the middle of the street because they feel safe enough to do that. this represents the diversity of cyclists. here's someone on a really cool stingray going the other way, i also see kids. here's a family of four riding which i'd never seen on valencia before, and i want you all to. i please hope i please consider the shoehorning and narrow bike lane into the gutter zone may lead to will definitely lead to a very expensive and disruptive design and build out worse traffic circulation due to turning across the bike lane when parking, when circulation is already. that's your time. if you could wrap up your thought. thank you. just basically any new and shiny design may look good on paper, but may have unforeseen downsides. next speaker please. hi, my name is

horst matzner, i live about three blocks from valencia street and i ride valencia street every day. i do not own a car. i only use public transit and a bike. i'm 77 years old and i feel very safe riding down the center of valencia street. much better than on the sides and the gutter lanes. it just feels much better. i have much better vision. i'm separated by cars on both sides. there's no pedestrians walking across like there are on, you know, on the side path. if the bikes are next to the, sidewalk. also, it seems like everybody's now talking about preferred side track and that doesn't make any. let's finish the study. this was supposed to be a year study, and we get all the information before we then look at two separate options. is valencia street safer with the middle or is valencia street safer on the sides? you know, we're sort of running towards the sides and

talking about the side running bike lanes. that doesn't make any sense. you haven't even finished the year study in the center yet. you know, let's finish that. let's get the data and then compare data. you know, is it safer to run down. and the main thing is safety. i mean, i think that's why we're going for this, to make it safer for bicyclists and also for pedestrians. so that's that's my issue. and then also the cost if we're going to switch over to the side running lanes, how much confusion is that going to be again. how much is it going to cost the city to do that. and you know, so anyway i say let's wait till the study is over and we get all the results before we talk about this hypothetical side running lane. unless i call it preferred, it's i don't know how it's preferred. you've decided one is better than the other. besides, without looking at both of them equally, thank you. thank you for sharing your perspective. next speaker, please. hello. my name is mark

d'antona. i've been sharing the roads of san francisco on my bicycle for 25 years. i've lived on valencia street for 22 of those years. during that time, i worked as a manager at the x21 furniture store there on valencia street. so needless to say, i've seen a lot of change on the street over the years. while valencia was colorful before, the initial bike lane installation coupled with the widening of the sidewalks around 2009, transform the corridor from light industrial and a few churches to the vibrant area. we knew before the tech workers left. however, about six years ago, i stopped riding my bike and i switched to muni because valencia street had become too dangerous because of the unregulated rideshare and gig food delivery drivers. i haven't really heard that talked about today, well, i know the center bike lane was a reaction to these unsafe conditions. i was frustrated with the installation as it was confusing to everyone

because it was unfamiliar to cyclists, automobile drivers, and the design doesn't make me feel safer, because it confuses those drivers. i was glad to hear about the move to more familiar design with the original parking protected bike lane design that we talked about before. i like to voice my support for this change. however, i heard that the movement of the parklets was kind of going to be left up to private businesses. the parklet thing was a giveaway to private businesses, public space as a giveaway to private business. and i don't think that it's fair that the safety of people riding their bicycles on valencia street, you know, is decided by private interests. i think that the design should be focused first on safety of everyone who uses the street. and second, because we all have to share the space. and second, to these

parklets, which, you know, they're relatively new. so thank you. thanks for your comments. next speaker, please. our read more speaker cards. christopher white, carissa cavazos molina cabada. hi guys. i have all the answers. you ready? great okay, here i go. i stand here today as a bike advocate, a mother, a san francisco native, and a 33 year valencia street business owner. i've stood before you many times and have pleaded with you to make proper accommodations for the entire city's population, i think we can all agree that the quick builds are hasty and have proven to be problematic in a multitude of areas. as simply stated, valencia street corridor is not wide enough to have everything smushed into one street. all of the planning and the pivots and creating have created havoc and, have divided among all of the stakeholders

from may of 2023 to may of 2024, 30 businesses on valencia street have closed. think about that. 30 in 1 year, as the economist stated, those are kind of skewed stats, right? because it's an aggregate stat, not per business. so that needs to be stated. okay back to my letter here. my own business, which is thrive for over three decades, including pandemic, dropped 35% starting two weeks after the construction of the center running bike lane. coincidence i've been working longer days and more days without a paycheck. many payroll cycles in the last year. i'm fortunate enough not to be in danger of closing my business because my family owns the building. i have, and sorry to say, that didn't happen for the 30 businesses that closed, i've suggested an alternate plan, and i'm always met with the same

rebuttal. everyone loves valencia street. it's a high injury network. cyclists are used to biking valencia, but you won't consider any other options. this seems very narrow minded and proves that the agenda comes first. at the risk of the safety of business, survival and common sense, i have two more paragraphs that's redundantly. i ask that you think outside the box and create a smarter approach to an easy and safe bike path that can be enjoyed. time and we just have to give everyone the same amount of time. well, then i'm going to put my name on the thing and come back and read the rest of my letter. okay, feel free. feel free to share the letter as well with the board secretary. thank you for your comments, next speaker, please. afternoon. chair ekin and members of the board, i am christopher white, executive director of the san francisco bicycle coalition here today, speaking in support of the conceptual design in

february, we came and told you that many of our members had come to recognize that the center running lane was an improvement over what was there before. but still, the majority of them felt that a more familiar curb running design would be safer for people biking. so we called for the sfmta to complete the pilot, but to simultaneously develop designs for a parking protected lanes. and we thank the board and in particular sfmta staff, for not only working toward producing that design, but for doing a massive amount of outreach and engagement to get us to this point. we strongly support the conceptual design. it's predictable and familiar, and we applaud the intersection treatments that it would introduce, such as state mandated, mandated daylighting and protected intersections. these intersection treatments must have the most robust materials. a quick build can allow to discourage people driving from dangerously cutting the corner. to ensure safety, we

call for a few changes. floating parklets should be removed from the design altogether, and all parklets must remain against the curb. having the lane sometimes run between the curb and a parklet introduces potentially dangerous conflicts between people, biking and staff and customers who use the parklets and the proposed mix of curbside and floating parklets is unpredictable and confusing, making the design unsafe. additionally, to keep conflicts at intersections to a minimum, every intersection should have a leading pedestrian interval of the longest duration permitted. seven seconds. the entire corridor also needs signage clarifying that people on bikes are permitted permitted under state law to go with the pedestrian walk signal and a citywide education campaign explaining that wouldn't hurt either. thank you very much. thank you. next speaker, please.

