the money will be better used. and we love north beach and we want to keep its uniqueness and charm for everyone. >> charles a resident of san francisco and a member of the senior disability action. and at first i want to give a salute to all of the union workers at muni who keep this system running in spite of the forced align against it. and i want to revisit the program whereby you have a uniform shake down squad that costs the public of the members use in your facility. and to find out if they paid their 75 cents of two dollars. i want the geary bus getting

off and there they are, about five or six of them. across the grandmothers with the walkers. the mothers with infants and the veterans with crutches and canes, and they pay their 75 cents or two dollars, i don't see anybody down on montgomery street checking the bankers who stole billion and continue to still billions and i don't see anybody checking apple who don't pay their taxes and more than that, by the way we are still, spending eight dollars to collect one dollar. so from the tackle in the pool and the working people of this society. i wonder what you do to the homeless people who can't pay and go down to saint anthony and dock their meals? there is nothing too low. stop to kill harding out in the bay view because he did not have a transfer. so this system decayed and you

want to make this a nice, friendly place for condos so you can have a tax base and do all that you can to chase the working people and the poor out and you don't do a damn thing to the bankers and corporations. >> herbert winer and followed by hansukim and wood. >> herbert winer, stake holder. they should site the bicycles who go through the lights. there are not enough cops to cover this there are much more needs in the city. but what is to stop the parking and traffics to site the bicycles going through the red light and they see it all of the time in the intersection

and this would be a buned of the cash for mta which is begging for bucks and staring you right in the face and there must be with 100 of these violations a day, multiply that by 100 dollars, per violation, and really you have a goal line here, and you might not be hurting. so, instead of going after, the drivers and their parking meters and everything, why not start that? and if you must, charge people, and you must do some parking meters, i think that the bicyclists. >> hans, sue, kim followed by john woods and howard strasner. >> good afternoon, nolan and fellow directors. i think that we all here want a

world class taxi cab service in san francisco and my feeling is that despite the efforts of chris, haoshi and riskin we are nowhere near there, my feeling is that the rise of these new services as been caused to our lack of reliability and our quality of service as a taxi industry as a whole. so this industry as a whole is to be blamed for the raise of these other services. and what astonishing me is that we are in a position where we have 33 color schemes and eleven dispatch serves and we have allowed half of the medallions to do half of the pick ups and we are that inefficient as a industry still. and half of the medallions and the tax i cabs are not doing neighborhood calls they are just doing flags and airports, we must create aoe standards

that are high and become a reliable service and going to be eaten and you have to follow the oversight that we do. and we as a company and a situation, where i have to really consider because, i have not gotten the support and the insensitives to provide the services that i need as a company to consider changing my model. do i want to be a taxi cab service or a sedan service? i can make money in a deregulated system and i don't want to go that route. i am asking you that if we are going to solve this problem, we must make sure that we have the highest standards of service and we are supporting the companies that are doing the bulk of our services. >> joan, wood, howard strasner

and the last person who will speak is (inaudible) lawrence. >> good afternoon, miss woods. >> good afternoon, i'm joan wood. and lived in north beach for 49 continuous years and i am here for the plan to take the boring machine heads or all of them at a location called the pagota theater and it is quite near where i live. the problem really started years ago when north beach was not notified of public meetings that would eventually lead to this, we were not considered a stake holder. unknown reasons, why, seven other stake holders including china town, not us. so most of us just find out that you are going to go 4.4

miles of it has been in the eir and no one knew about it. rather recently it was decided that, it would be in our best interest, and north beach's best interest to extract the boring machines and these giant machines from the pagota theater which has been an eye sore to most people and i have gotten used to it myself. and so pretty inventive graffiti has been painted over it and i am used to it as part of north beach which makes it charming to me. and i have lived in the same apartment for 48 years, of course it is rent controlled that i why i stay there. it is impossible to change the plan and leave these machines in the ground at the china town station, this was offered to us in the public meeting, on january 22nd, five options were printed out for us. it is not as if, director

riskin did not know about it and supposedly all of the options were supposed to be presented to you and option two, is leaving them or taking them out of china town was not apresented, and i have never figured out why, change your minds about this, thank you. >> howard strasner followed by amy law ens, those are the last two people. >> i thought since i don't have class during the summer i would come by as often as i can to give you guys a lecture on parking. >> and about a month ago, one of the supervisors called a hearing on parking. and when i got there, in the middle of the hearing, i noticed our director, riskin just (inaudible) with the bench as if he had been wrestling with three tigers at the same time on the floor of the coliseum and i am the only person who spoke that the muni and mta were doing a good job

