>> thank you, ramone. a picture is worth a thousand words and there are several here that works as a checklist over things we can do after today. i want to make a quick announcement. we have assisttive listening devices available. they can be checked out in the sign in table if you need them. nick is holding them up now. assisttive listening devices. we're now going to move o to the panel portion of our day. four one hour panels are set up to discuss engineering, education, enforcement and planning or design. the first panel is crash reduction measures and i'd like to introduce mathew rubble way of peer associates to monitor it. in addition to his works as a

consultant he's an instructor for the university of california, institute of transportation studies technology transportation studies and biking and pedestrian planning and design since 1999 and serves as the vice chair of the pedestrian bicycle council of the institute of transportation engineers. less welcome mathew. >> you'll be happy to know i don't have a big presentation to give you. i'm mostly moderating so i want to invite the other speakers. there's place materials at each spot so if ya'll come up i'll save our audience walking time. we're going to have brief presentations five to ten minutes from each person and i'll take a couple of questions immediately following assuming time available but we want to leave time for general group

discussion so we'll take as many questions as we can after the discussion and cut ate off if it looks to run for a while. our first speaker jack fleck the traffic engineer for the city of san francisco for a very, very long-time. serves as a mentor for many in our industry, giving back especially in the context of professional organizations like professional engineers and at the forefront of a lot of innovative practices for many many years - i think even though pedestrian are - the hot button thing and hopefully will continue jack has been on that side for a while. i'll introduce jack for a brief presentation. >> um... i'm going to talk about some pedestrian safety measures we've done in san francisco and i want to start by highlightg the serious necessary of the situation. we have currently two pedestrian injury coalitions every day in

san francisco. and last year we had 24 pedestrian fatalities up from 13 the year bfrn and, so the situation is serious. on the other and we're making progress and have made tremendous progress and improvements are possible so i do want to convey a sense of confidence and enthusiasm of what we can accomplish. back to the dawn of the era of san francisco in 1926 there were 82 pedestrian fatalitys in san francisco. things got so bad police would raise a banner or flag whenever there was a traffic fatality at union square to call attention to this. in fact all the publicity and efforts of the police and engineers at the time did come up with improvements. the city came up with innovative ideas. there's a slide we have of the

pedestrian scrabbles installed in the 1950's on montgomery street and this was innovative for any place at the time and still very successful today. as of 1963 there were still 62 pedestrian fatalitys in that year, so it's need for improvement has increased over the years and i want to show some of the more recent data. in 2000 with the first pedestrian summit there were 30 fatalities that year. the number is coming down but it's still very high. this graph after i talked to peter jacobson he mentioned about the trauma care leading to reduction in fatalities and this is not just fatalities but the pedestrian injuries are coming down. so, we have been successful over the years and i did want to talk about a number of the things since this is a pedestrian summit i went through the notes from the 200 summit

and there were a lot of great ideas there and i think we've implemented a lot of them and this slide shows a lot of those. probably too small to read but let me highlight some. not just out of that summit. some were things wele already were talking about but things i hoped we could talk about to conty newelly improve safety. one was timing signals for people that moved as slow as 2.5 feet per second. quite a bit slower than the national standard. pedestrian countdown signals. we used to not have any. in a study in monterey california looked at these and we were skeptical but we started our pedestrian program and frank mark wits and we did a program and found out how people liked them and they improved safety

and we've implemented them city-wide and it haves successful. pedestrian head start intervals. red light camera program started those years. and it's been very successful. ideas such as more corner bulb outs and automobile pedestrian signals. we now have 54 and plan to go city-wide. recently we adopted a standard we feel will be the thing of the future in terms of signals in san francisco. they ever was a new standard for fluorescent yellow pedestrian crossing science and school crossing signs and we hired more crossing guards and put in more cross walks at schools and had the idea and these are all from the notes at the last pedestrian summit by the way, lighted cross walks were talked about and we have experimented with them and found some technical difficulties and hopefully that will improve to be maintained.