good afternoon, chair egan and members of the board. my name is chris corbett. i'm the director of communications for sf bike, speaking in support of the conceptual design, many of our members fell in love with the center running pilot, contrary to the persistent news stories claiming that people who bike hate it. we noticed that we heard this appreciation, especially from women and people who ride with children on their bikes. those members alike that others on the street can see them clearly and that they can see everything that's happening. they also appreciated the relative width and ease of passing qualities that we would like to see maximized in the final design. another persistent myth is that the valencia saga shows that the interests of local businesses and those of people who bike, are opposed. in fact, the opposite is true. sf bike wants to see valencia thrive as a vital and fun commercial district. we have had productive conversations with the merchants association in recent weeks, and we intend to continue them data consistently shows that people who bike

regularly tend to shop at local businesses at rates higher than those who primarily drive to support the businesses on valencia, though people on bikes need to be able to get there safely. and as this board has repeatedly said, the safety of the most vulnerable road user must always be the top priority. this conceptual design should not be the final evolution of valencia. we call on the sfmta to see through the long term valencia bikeway studies and implement pedestrianized pilot blocks so that we can all imagine the kind of world class, people centered destination that valencia could truly become. finally, we want to once more thank the sfmta staff and their livable streets team, who have spent countless hours going block by block, talking to merchants and who worked late to present to our members your effort to help everyone be heard and foster understanding is commendable. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, director tumlin, chair ekin and

directors. my name is melina kawata and i'm a campaign associate with walk san francisco. thousands of people walk on valencia street every day. we know over the years too many pedestrians have been hurt and even killed on this street, many by drivers turning and hitting people in the crosswalk at signalized intersections. the current design for valencia has brought benefits to pedestrians. collisions for users are trending down. drivers speeds are down, and the left turn ban reduces the chances for conflict in the crosswalk. plus, drivers are taking turns slower. walk sf supports the continued iteration on the design of valencia street being discussed today, and urges that current safety benefits for pedestrians are both preserve and expanded. pedestrian visibility slow speeds turn restrictions turn calming daylight and preventing car parking in the daylit spaces. using vertical posts are critical to improve people's safety. along valencia and on many streets like this. thank you. thank you. next speaker,

please. yeah. go ahead. it's on. me okay, okay, i will introduce myself, my name is ruben. look, i'm an engineering student at the city college of san francisco and also a member of the bicycle coalition, first of all, i want to say that i strongly support, the new bike lane proposal. the conceptual proposal, so first, we want to go into the current design and the problems of the current design. well, first of all, the current design, as you can see here, the center running bike lane, it kind of functions more

like a highway than a regular bike lane, because if you want to access the business mid-block , you have to leave the bike and cross the traffic, which is, very dangerous and very unsafe. and with the new design, the, the side running bike lane, you can exit the bike lane at any point in the block and, and you don't have to cross any dangerous traffic. but however, i have a, i have a few, like, minor problems with the new plan, when it comes to parklets being moved and wants to being moved. so there are a few trade offs, pros and cons here, so for the for the parklets that have been moved out into the street, like, there's a risk of, like, conflict with, with the pedestrians crossing over the bike lane and all those hanging over the parklet, but but for the for the, for the one in this design where the, where the parklet is against the curve, like, it's actually safer for

pedestrians. but one thing that i don't like about is that you have to turn, to, to avoid the park, but this with this design, the bike isn't straight, but with the parklets moved, the biking is straight, but we again, we don't like a pedestrian conflict for this design. there is virtually no conflict with pedestrians. so for people trying to access the parklet, so i support this design more than the other design. so. so in conclusion, the best design is like, keep the parklets against the curb. and okay, so my time is up. so i thank you all for having me here. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. few more speaker cards. uthai lao robin levitt hi. good afternoon, directors. zach lipton i'm a volunteer with friends of valencia. i really just want to thank paul and the entire team for the uncountable number of hours they put into all the outreach they've done. our group would like to support

the side running plan and ask the board to advance it as soon as possible. we heard from the comptroller's analysis that while the bike lane didn't cause it, valencia merchants are struggling and do need help. i look at the wild success of people for spaces and cities like mountain view, redwood city and san carlos and know that carving out more space for people and placemaking is pro-business, creating a thriving destination that gives customers new reasons to visit our group of people who live near, walk and bike on valencia has some safety requests that we hope the board can support. these include having no floating parklets because they represent a substantial reduction in safety in the name of eking out a tiny number of additional vehicle parking spaces. contrary to vision zero and risking collisions with bicyclists and people traveling between parklets. we ask that posts be used to prevent parking and daylighting zones. these zones need to be kept clear for sightlines and visibility. if they're necessary for safety, then they shouldn't have cars double parked in them, and

physical infrastructure is needed to prevent that. keeping the existing turn restrictions is important for pedestrian safety, particularly given the tragic record of fatalities on the corridor, we also hope to see a public commitment to finish the bikeway south of 23rd street. this portion is on the high injury network, and we'd love to see it completed no later than the end of 2025, and finally everyone. we'd love to see this built without delay. everyone agreed to a one year trial of the center running bikeway, and we should honor that promise and show that we can be responsive and really combat just the general bad vibes that have taken over the conversation around these bike lanes by rolling out side and running lanes as soon as possible before the end of the year. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. okay. good afternoon. my name is robin levitt. i'm a 40 year cyclist in san francisco. and i want to, say that i really love the

center running valencia bike lane, but i'm resigned to it going away and but i want to thank sfmta for trying it. i think it's a great experiment and hopefully it can be done someplace else because for me it really works, there were some comments about, you know, drivers finding it hard to cross the bike lanes to get a new driveway. well, how do drivers turn into a driveway on van ness , for example, make a left turn into a driveway across the bus lane? should we get rid of the bus lanes for that reason? also you know, the side running bike lanes. how am i going to get from the from one side of valencia to the other if i want to go to a business on the other side? so it's easier now actually with the center running bike lane to go to either side for me, but anyhow, like i said, i'm resigned to the parking protected bike lanes. some of the parking protected bike lanes

like second street and, battery or i think are really good. some are really terrible, like folsom and eighth street. and for various reasons, for example, on curbside running, bike lanes, you have sewer grates, manhole covers, you have irregular pavement, you have glass in the gutter, you have a bunch of rubbish. this is not to mention people stepping off the curb into the bike lane which was mentioned before, and cars pulling into the bike lane from a driveway or a side street, making a left or a right turn and not seeing the bicyclists. so i just hope that some of these hazards will be considered when the if we do go with the side running bike lanes. so anyhow, i want to again thank the sfmta for trying this great experiment. i'm i'm sorry some people didn't think it worked. i, i think it works fine. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. how's it