on the portion and parking. and so i thought, an overview would consist of just dealing with that one supervisor. that one supervisor knows that muni has to work better, that when supervisor knows that we have to do more for the pedestrian safety. also knows that you can't take away the parking from anybody. an overview that we show and the first thing that we looked at. the tip and the tip study, they show us that the downward slope of the muni speed and how does that respond with the increasing numbers of parking in driving in san francisco? and car ownership? precisely directly. if you don't believe tha, have you to look at your own studies about the drt that when you move the bus away from the cars it does well pretty quickly. this is going to be a long series of limited each time, but, and then, i will eat my own neighborhood, and a quarter

of century, neighborhood and they wanted to put the red paint on the crosswalks and you said that you can't do that and that will take away the parking, we started to whisper about putting some paint around which is required by city law, oh, no you can't talk about that, it gets rid of parking, so there say lot to talk about and next month we will deal with the history of parking in san francisco, thanks a lot. >> lawrence? >> good afternoon. >> you have three minutes? >> no. >> short list, today. and ladies and gentlemen, and commissions good afternoon, for the record, my name is amele law ens, i have been a resident of the city and county of san francisco for 44 years and a taxi driver for 15 years. i am here for the first time today to tell you that i am not

going to give the speeches to the commission every speech that i make will go to the board of supervisors at the same time, i have had up to here with your fines and harvesting of taxi drivers and the fees to squeeze us for pensions and liabilities that are not ours but yours. we don't have friends and fans, we don't have medical plans, we don't have dental plans, but we are paying for yours. i have collected a whole bunch of the manuals that is going to the board of supervisors i have a letter going to the mayor. mayor lee, to advise him of what is taking place in the taxi business. >> i am a taxi holder and i am going to be paying you on 30th, $4500 for something that i considered fraud. picking up ran fan taxi, wheelchairs, para transit holders that any taxi can pick

up. collapsable wheelchairs that any wheelchair can pick up. and you pay $50 a pick up and you pay mobile. $50, and you don't have one of those ramps to a taxi driver. we are instructed to hold out at hospitals for hours after hours. >> picking up for $17 or $18 that is what it is all about, i am tired of being harvested by this commission, by the mta. i thank you for the time on this issue, and there are seven letters and the copy to the mayor. >> mr. chairman that is the last person. >> and then the consent calendar? >> mary mcchoir, one of my

customers described our current administration as master for taxi and i thought that was appropriate, and i don't know if the idea is to just flood the streets with cabs and let us all fight it out sort of a social darwinism situation, the morale is really bad and i have been told that there as many as 4,000 out there, and they are just everywhere and they are coming from... i have heard that they are coming from all over the country now and we have seen them from out of state. and if you are driving around you see the black cars and the tcerebral palsy just drive around and you see them. and then, cab drivers keep coming up to me and calling me every day and just distraught and saying that why isn't the city doing anything? i tell you something and she says, no we want do anything because they will sue. let them sue, this city attorney right here is 100

times better than any attorney that they have had. i was at the rule making sessions and it is just a big, it is all spin, this city attorney could take them on and anybody in this city and let them, because i think that if the rule making comes back and it decides against them i think that they are going to go on ahead and do anything that they want, i have that feeling. so we have to be ready to take this on. and also, they are in violation of the ada. and we have, i mean, that there are grounds right there. and they are running businesses, and there are as many of them as there are taxis now and they are not complying with the american's with disabilities act. i am sorry i am frustrated. you know i have better things that i would like to do every week. but okay, thank you for. >> thank you. >> anyone else here to address the board under public comment? >> director brinkman has a question. >> i actually just wanted to

circle back on the parking issue. we talked about it a lot and the director brought it up the reward for the park and which is deserved and mentioned one of the things that we did was take away the free parking for city employees and our own employees and i remember that they were actually two unions that i believe still have the free parking in their contract and i remember at the the of the neglectization we were told that those would come up for negotiation again in whatever amount of time it was and i think that is approaching. i know that it is going to be touchy subject and it is something that we need to do to finish the transition of our own employees and city employees. >> is that something.ing up, soon? >> all of our contracts will be up for negotiation at the end of next fiscal year, so it will beginning the process during the next fiscal year. >> okay. >> just to follow up on