that's problem with installations we've done. speed bumps were talked about and that was dormant for years but it has been revived. traffic calming program has been revitalized since passing of prop-k that has begun to provide funding for that. there are some ideas i wanted to call your attention to. speed radar signs that say the speed limit is such and such and these have been found to get people to slow down. we've experimented and had some interesting experiences with traffic circles. but we've learned a lot and this is part of the tool kit we have. some of the things we do are not necessarily new invasions but they're proven traffic engineering improvements. new signals. we constantly get requests for those at high traffic

intersections. we've put in close to 200 and these are highly motivated to improve safety and have worked to do that. we're upgradeg the old cyst tells. mast arms and 12 inch lenses to improve are visibility and these have been shown to improve safety. everything doesn't have to be that expensive though. we've put in lots of stop signs. drivers may get annoyed but we have a problem on too many muni routes so we're care full but we watch the pedestrian collision pattern and those are an effective tool. just putting red around curbs are effective. the mast arms, we put those in the south of market and did a study that there was a 50% reduction in all collisions a lot of which were pedestrian.

numbers went from 724 collisions to 344 in the three years before and after we installed those mass arms. 344 is too many collisions but it's better than 724. so, a step in the right direction. similarly the countdown signals. putting them city-wide we found a 20% reduction in intersections installing those. the study is now use bide the federal highway administration to encourage cities to adopt pe pedestrian countdown signals because they're so effective. simple things like stop signs. we did a study at 27 locations. before we put those in 42 coalitions and then after putting them in there were only 5. a lot help show why san francisco has a declining number of fatalities and collisions. the red light cameras and

putting in all red intervals. turning restrictions and all of these are the things we look forward to discussing today and maybe new creative ideas. just some thoughts about what's next. we have a big job to finish putting in countdown signals and have 350 intersections without countdown signals with old ones. it was easy to put in down downs with ones already there but it's a lot of work to put them in a location that doesn't have one. van ness came up repeatedly at the last pedestrian summit. at that time didn't have any there. but now we have 17 out of the 31 intersections so we have a big job there. launching a project on 19th avenue. no pedestrian signals. busiest street in the city crying for improvements.

i mentioned we'll install automobaut audible pedestrian signals. i'll wrap it up here. adrian said we're an integral part of the municipal transportation agency. traffic and muni work together and we'll hire a traffic engineer to help with reduction of muni collisions and i want to encourage you to think outside the box today and i want to throw out idea des of the things i think we're facing. eating. we've made great signs in red light running. a lot of that had to do with campaign on red light running but they haven't changed their minds about speeding. too many people feel they can go as fast as they want if they

don't get caught. it requires several things of traffic safety. in san francisco the gentleman before we showed the slide of the narrow streets but there's a lot of streets in san francisco that are too wide and they don't need to be as wide as they are. we can widen sidewalks and landscaping. we can make a better walkable environment by making streets less narrow. a lot of things is the third street light rail. wonderful opportunity and beautiful project for san francisco. there's a lot of areas with a 10-foot sidewalk next to a toll way lane. there's a lot of industrial lane there prime for that if we can get the new properties to set themselves back five feet. mission bay has agreed to do that all mission bay development will have that. we want to see that done not in

the bay view court but in the industrial areas so. those are my ideas. couple of things looking to the future. a lot of us are getting older. one stat at the last summit was 2020 one third of the population will be over 65 so i'm going to be in that group and i have a self-interest thinking of the seniors in san francisco. another thing future trend, wade talked about global warming and a big part of that is plugging in hybrids and they're very quiet and there's going to be a bill to require them to have sound. as kids we put a baseball card in the spoke office an our bikes and it's the kind of thing easy to accomplish and good for ten environment. i'm encouraging you to be creative. one person last time said we should get rid of the yellows because people speed up. i'm not going to accept every

idea here but we do encourage you to think boldly and i think we can make major strides in improving pedestrian safety. [applause] >> thank you and like i promised i'll give you a chance if you have a couple of questions and if it turns into a lot we'll go to the next speaker. questions for jack? go ahead. >> yes, mast arm is signal that extends out over the street. think of the old south of market intersection and we had a pole on each corner. 50 - 60 foot wide straight or street and the signal is right in front of the drivers it improves the safety. [question from audience]