going? my name is youth halo and i've been a mission residents, cyclist walk, walk, pedestrian and occasional driver for about 15 years. and i also actually like the center running bike lane so far. but i am really excited about the new proposal that paul and sfmta has shared with the community. also, thank you for doing that. that was really amazing. just that's all i'm really excited about the new proposal, and but i will say if we're going to do it and i think we are going to do it right, i would love to see more like protection to for daylighting. so that cars don't use it as an emergency parking spot, because we see that in the old bike lane where it was basically just an uber drop off loading zone all the time. right? so i think that like, likely might happen with some of the daylighting. so if we could do something to keep that in mind, that would be amazing. but either way, i'm

really excited about it. so thank you so much. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. my name is paul bosch. i live in am an avid cyclist and pedestrian pedestrian on valencia. i primarily shop and go to restaurants on valencia because i love the neighborhood. i previously lived for a few years in paris and saw firsthand their transformation to a cyclist city. it was awesome. people hated it at first and now the people love it. i'm happy it's now happening now that i'm back in san francisco. personally i really enjoy the current bike lane for my hardcore cyclist biking style. i go fast and i like that it's a freeway, but it may be too advanced level for the average san francisco riders , and children and the drivers that use valencia. this lane has its pitfalls that you have heard, so i believe it would be more inclusive for the average

road user to change this lane to a parking protected lane without the floating parklets. for everyone's safety, it allows for easier stopping anywhere along the path to stop and access shops and restaurants and bars along the path. i believe it will will bring economic prosperity to the neighborhood in the long run. thank you very much. thanks for your comment. next speaker, please. and one last speaker card. yoichi shiga. hello. my name is william vigil. i've been a resident and a actual business owner in valencia for over 45 years, close to 45 years and how's that? sorry about that. and my concerns are basically i've seen pretty much what's been going on in the neighborhood and all that down the corridor and since the middle lane did get put in it, did you know it did affect a bunch of businesses and pretty much the surrounding towns and but the current bike lane that

we had, we did, you know, it was working to a point, but the only problem was that the cyclists were being protected with double parked cars and all that. and so sfmta's sfpd, they wouldn't really go out there and force it at all. so it put them in danger. so then comes along the middle lane and things have changed. and my concern is basically what's going on with what's going to be happening now with the new transition of the new lane on the side lanes. but, my safety for that would be, again, for the cyclists and the pedestrians, which is going to become a problem, you know, especially with businesses, because we own a business on that block, too. and for coming in and out, and we all hope things work the way they're supposed to work, but they don't. and so i see more problems down the road. if this doesn't get handled right or doesn't get performed right. but other words, it's been a big effect on the definitely valencia, since that middle lane

did come in and i've noticed it. i've seen accidents, i've seen people racing down the middle of the street, motorcycles, wheelies, just slamming down there. it's like eventually it's going to happen, you know, something that we it doesn't. but the protection, you know, for cyclists is very important too. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. my name is yoichi shiga. i'm a mission resident and cyclists for about ten years now riding my bikes. my main mode of transportation. i love the valencia corridor. i go there all the time. my doctors there shopping for friends, eating out. it's one of the my favorite places to interact in the city, i like the other cyclists here. we're pretty laid back group. we love the center bike lane, but we're, you know, sort of sad to see it go, but we're we're open to new options. i think with the considerations of the daylighting and the no

floating parklets, i will say again, i've never felt so good riding in the city, than when riding down that center bike lane. most of the time we are literally riding in gutters. that's what a bike lane is in the city. and so being in the middle, being kind of like open and seen and yeah, like other said, you see kids on the bikes in the bike lanes. you see, i see way more kids, way more families in that bike lane. and so i'll be very sad to see it go, but i really appreciate all the work that was done to get that out. i do think the biggest problem with that bike lane was it had a bad first impression. it was the it wasn't the bike lane that we wanted, but it was the bike lane that we needed, you know. and so i think we all, you know, are going to miss it. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. board members, luke bornheimer, thank you to paul and other staff for their exhaustive work on this update and design. i'm grateful for

their work and dedication to this project, as you may know, i organized over 1400 people who supported curbside protected bikeways as part of the better valencia campaign. i did not organize supporters to make public comment today, in part to save you staff and the public time, but i'm here to speak on behalf of those 1400 people. i'm glad to see staff proposing a curbside bikeway design for your endorsement today, and i urge you to endorse staff moving forward with a curbside bikeway design with installation as soon as possible to help local businesses, and to help more people shift trips away from cars to bikes, which will reduce car traffic. demand for park car parking, noise, air pollution and climate emissions. i also urge you to direct staff to propose the curbside bikeway design from 2020 for between 23rd and cesar chavez streets, which requires almost zero updates, in part because only one parklet has been removed from that section since 2020. installing the curbside bikeway design between 23rd and ■cesar chavez streets would close a critical bike network gap on valencia, increase safety for

all people and help more people shift trips away from cars. regarding the design for between 15th and 23rd streets, the current number of people biking on valencia necessitates 8 to 10ft wide bikeways, including between 15th and 19th, and the design should be improved to widen both bikeways to ideally ten feet. this is relatively easy between 19th and 23rd streets by reducing the dangerously wide driving lanes currently 13ft to 10ft, as they are currently proposed for between between 15th and 19th streets. i also urge you to direct staff to use precast concrete curbs to protect the bikeways, rather than simply using plastic posts to separate but not protect the bikeways. finally, i encourage you to direct staff to only include curbside parklets, which are safer for all people, a better experience for staff and customers, and will make valencia more vibrant. thank you , thank you. are there any other speakers on valencia street?

item 13 okay, seeing none, we will close public comment i do want to thank you all for coming out and sharing your perspectives. it is really valuable for us to hear each of your stories and your experiences of this infrastructure. we're getting a lot more kind of color through these comments than i think i was previously aware of, particularly the support for the existing facility, so thank you all. thank you all for being here, taking time out of your lives to be here. it's very, very helpful for us, colleagues, there is, and this is an action item today before us. there is a resolution before us. i'd love to hear your comments and questions before we move to, take an action on that, on that resolution. who would like to kick us off? director carlo, please. thank you. chair ekin, my question is for, paul, mr. stannis, and then i have, something to offer to my

colleagues here. but we heard a lot today about floating parklets and, the, the trade offs that are associated with with that. can you from kind of an engineering and precedent perspective, share with us more about, you know, what's what is the common wisdom, what are the other, municipalities that have implemented those and what their experiences have been and how has that been guiding your your thinking about floating parklets ? yes, absolutely. so we want a safe transportation network. we want people to feel comfortable when they're using it. and whenever capacity, we realized very early on that there were trade offs with everything as we've discussed. and we want to