commissioner mcquire's comments do we have an idea of when they will rule on the rule making decision? or not bound to any time line? >> yes. dr. heinieke. >> as we understand it, that is why the administrative law judge is expecting to issue his proposed decisions on behalf of the president of the commission in july. >> and what would be the time line would it then have to be approved by the commission and that sort of thing? >> it will have to go to the commission for approval. >> what was the estimated time there? >> a couple of months, but i am happy to check with them again and see if they can give us more information. >> i mean, okay. i asked the question, because the folks in the industry are all, who are here and care about this know what is going on and so that also, they don't think that we are looking at this issue as something on permanent delay and it is

something that we have a forecast coming decision. >> thank you. >> anybody else? >> thank you. >> thank you. >> moving on to the consent calendar. >> these are routine, unless the member of the board or the public wish to have it severed. i have received no requests to sever an item. >> motion on the consent calendar? >> okay. all in favor, aye. >> >> item 11, regarding the presentation and discussion of regarding the stma bike straggy and needs assessment. >> director riskin is presenting to us on this one. >> good afternoon, directors. >> good afternoon, unfortunately, our planning director who is meant to be here presenting and speaking much more intelligently and with a better accent than i was unable to be here and so i am

going to attempt to... since we had noticed the meeting and i know that there are people here to speak to it we did not want to put it off. but we had to come to you back in january at our off-site workshop and given you an overview of the strategy and i think that recently, vice chair asked that we come back and provide an update and so, we are here to do that. this is meant to be an informational item of what we are doing and where we are heading and we look forward to the discussion and the direction from the board and of course the public comment. >> so, if we could go to the slides. what we have laid out, and i believe, previously, was kind of the process by which we are going to advance this strategy. and it was this, there was not a plan, as in the previous bike plan it was a strategy meant to

provide a framework for how we would advance that part of our strategic plan that directs us to shift people to make it more attractive to people, to get out of their cars and avail themselves of other forms of transportation, including active forms such as cycling. so, we started you may recall, by doing establishing the needs assessment methodology. and i don't know if we are going to go back and review that. but, yeah, i guess that we will. it had to do with basically using this kind of comfort index. and that we presented to you back in january. and we then, applied that strategy, or that method, and that methodology to our bike network and we have completed that assessment and so now we know basically looking across the city at the bike network,

what routes are at what level of have what level of need in order to bring them up to the standard that we ultimately would like all of them to be. and the next steps including establishing 8 to 80 bicycle team and 8 to 80 referring to the desire to have the facilities at a state where they are comfortable and attractive for people from the ages 8 to 80. and trying to use data that we get from people out there. as basically data points to crowd source from them. to enhance data collection. and what this will all do then is that it will feed in to our capitol program. and i know that is going to be probably a subject of a lot of discussion as really how do we fund all of this stuff? we are really trying to refine the needs assessment so as we go into the next capitol budgeting cycle, that we have, a good, understanding of what

our needs are. and a defined capitol improvement program to be able to recommend. and from that once we have the capitol budget in place, then it is really implementation, which is what the... what is on the right side of the slide and of course, it will need to be a phase implementation depending on the funding level, but we are trying to do what we can to figure out ways to implement the efficiently and effectively as possible. >> so just a little bit about the methodology. we basically start with a full level of 5 points and then, detract or subtract from that five based on different characteristics, such as are layed out here. and such as speed of the

prevailing speed of traffic. and proximity to some of our rapid network and kind of a crash history. and so those are things that would bring the score down. but then there are things that could bring the score up, notably the infrastructure such as a bike lane or a bike path. so, this is basically what we use the framework and fairly simple. but we wanted something that was easily doable and understandable so that we could evaluate the over all bike network and this is the methodology that we used. what this slide shows is different levels of traffic stress. which is everything from, you know, where we would like to get the level one is where everybody feels comfortable to ride and this is really the 8 to 80 goal that we think that we would need to ultimately