[inaudible] >> converting one ways to two-ways. most city streets are two-ways because it's more convenient. as far as one way streets there's safety advantages in terms of one waist. studies all have shown to me that streets are converted from two-way to one way there's improvement in the safety. i know that's counter intuitive because you might think cars are going faster but you don't have to watch both ways as a pedestrian and it's a little more predictable what's going on. fewer coalition points and it's a long case-by-case basis, but

let me say tre are pro's and con's and we're open to looking at every d case. >> we'll come back later and i know you too because you had your and up. adrian my is deputy director of muni safety. been in the industry for over 20 or 30-years in san francisco and also in portland. with that go ahead. [applause] >> thank you. it's a privilege to have an opportunity to speak to you today at this very important conference. somehow when we think about muni and pedestrian accidents i know it brings up negative images. hard to duck that. any pedestrian coalition is very traumatic. look at the ten o'clock news,

the examiner, chronicle and it's hard to duck from the headlines. on the other and there is good news. if we look at some of the historic numbers going back a decade to the 1980's. we had some years in the 1980's with these kinds of pedestrian incidents in each year. 1988 - 81 pedestrian accidents. 59 in 1989, back-up to 68 in 1990. 86 in 1991. then throughout the decade of the 90's we see a downward trend which is some good news. down into the 73 in 1992, 58 in 93, 68 in 1994, a bump up to 73 in 1995 but we closed out that

decade going down with 60 in 1998, 58 in 1999. again we're seeing a downward trend overtime. when we get into more recent years. 2004 with that we had 50 pedestrian coalitions and 2005 we were down to 23 or 34. bumped up to 50 again in 2006 and unfortunately in 2007 we bumped back-up again to 64. now having been involved in some of these investigations myself, it's a tragedy looking at how a lot of collusions occur because typically if you could change just one thing - one thing that the operator might have done or one thing the pedestrian might have done, and if these if the

vehicle and person weren't coming into that particular point in time, the accident never would have occurred. so, when we reconstruct these, it's always kind of a - kind of a, what if? exercise so say if we only could have changed this one thing or change this or if we had a better line of site? could that accident have been avoided? and that's always challenge for us in safety to identify the cause and factor and determine what are the things we could put in place to prevent this situation, this accident from occurring again. as we look at the things we are doing in terms of tracking our statistics i think you have to conclude that our accident rate for million miles traveled is

fairly low. example, if we look at our various modes of equipment. our injury rates per million miles or our,lrvs is 2 point 8 pedestrian coalitions per million miles traveled. the vintage street cars have a higher rate, 9 point 8 pedestrian coalitions per million miles. motor coach? 1 point 9 per million miles. trolley, 2 point 4 per million miles. and cable car, these are 2007 numbers. 6 point 4 per million miles. well two things i point out and i know it's difficult to memorize the numbers but the two things that come out of these numbers is that the vintage

street cars have the highest rate of pedestrian coalitio col follow i'd cable car. because if you look at 2005 the rate was actually 0 because we had no pedestrian collisions in 2005 a very good year. in 06 that bumped up to 2 point 3 pedestrian collisions per million miles traveled and one with a cable car and then in 2007 the rate climbs to 6 point 4 but that's indicative of 3 pedestrian collisions with cable cars in 2007. so, what this is saying is our rail vehicles traveling on the city have the higher rate as collisions as