accommodate, merchants as much as we can. and so they understand the trade offs between their parklet placement and parking and loading, potentially, that's why we talk to them very early on, just to explore the idea with them while we were talking with parklet owners along the corridor, we were also talking with our partner cities in new york and in oakland. and floating parklets are very common in both cities. so, our conversations with oakland, which is obviously the more local example, there are a lot of examples of floating parklets along telegraph avenue. so we spoke to them first. what they told us is that it generally works like the floating parklet layout generally works. they don't have any reported crashes between people who are crossing the bikeway to get into the floating parklet, or from a cyclist hitting a parklet itself, we

found out similar information from our conversations with people in new york as well. the parklets. the floating parklets in new york are more seasonal because you really can have parklets in the wintertime, but they have instituted their floating parklet program for a number of years, and they had same results, no reported collisions. it generally works. people are very aware of their surroundings when they're crossing from the sidewalk into a floating parklet, we have noted some differences between those floating parklet designs and what we are considering in san francisco. so we've taken what they've instituted and those designs and are trying to take those designs a step further. so, i have a few examples. i can i can show you visually, just to give you a sense of what we've seen. okay

okay. is that up? no okay. here we go. so here are some examples that we've seen in oakland. and there are some things in here that we like and some things that we would definitely improve upon or improve upon, there are a lot of examples in oakland and in new york city where the floating parklet is directly on the edge of the bike lane. so that's what you see here, the design that we're thinking about offsets where the parklet is located. so you would have at least three feet offset from the bike lane. so if you were leaving the parklet, you wouldn't be stepping directly into the bike lane. as some people have mentioned, there would be a little bit of space where you could stand, take a peek and look, some of the examples that we've seen in new york, in oakland as well, the entire face of the parklet is open, so you can cross from any

point in that parklet into the bike lane. the design that we are thinking about would have a very focused access point. so there would be one location where you would cross, that crossing would most likely have some sort of ramp up and ramp down if you are a cyclist. so you're prioritizing pedestrians from the sidewalk to the park, across the bike lane, into the parklet. so we're taking a very serious and close look at this, learning what our peer cities have done and trying to improve upon that. thank you. okay very helpful. thank you very much, so , i, i've prepared a few remarks because i, i've been working on, on this, as the small business, representative on the board and i'd like to start by recognizing

the staff for all their very hard work on this project, balancing the needs and wishes of so many stakeholders has been and will continue to be a very big challenge, i've had the opportunity to meet with members of the valencia corridor business community and i want to and i want also to recognize how hard they've been working to advocate for the economic vitality of the corridor, getting to this point has been a slog. and i think it's fair to say that most everybody is weary. still i'm glad that a clear path forward is coming into focus, and i'll be pleased to vote in favor of a curbside running bike lane design concept for this stretch of valencia, what will happen in the coming months and through an eventual construction phase will be very significant for many, if not most, or maybe even all of the businesses that are impacted. i want to urge staff to do everything they can to strengthen the already productive relationships they

have with with valencia merchant leaders and with individual merchants. it's my understanding that the vqma may conduct another poll of their members to understand how best to advocate for their needs, for the merchants and other professionals responding to a survey like this is a business decision in my mind, and it's vitally important that they have all the information that they'll need to express sound opinions as they consider timing and methods for construction on. i understand staff has made over 150 changes to the center running design to minimize disruptions to this community. i want to appreciate this and urge continued work in this area. a tremendous amount of work has gone into finding the right balance between commercial and general metered parking, but i think there's more work to be done here, with the chair's

permission, i would like to offer some amendment s to today's resolution. and, shall i just read them out? great. thank you. so, i wanted to add, several items, in the, in the beginning, i wanted to add, should i, should i indicate where i think she has copies? maybe of language for people to review. thank you. so, so i would like to add, whereas the sfmta understands that the vibrancy of san francisco as a whole depends upon thriving commercial corridors such as the valencia corridor between 15th and 23rd streets. so that's one

addition. and in the resolution section, i wanted to add two, resolutions. resolved, that the san francisco municipal transportation agency board of directors directs staff to continue to collaborate with the valencia corridor merchants and other key stakeholders to understand their needs for quantity and available hours related to parking and loading for commercial deliveries, and continue to make adjustments to existing parking and loading spaces to align limited supply with those needs whenever possible, and an additional resolution. resolved, that the san francisco municipal transportation agency board of directors directs staff to work closely with the valencia corridor business community and other key stakeholders to accomplish any eventual construction at a time and in a manner that will minimize to the fullest extent possible

disruptions to the largest numbers of businesses possible, so that's that is what i had to say today. thank you very much, chair. thank you. director tarloff. and we'll have other comment, but can we take these amendments as your motion to approve this resolution, as amended, that you would be moving that. okay. thank you. is, we don't need a second just yet, but we'll just have that motion on the table. i'm going to go to director hinsey, are you taking her name down? okay. go ahead. director henzi. no problem. thank you, madam chair. and when? when the time comes, i'll second those amendments and second the motion. thank you. so first i, i, i just want to appreciate that continuum and all the work that they've done specifically, to not just to do, the conceptual design for the,

the side running bike lane as we requested. but but also just for, the continuous improvement that that, you all have been trying to do and really iterating on the pilot, i think today, as the chair noted, i think we've we've both in our written communication and oral comments today, we've seen a lot more support than we have in the past for, for the current condition. and so, you should be commended for your iteration on, on that. that's that said, i, i also, would endorse the motion, before us today. and the only concern concern i have about it and the something that's already very much on your mind is, and,

is the mixing of different types of parklets on the, on the bike lane itself. so i, i know it's tough because i appreciate the fact that staff is really trying to, customize, if you will, the parklet situation, for each merchant. but i am i'm it sounds like something that is very scary to actually use. if the there are two different parklets on the on the bike lane. so just to keep keep that in your inbox for it to make sure that we get the, the safest outcome possible here while also know, as

director tiktok indicated, balancing the work with the merchants. but that that's my only, big red flag concern is with the different types of parklets on the same bike lane. but i'm sure you'll continue to iterate on those. and then i would, second the comments that we've heard from the public, to try and keep the, the, current restrictions, i know that that those have been popular from a pedestrian safety perspective. and so i will note that we're not taking action on the actual proposed design, and we're just endorsing the staff going forward with the side protect. protected design, design and