really achieve significant mode shift to make the bicycling more attractive for a much higher percentage of trips than they are today. the next level is where adults feel comfortable to ride. so kind of narrowing that age band, the third is you have to be enthused and confident in order to ride. and which probably reflects a good deal of our network today. and then the foulerth only the strong, and fearless and this might be more of the bicycle messenger are much narrower than a graphic and we need to accommodate before we are going to significantly shift modes. >> when we apply that criteria to the existing network, this map shows you what it looks like. and while there is a little bit of dark green, which is really where we want to be, there is a lot of red and orange too,

which is really representative of the enthusiastic and some that call themselves not fearless and many of them tell you that is not a comfortable or pleasant experience. >> can i ask to make sure that i am reading this right. >> you have all of market street of what appears to be from the headquarters to the water as red. >> ha is correct except for the first couple of blocks where there is some separation. we have been able to get out of the red. and i think that some of the recent work, in terms of repaving and restriping, and i don't know, maybe that will get us up into the orange for some of the stretches. but yeah, i mean, it is good to point out that our busiest and most important bicycle street is predominantly one that is not attractive to a very wide range of people. >> in fact it is the bike messenger category that you

described before. >> correct. >> and again, if you look on market street it is more than bike messengers that are riding on market street. there was a hearing today on the board of supervisors a lot of folks talking about market street and saying this they ride it but it is uncomfortable. >> you know where i am going so i will stop leading questions and let you continue. >> so as it says here on the bottom, we have less than ten percent of the network right now that we believe is comfortable for that broad range of folks that need to get cycling. >> or that we need to get cycling in order to achieve the board's strategic plans of goals. so we are trying to look at this kind of from a key quarters perspective and we can't do everything and we need to prioritize some what. this is one of the questions that we brought to you in january, do we go to all of the reds and start bringing them up?

or should we focus on the corridors where the rider ship is the heaviest? and i think that we are looking at doing the latter, and this kind of outlines the key paths that people take that you know there is current ridership where we think that there is latent demand. and then an example of how we will apply this methodology and here you can see more detail and speaks to the earlier discussion about the market street and taking that whole corridor going all the way across the city and in terms of what it looks like and you can see where you have made some investments and first of all our page, jfk drive and there is investment and infrastructure that brought it back up for a better level and then the actual things that they took to get the separated bike lanes through the eastern part of the park, and really gets that into a facility where

most people could be comfortable riding similarly, and going through the panhandle. and it is essentially a separated bike lane, and it is off of traffic and then we start to get into some of the difficult areas, obviously, the contentious decisions that you made recently to approve the oak bike lanes. that will turn the yellows into greens, a much different speshs experience, the oak side back open now and much a different experience for anyone who used to travel and in that place but really a key connector there and passing through the wiggle. you can see that that is currently in the yellow. and we do have some green back shares there. and but we are still, a little

place really for all modes of transportation going through there. and just this past week or maybe it was last week, we conducted a public workshop with a public utility commission, in the lower haight neighborhood to identify what things we could do to bring up that stretch, because that is the critical connector from the west side of town to market street. and then, as we discussed, on market, a good chunk of it, remains in the red, about four of the place and where we have put in the separated bike lanes, the posts and a few years back. and so this is an example of how this methodology applies and how it really points us to where the strategic investments are needed. >> so just some xham examples a key hot spot going on market connecting to the commission and previously on the street

going south, we had to cross two or three lanes of traffic and the muni tracks and if you were doing it, as you were using your way to the south and your wheels are in line with the tracks and a pretty significant hazard there. and so what we did just in the last six months, was put in this right turn pocket as well as bike traffic signal. and so now, the southbound traffic can go off to the right and the bike traffic to the right and wait for the signal and cross perpendicular to the tracks without the conflict with the vehicles. and compliance is not great with that right now, a lot of people still do it. the dangerous difficult way. but we are creating options here for the folks who don't want to fight the two or three lanes of traffic and the street cars and the tracks. so this is just an example of how we might fix the hot spot, and a little bit better version

of it where you can see the people using it. and you can see that the bike signal, up there, and you can see one car not keeping clear of the area that is meant to keep clear but at least the cars are not moving as the cyclists are trying to make the ways across and they can go perpendicular to the tracks. so this map shows where some of the strategic opportunities are that one in valencia and market is one one of many examples where we have critical exceptions that represent the gaps that we want to close and what this map also shows is the current, it is maybe a little bit hard to see, but it shows based on, census data, i believe, and some current mode share information, percentage of the trips being taken by bikes and