compared to our rubber tired vehicles. i'd also like to point out that our operators are doing a very good job in terms of safety. in 2007, the rate per operator when you include all types of collisions and mishaps on board. false boarding, lighting, slip, trip fall. anything related to the operation of the vehicle. the accident rate per operator was around 1 point 4. and the previous year was around 1 point 3 and we hover historically around 1 point 3, 1 point 4 accidents per operator per year counting everything. whether or not that accident was determined to be the fault of the operator. in 2007 it was i think 592

operators with no accidents of any kind for calendar year of 2007. and about 700 that had only one accident and then the rest of the operators were kind of on the other end of the scale with 2 or more accidents. in terms of dealing with operators who get involved in collisions we do have a program for accident retraining and we are aggressively expanding that and in the process of acquiring some new training equipment in terms of improving training we offer operators. it's all about imagining space and visibility and developing safety habits that will prevent that confluence of space and time where a person and a vehicle coming to at the wrong point in time and a collision results. so, for us, it's imagining the space and

visibility to prevent those incidents from happening. with that i'll conclude my remarks and take any questions if there's time. >> if there's just a couple of questions we'll take them and hold the rest for later. the next speaker is michael mole. the only person on this panel that's not a city of san francisco employee. he is a national expert on pedestrian and bicycle and served as a coordinator for the organ department of transportation currently based in florida and does a lot of safety audits and trainings related to bikes and pedestrians and it's your time. [applause] >> thank you mathew and thank you for being here and having me. i feel honored to be here in san francisco to talk about this.

san francisco is certainly a leader nationally in working toward pedestrian safety and it's very encouraging to see you working further beyond what you've done. you've had some great success and will continue to do so. brief information myself of the give you background on where i am and why i'm here i guess. i work for the oregon department and why thought that relates to san francisco is every city and san francisco is no exemption state highways are coming through and there's a need to partner between the state and city and public on the issues and that can be a challenge dealing with routes where the city doesn't have full control over things that happen. the other big challenge is freeway ramp terminals. major safety issue for walkers. there's so much traffic coming into the city and turning

movements and these are the kinds of things counter measures we'll talk about in the question and answer appea period can oft helped with that. in north carolina we called a city the paris of the south and san francisco was of the east. you probably know your bike program manager here and he and i worked in ashvile and he said i'm moving to the ashvil of the west now. it's similar in where people highly value visibility. similar role there to what jack does here. similar issues and much smaller scale and we looked at san francisco when i was there. there's examples that can go both ways and similar cities can learn from each other. i do a lot of design projects and i'm a consultant and

designing and planning national working on the seattle master plan come up. one of the primary things i do which is probably why home here today other than working on urban design projects with pedestrian design need i do a lot of training with the federal highway administration, designing a safety course i t teach and i could show you a lot on that but we'll not do that. a lot of thing we talk about are related to is surburban issues. many things you don't have to deal with. big intersections in tampa florida and other places you don't deal with here but there's a lot of counter measures in our courses that are applicable and i'll talk briefly before we take questions here. one of the big ones think we talked about speed.

jack talked about that and it's a major issue. it's a major factor. briefly talk stats on that. one of the things we find is slower speed there's much less chance of pedestrian fatality but we seed 20 miles per hour 5% chance of fatality. 30 jumps to 40 and then almost every pedestrian hit 40 miles an hour faster is killed. i - someone asked about the one way streets and convert together two-way streets and that certainly is a solution, should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. but there's another solution that can help and that's progression speed of the traffic going down the streets and that's another counter measure we talked about. in a place like san francisco there's one of the ways you can control speed is through

progression speed. you have to look at the signals throughout but that's something that's perhaps good next step for san francisco because you've already done such good things for pedestrian safety. generally we'll talk about intersections and geometry. smaller is better. jack talked about the larger wider streets you have. van ness and 19th and anything we can do to narrow roads and intersections and keep the corner radius small and big safety improvement, curb extensions and bulbing that curb and on street parking, that can be a solution to increase the crossing of across the streets. one of the things or places you've seen improvements in pedestrian safety is having to do with signals and signal timing. i think they're critical. you stole my