continue to iterate on it. and i have no question and i have no problem with that. so i'm happy to support this motion. thank you, madam chair. thank you, director hinsey, we will note your seconding of the motion. director henderson, please. thank you. chair, i and thank you, paul, and to the rest of the team for all of your work on this, and i appreciate the conversations that we've had. just to keep me updated on on what's happening. i have just a couple of questions that i want to clarify for the way the process would look after today. would you continue those block by block meetings or then does it turn into more of a, neighborhood wide outreach process or corridor wide outreach, we would have to think about that because we were impressed with the turnout. we got about 15 businesses per

block meeting, which is great. it wasn't everybody, but but, people who wanted to be involved and wanted to hear from their neighbors. it was great, i think at some point we do have to have a larger meeting that shows the entire, corridor and we've done that in the past for many projects. but i think this very focused, personal outreach has gone a long way so far. so we're we're planning to continue to do that, especially when we at these small, smaller block meetings we've already received a lot of great input, and our design team has to go back and integrate that, so we do need to share that with folks at some point. yeah. okay. thank you. i'm just i am curious to see, you know, maybe visit the some, you know, one of the meetings. but i would we'll let you know. yeah. i would rather go to one than all of the blocks, and then

also, i have a question about how you measure. so the, the center running was or is a pilot. and so there's going to be some study and measurement of that, i assume, and so i'm just curious about this proposal, this conceptual design is not being proposed as a pilot, but as a sort of long term response. and so do you have any plan to study whether or not it's working or meeting the, the goals, or is it just, you know, once it's implemented, then that's it. yeah, that's a great question. and i think for a lot of our projects in san francisco, we do evaluate them, the evaluation for the center running lane was, is very robust because it was a very brand new, different design in san francisco, but our evaluation team that we have in livable

streets is always looking to understand how our projects are working and compare them with other similar projects in san francisco. so, yes, i think we would want to take a look at how this pivot to a side running bike way would be performing, we do have an example of a side running bikeway already on valencia for 15th to market, but it would be interesting to compare how their those two are performing. okay. and yes, i'm really interested in in that especially, you know, looking at the, the photos and the, you know, hearing the stories and anecdotes from the public about the center running lane. it's disappointing that it's not working. but, you know, as director tarlov, pointed out, it's, you know, really about ensuring we have a vibrant corridor, that allows for the safety and also allows people to be able to visit and enjoy the stores, whichever mode they're taking. and so i'm, i'm curious

to as to how the, how they compare and what what it, what the improvements look like once once it gets implemented. and so i my i think last maybe not a i don't think it ends in a question mark. so maybe a comment. the floating parklets are a little tricky to me. and i think that because safety is, you know, the primary and, you know, most important, factor to consider and i think closely followed by by a vibrant corridor, of course, i think that the floating parklets is something that i would really need some evidence of, of some strong evidence for, especially if it would be inconsistent on where there might be a floating one and then on the same block or within, you know, a 100ft,

there might be one that's curb running or curbside. so i think that that is somewhere where i'm still not quite sold, but i do appreciate all the work that you all have done and all the outreach and the engagement that you've conveyed to get feedback from the public and really try and help everybody understand the trade offs and, and be comfortable, with a solution. and, lastly, i think i heard you mentioned something about the, the parking lots and how they're not at max capacity. and so i, you know, appreciate the increased signage, but i'm wondering, you know, part of the, complaints sometimes that i hear from people, especially drivers, is that they don't know how these new configurations work. so they're driving in the bike lane or the, you know, the bikeway or parking in it, which i'm sure. well, they're parking

in it. and so i just want and so i, you know, the, the, the green striping and you know, the i get the yeah, the i think the color coding is helpful. and so i wonder is there a way and i don't know if this is allowed with state or local law, but if there's a way to paint on the street like a path to the parking so that you can direct people to the lots, because i don't know if they're going to be looking at the sign that's up here. they're not looking at the no left turn sign, you know, and so i so if there's a way to be able to creatively mark on the street level for drivers to see where the lots are, then maybe we can increase the, the parking and also, i think that the, the point made about the, the daylighting spaces and making sure that they're very protected because i'm in oakland every day except for the days i'm here

and, i know, i know that there that those spots on the edges, especially on the edges of the streets with the parklets, are just double parking zones. and i just think that that's not, not the safest option when we had when we're going to consider having bikes going back, you know, back and forth. so, those are my comments. so if, if we can paint some something on the street that's blue or whatever matches the sign for parking, i think that that might be helpful to get people off of that double parking and into the parking lots. thank you. chair. that's it. thank you, director henderson, director kahina. thank you. chair. deep appreciation, paul, to you and the team for the amazing outreach and engagement that you have done in these last few months, what's incredibly notable to me is the block by block strategy that you took to work with merchants and have

these, like, mini design charrettes with each one of them , i think that that is just incredibly commendable. and i, you know, i think it's important for the public to hear how how well attended were those, like, how how many folks would show up to those block block meetings. so so, we passed out paper invitations to everybody on each block, and we had somewhere between ten, ten and 15 businesses show up to each one. that's incredible. so thank you. i did so in my previous life i did a lot of, merchant organizing and boy, was that challenging to do. so to reach those numbers. so i understand like to get that type of turnout. it's really amazing. it's a huge credit and testament to the amount of work that you all did, so i just wanted the public to hear that to hear that number, because it's really important for folks to see that, and to hear that, i so appreciate the public comment that we heard today from the merchant community, from the cycling community, from all

sorts of folks that came out. and there was this collective reluctance of acceptance from folks of, yes, we know that this was a really great design, and we know that this is just not working here, and so i, i appreciate folks putting this community above any sort of dogma or sort of, you know, idea of like, what should live here and really centering, the humans and the folks that that work and live along this corridor and centering their experience above, a policy. so i just i truly appreciate that. so i do want to, you know, that did make me think. and director, love your comment too, about, the question that you asked chief economist egan about understanding how to assess the readiness of a corridor to sustain a pilot. and so i did want to, just get your sense, paul. or perhaps jeff, of if there there has been some effort

yet to be proactive and get ahead of that and think about how do we start assessing if a corridor is ready to sustain a pilot like this? and that is one of the big learnings that i think this pilot, showed me as a director of like, you know, i have to be judicious about asking those things, but i do want to, you know, just hear from you all if this is something that you are also thinking about, and if you have, you know, created some metrics or if there's something there to help us understand how to assess if a corridor is ready to sustain a pilot for any future project. it could be senator running. it could be a variety of things. right. so this is a question that has come up in our work in the bike and roll plan is how do we evaluate our work and how should the evaluation measures vary by context? one thing that is very clear to us is that our neighborhood, commercial districts are a central part of san francisco.

there is an incredibly tight relationship between the success of muni and the success of our neighborhood commercial districts, and for most neighborhood commercial districts in san francisco, they're dominated by locally owned small businesses who have invested their family fortune in their business, and they live or die on oftentimes a less than 10% margin. so we've got to be very careful with how we experiment, right? so i one thing that i appreciate about the sfmta is our staff are ready to experiment, to try new things and to adjust, but we also need to reflect on who bears the burden of those experiments. and so being conscious about context , whether that is a neighborhood, commercial district or or an equity priority neighborhood, we likely need to set a higher threshold for how we assess risk and what we evaluate that we need to

evaluate beyond simply transportation performance metrics, but also look at equity metrics and economic performance metrics and at other metrics. and that's why we've been so grateful to have to be building a stronger partnership, particularly with the controller's office, to help support us in analytics that you know, aren't we're not experts at. thank you. and something else that folks noted in their public comments that also resonated with me is you know, how the experience was sullied by the implementation of this project. and so that that takes me directly to timeline for any potential changes that we would approve today, if we approve the motion as amended, what is the timeline and when would a merchant, when would merchants note the difference? or folks in the corridor see the difference, and what what factors are contributing to if we don't have a timeline, which is understandable because we have

to take action today, what factors are contributing to informing what that timeline looks like? i think one of the things that, that i don't want to repeat this time around, is having an experience side again by, implementation. right. and so that is the that is something that i hope we can get ahead of, but just want to hear your thoughts on that fall. yeah. i mean, we, we hear loud and clear that implementation has to provide minimal impact and be the least disruptive as possible , it's a little unusual taking a conceptual design to the board, because usually you just take final projects. so this this is a little odd for us as well, but there is a lot of work that we still have to do. so far, we've been really focused in between the intersections. so that's where all the merchants are. that's where all the businesses are, and that's where a lot of our focus has been over the past few months, there's a lot that

we still have to design out. i think the issues and the concerns raised with parklets, we need to we hear that we need to take a closer look at that, but we also have to look at the parking and loading mix. we have to look at the intersection design. so how do people move through that space where a lot is happening, there are questions about the left and right turn restrictions and we need to take a very close look at that. do we have to revise the signal timing at all? we need to get into all of these details. and that's what it's going to take to go from the conceptual design that we have here to a final design, so that is our work over the next few months is getting to that point, we need to continue our outreach in the background as well, and continuing to meet with the small business owners and making sure that they are up to date with what we're working on, because the last thing we want to do is go silent and nobody

hears from us. and then people are wondering where is this project heading? so every, every block needs that attention. and that's our job for the next few months. our goal is to come back by the end of the year. so late 2024 with the final project, and then as far as construction and implementation goes, we know that it's very important for the small business owners and merchants to understand and know what to expect. so we have to think very closely or we have to think very clearly and closely, like, how are we going to implement this? because going from a center running design to a site running design is also new in san francisco. so what is it going to take to do that? and i think we probably have to get a little creative and flexible as well and just understand how we can do this. so also the final part is we have to listen to merchants and we have to listen to the small business owners and figure out when can we thread the needle in terms of all of their priorities and all their seasonal all, you know, economic upticks? what time is

right for us to do this? so that's our job as well. and i think i forget you mentioned it, director tarlov, but vqma is going to be talking about that internally. we have to do our listening as well and figure out exactly when this would make the most sense. that's great. and i you know, i think this speaks to the amended language that director charles was proposing, that you that working in concert with merchants to really understand what that seasonality of the work should look like, and what is that sweet spot in a year of when, like implementation of a project or construction can happen, i also i'm curious and i know i've said this in previous meetings, like we do have the construction mitigation program. and so as you're considering, you know, how how to gracefully, if at all possible is never graceful, but how gracefully you can undo one project and implement another and that beautifully choreographed ballet of switching one project to the next, how we could support merchants during that time. it

will impact merchants no matter what we do. it will impact merchants. and so it's important for us to just, figure out what resources, not just we, but the greater city family, could corral to make sure that we're we're holding merchants during this time. and that's something that, i would definitely invite us to, to work across different city departments to, to better understand what that looks like. thank you, director tomlin. yes. before you take a vote, i'd like to suggest perhaps a friendly amendment to director khalaf's motion. and that is in the second resolved clause, as as project manager paul steinitz have said, we are trying to juggle a lot of trade offs here. and we've heard loud and clear from the merchants and from all of you that we need to move through this quickly. but we also need to do it with a tremendous amount of engagement and a tremendous amount of accommodation of specific businesses, like when we discovered the nitrogen hose

issue for smitten, that caused us to have to re juggle everything. so, so my, my simple amendment would be in the last sentence of the, of the last resolve clause that we would accomplish any eventual construction at a time and in a manner that will minimize to the fullest extent practicable, disruptions to the largest number of businesses possible. so in simply changing the that word possible to practicable, recognizing that there are additional considerations other than mere speed. so if you would entertain that, we'd be happy to you, director. okay thank you for that, director tomlin. i'm just going to make a few remarks, and then i will move us to a vote. colleagues, i also just want to thank mr. stannis and team for just laying this all out so clearly in the

powerpoint presentation, one of this board's priorities from the beginning of this year was just really clear communication and transparency to help everyone understand what we're doing. and i think you've really modeled that in this presentation today, sharing back what you've heard, laying out the issues, not hiding anything. we were just sharing very clearly. what are all the trade offs for everyone? so thank you for that, i want to appreciate director tarlov for your leadership in offering these amendments to the resolution in response to the themes that you've heard. and we've all heard from the business community. i'm also in support of your proposed amendments, one of the issues that you raise in your amendments is this issue of minimizing construction impacts. and i do want to speak to this just for a moment, when we think about the way the construction happens, one of the commenters talked about a sort of an extended construction period, i think about some of the and i don't know if this is a fair analogy, but i do think about some of the times that we are forced to close the subway and

how conscientious and intentional the transit team is with sort of consolidating those impacts in recognition that there is a real impact to people using that service. and we want to limit the amount of the time of that impact of that disruption and get the trains running as quickly as possible. i also, i want to i want to honor that. director tarloff has mentioned the importance of working with the business community to understand the ways in which this impact of construction could be minimized. this is a very important partnership opportunity going forward, i might hypothesize that sort of consolidating the construction time and getting it done as quickly as possible might be a way to go. but i am, don't i am not, and i don't need to be the decision maker on that. i just want us to be very intentional and strategic about how we design this construction to minimize impacts. so look forward to hearing updates on that going forward and if there are any creative ways that we can really do the best, most

expeditious version of this construction, it would be appreciated. i also do want to say, and there are many people here who rely on this corridor every day, multiple times a day, to get around the availability of safe biking infrastructure during construction is also important. your slide makes very clear that there's not a great immediately apparent alternative to this corridor. so even during construction, i want us to be really thoughtful about the people who use this every single day as a biking corridor. and i know that's tough, but we got a lot of feedback last time around, like, what is going on? is this open for me? can i use this? can i not use this? where am i supposed to be? and that's really helpful. important user feedback that i want to honor and a continuous improvement fashion. make sure we're conscientious. so i don't know if there's some sort of like advisory committee or something you want to convene, in acknowledgment of all the different needs that need to be

balanced during construction phase. but that feels really important to me to get that right this time around, and then just a couple other items i'll share quick responses on or quick thoughts on and then, wrap up here i am. i do find myself in sort of resonating with the public comments we're receiving about preserving the pedestrian safety aspects of this project through continuing some of those turn restrictions. and i know that's another area of trade off, because we also have heard circulation matters a lot to members of the business community. so that's something that will need to be weighed. but to extend those pedestrian safety impacts have been elevated, i, i'm in favor, i believe, of continuing to look at how we make this not just a bicycle project, bicycle safety project, but also a pedestrian safety project. we heard also about the section from 23rd to cesar chavez, which i know you're like, please don't pile it on me right now. i understand there are concerns about that.

it's also just such a natural question when it comes to sort of closing the gap in the network and sort of finishing off this whole corridor. so i just i do want to sort of underscore that and, add, add my voice to the chorus, calling for us to really complete the job. and then just the last thing is around the sort of the width of the bike lane facility. we heard some commenters talk about how we can maximize that and just make sure that the demand we know exists for the corridor is accommodated in the design. so just i think i'll just encourage you to continue to work with the key stakeholders in the bicycle community on those design details and make sure we're putting it where acknowledging and reflecting that user experience. and then, of course, continue to work with the members of the business community on the things like solving the floating parklet challenge and the construct and the design of the construction phase and minimizing construction impacts. so with all that, i will turn to you,

director tarlov, are you okay to make a motion with that amendment? yes. okay. and we had a second from director henry. is that right? yes. and i and i take that amendment okay. thank you. could you please call the roll secretary silva on the motion to amend the resolution as read into the record with the additional amendment and approve, as amended, director henderson, a henderson i director henry i. kinsey i director tarlov i tarlov i director kahina i kahina i chair ekin i ekin i thank you. the item is approved and concludes the business before you today. okay. thank you colleagues, staff and members of the public. we are adjourned. our next meetings are on june 28th, a special meeting on july 16th. regular meeting. thank you.

you're watching san francisco rising with chris manors. today's special guest is jeff tumlin. >> hi, i'm chris manors and you're watching san francisco rising. the show on starting, rebuilding, and reimagining our city. our guest is jeff tumlin and he's with us to talk about our

transportation recovery plan and some exciting projects across the city. mr. tumlin welcome to the show. >> thank you for having me. >> i know the pandemic was particularly challenging for the m.t.a. having to balance between keeping central transportation routes open, but things have improved. how are we doing with our transportation recovery plan? >> so we just got good news this week. we're getting an extra $115 million from the american rescue plan and this is basically the exact amount of money we finally needed in order to close the gap between now and november of 2024 when we'll have to find some additional revenue sources in order to sustain the agency. in the meantime, i finally have the confidence to be able to rapidly hire, to restore services and to make sure muni

is there for san francisco's larger economic recovery because downtown san francisco doesn't work without muni. >> quite right. i guess the other impact of the pandemic was that some projects like the valencia bike improvements had to be put on hold. are we starting to gear up on those again? >> yes, so it's an interesting case study. of right before covid hit, we were about ready to invest in quick build bike lanes. arguably the most important bike order in san francisco. that got stopped with lockdown and then as you'll recall, during covid, we invented all kinds of other new programs like shared spaces in order to support our small businesses as well as sunday street light events for neighborhood commercial streets where streets were closed off to cars and turned over to commercial activity. those successes now that they've been made permanent

actually interrupt the draft design we had put together. so we've gone back to the drawing board and we are looking forward to having some additional community conversations about other design ideas for valencia. we're committed to completing a quick build project on this calendar year. >> that's such good news. valencia is a really great street for biking. so there are two huge and exciting projects that are about to be or have just been completed. let's talk about the bus rapid transit project on van ness avenue. how extensive have the improvements been? >> what's called the van ness transit rapid project is in fact more about complete reconstruction of the street and most importantly, the 100-year-old utilities underneath the street. so all of the water, sewer, telecommunications, gas lines under the street were basically rebuilt from market street all the way to lumbard.

the part on the surface which provides dedicated bus lanes for golden gate transit and muni, that was relatively straight forward and we're so excited we're going to start revenue service for muni on april 1st. >> that's fantastic. i understand there were some sidewalk improvements too. >> there were sidewalk improvements. we planted 374 trees. there is new storm water treatment including infiltration in the sidewalk, there's a bunch of art. there's all kinds of things. we put in new street lights for the entire corridor. >> finally, the other big news is about the central subway. can you briefly describe the project and give us an update. >> yes, so the central t-line

project, another stop at union square that connects directly into powell station and a final stop in the heart of chinatown at stockton and washington. that project has also run into challenges. it's 120' under muni, under bart, 120' down and out under chinatown in some unexpectedly challenging soils. but that project is nearly complete. it's at about 98% completion right now which means we're testing trains, we're testing the elevators and escalators and the final electronics and we're still on track to open that in october presuming all of the testing continues to go well. so fingers crossed on in a one. we're really looking forward to allowing people to have a subway ride from the heart of chinatown all the way to the

convention center to the caltrans station and all the way down to bayview and visitation valley. >> it's great to see all these projects coming to completion. we're all grateful for your team's hard work and i really appreciate you coming on the show, mr. tumlin. thank you for the time you've given us today. >> my pleasure. thanks for having me. >> and that's it for this episode. for sfgov tv i'm chris manors. thanks for watching. >> i'm connie chan district one supervisor and welcome to the richmond.

>> i'm an immigrant and came to san francisco china town when i was 13 years old with my mom and brother. my first job is at the community organizer for public safety with san francisco state. and land in the city hall and became a legislative aid to sophie maxwell. went through city departments when kamala harris was our district attorney i'm proud to represent the richmondad district supervisor. [music] we have great neighborhood commercial corridors that need to be protected. the reason why we launched the neighborhood business for supporting the [inaudible] for

15 years special more. we have the legacy business program the business around for 30 years or more and thought, you know, we gotta make sure the next generation contains for generations to come. am i'm ruth the owner of hamburger haven we came back on july 11. we were opened in 1968 at that time i believe one of the owners of mestart today went through a guy named andy in the early 70s and my father took it mid 70s. >> originally was just a burger joint. open late nights. then it changed over the years and became the breakfast staple. we specialize in breakfast, brunch come lunch now. i love this neighborhood. i grew up here. and it feels like home. i walk down the block and recognize people of people say hello. you say hello you talk and joke.

has that familiar environment that is enjoyable and i have not experienced anywhere else. there are many things i would like to see improve ams the things we might see are making sure that our tenants stay housed our small business in tact and those are the solutions that will contain to push to make sure that you know our communities can take root, stay and thrive. >> i'm proud of you know, welcoming folks to the richmond. everyone loch its we got farmer's market every sunday there. the you see really business at the noaa. ice cream at toy folks and going to chop for book like green apple. and that's when you like the

deal is pizza place haall families love. you will see a lot of great chinese shops that is readily available for everyone. >> and that is just thein are richmond there is more to do in the richmond. what is love is the theatre. >> i mean adam and with my wife jamie, own little company called cinema sf we operate the balboa theatre. the vocabularying theatre on sacramento and soon the 4 star on clement. >> balboa theatre opened in 1926 and servicing this outer richmond neighborhood since then. and close on the heels the 4 star opens since 1913. >> when you come in to a movie theatre, the rest of the world has to be left behind. but you get e mersed in the world that is film makers made

for you. that is a special experience to very much we can all think of the movies that we saw in the big screen of with everybody screaming or laughing or crying. it is a shared human experience that you get when you go in to places that are gatherings and artist presented to you. >> a shared experience is the most precious. and the popcorn. [laughter]. at the balboa especially, we stroif to have movies for people of every generation from the pop corn palace movies on the weekend mornings, for families and kids. this is for everybody of all ages. >> what is great about the richmond is it is a neighborhood of the immigrants. belongs to immigrants not ap i immigrants you will see that

there are also a huge population of rush wrans and ukrainian immigrants they stay united you am see that the support they lend to each other as a community. and cinderella bakery is another legacy business. if you go on the website it is known as a russian bakery. the first thing you see their pledge to support the ukrainian community. you will see the unity in the richmond i'm so proud of our immigrant community in the rich monthed. >> my dad immigrate friday iran the reason he stayed was because of the restaurant. has more centamential value it is the reasonable we are in this country. when he had an opportunity to take over the instruct he stayed that is why we are here part of our legacy and san francisco history and like to keep it

going for years to come. >> another moment i'm proud to be supporting the richmond and the only asian american woman elect in the office and as an immigrant that is not happen nothing 3 decades. you see it is my ability to represent especially the asian-american community. in my case the chinese speaking elders in our community that really can allow me to communicate with them directly. i'm program director of adult day centers. i have been here for 7 years i love to help the communities and help and the people with disability. i foal a connection with them. i am anim grant i love helping our community and new immigrants

and improvements. >> if you want nature, richmond is the neighborhood to go we are between ocean beach heights and golden gate park. >> i love the outer richmond. for me this is the single best neighborhood in san francisco. everybody knows each other. people have been living here forever. it is young and old. the ocean is really near by. and so there is that out doors ocean vibe to it. there are places to seat golden gate bridge it is amazing. businesses are all small mom and pop businesses. houses get passed down generation to generation. it has a small town feel but you know you are in a big city at the same time. it's got a unique flavor i don't

see in other neighborhoods j. it is about being inclusive we are inclusive and welcome the communities, anybody should feel welcome and belong here and shop local, eat local. we believe that with that support and that network it come in full circle. it is passing on kinds knows. that's when richmond is about that we are together at once. welcome to the richmond. [music]

>> come shop dine and play. taraval street is open for business. >> i am a coowner at 19th. this establishment came about when me and my brother andy, coowner, we decided that it time for us to take a step up in the barber industry, and open up a space of our own. ory business is a community that shows their true artistic side of the barber industry. we are involved in teraival bingo so stop by, get a hair cut and when you do you get the barber sticker made just for us.

i say in three words we are community, arts and here to help any way possible we can, so come by, visit at barber lounge, 907 taraval in the sunset. you can find us on instagram. >> time for teraival bingo supporting small business, anyone can participate. it is easy, collect stickers on a bingo gameboard and enter a raffle event.

>> making to may grandkids a program all about pop ups, artists, non profits small business in into vacant downtown throughout the area for a three to 6 months

engagement. >> i think san francisco is really bright and i wanted to be a part of it revitalization. >> i'm hillary, the owner of [indiscernible] pizza. vacant and vibrant got into safe downtown we never could have gotten into pre-pandemic. we thought about opening downtown but couldn't afford it and a landlord [indiscernible] this was a awesome opportunity for us to get our foot in here. >> the agency is the marriage between a conventional art gallery and fine art agency. i'm victor gonzalez the founder of gcs agency. thes program is especially important for small business because it extended huge life

line of resources, but also expertise from the people that have gathered around the vacant to vibrant program. it is allowed small businesses to pop up in spaces that have previously been fully unaccessible or just out of budget. vacant to vibrant was funded by a grant from the office of economic workforce development that was part of the mayor's economic recovery budget last year so we funded our non profit partners new deal who managed the process getting folks into these spaces. >> [indiscernible] have been tireless for all of us down here and it has been incredible. certainly never seen the kind of assistance from the city that vacant to vibrant has given us, for sure.

>> vacant to ibvooerant is a important program because it just has the opportunity to build excitement what downtown could be. it is change the narrative talking about ground floor vacancy and office vacancy to talking about the amazing network of small scale entrepreneur, [indiscernible] >> this is a huge opportunity that is really happy about because it has given me space to showcase all the work i have been doing over the past few years, to have a space i can call my own for a extended period of time has been, i mean, it is incredible. >> big reason why i do this is specific to empower artist. there are a lot of people in san francisco that have really great ideas that have the work ethics, they just don't have those opportunities presented, so this has been huge lifeline i think for entrepreneurs and small businesses. >> this was a great program for

us. it has [indiscernible] opening the site. we benefited from it and i think because there is diverse and different [indiscernible] able to be down here that everybody kind of benefits from it.

>> it is 102 p.m. and my name is commissioner brackett is this is meeting of community investment and infrastructure. tuesday june 18, 2024. i like to welcome everyone joining today's meeting, being held in both hybrid format. to members of the public, you can participate and provide comments in person at city hall today and remotely by the phone. thank you again to our staff and guests. i hope you will be participating in today's meetingism please call the first item. >> thank you madam chair. the first order of business is roll call. commissioner aquino, here. commissioner drew, here. commissioner lim, here. vice chair scott, here. commissioner brackett, present.