tv [untitled] July 4, 2013 1:30pm-2:01pm PDT
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evaluate in those corridors. we have not yet obviously prioritized the programmatic level, but those will be after the first round of implementation which will be these project level corridors. it's all resource dependent, of course, and, so, we are working to identify funding sources and funding source availability for these projects. but as far as prioritization of those eight corridors, it's kind of a moving target as far as what wants to go first. >> when you are getting to that place, it will be interesting to learn about that. >> sure. >> you mentioned a little bit about expanding sidewalks for pedestrian safety. can you talk a little bit how the tep is doing with the -- pedestrian safety is obviously a big issue we hear of a lot and bicycle safety as well. >> sure. >> and the other thing i mentioned, is that all stressing on bus [speaker not understood]? because that is becoming more
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of an issue and affects rider ship. >> are you talking about the [speaker not understood] or shootings? >> two things. one is pedestrian safety, the bus hitting people, right. [laughter] >> and we just had a bus and a streetcar accident -- [multiple voices] >> yes >> . >> what kind of things are being done to prevent those issues and actual safety on the bus. >> so, the actual -- the issue about safety where like the example you just gave of the accident last week, you know, we are addressing those through aggressive management techniques so it's more -- we're trying to change the way we manage the system. traditionally it's been done with on street service managers that try to manage the system [inaudible]. we're trying to incorporate more of that real-time management into how buses
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spread [inaudible] some of the gaps you see in buses and bus delivery instead of having three buses show up. we're trying to get the drivers -- operate to spread that out it will be showing up more like a 10-minute schedule versus [speaker not understood]. so, i think we're trying to address the safety and demand issues like right now through s-o-p standard operating procedures our managers go through [speaker not understood]. safety improvements,v all of our proposals, not only taking into account pedestrian safety and access, but also essentially put forward those projects, we work closely with sf walk and some of those organizations [speaker not understood] some of our proposals [inaudible].
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[inaudible]. [inaudible]. so, i think all of our proposals address pedestrian issues. we, of course, also try to tie in the bike network and work with sustainable streets on developing a good bike integration. >> and then the final thing, you have a transit stop consolidation which i would imagine if you just did that alone would speed up the entire system. where is that in the overall, when you're looking at the projects? is that one of those things with low hanging fruit [speaker not understood]?
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>> so, i would say that, you know, you are very right in your first statement that that is one of the easiest ways to increase reliability, increase speed. however, it is very hard on the political side of things. it's a very touchy issue and, you know, it's a discussion that we are going to obviously be having more of in the future as we work these proposals through implementation. we have specific locations and stops that we have recommended for consolidation and now, you know, after we have certified it will go through the public vetting process and implementation process of actually figuring out which one of those -- what of those stops will end up being consolidated and which ones won't. so, it's more of a political question than a technical question. >> thank you very much. >> commissioner antonini.
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>> thank you for your report. i think you're moving in the right direction. but in general terms, it doesn't come as a surprise to me that the time of transit miles per hour in new york is twice as fast approximately as what we have here. and even in chicago. i mean, almost all the lines in those cities are either elevated subways or have separate right-of-way. so, it's very pleasant to ride on it because you get on and you don't stop moving until you get to a tunnel or get to a station, rather. and i think as a result, you see it being used by all segments of the population at all hours. you have people dressed up at night going out to social functions and stuff which you don't see as much of in san francisco because they know they're going to get off relatively close to where they're going. so, i think overall you have to look at some kind of long range philosophy. you're only working on the efficiency of what they've got now.
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but to that point, the dedicated lanes are fine with me. i think it makes total sense. if you're really going to dedicate them, you'll elevate them. you'll put rails on them and make them streetcars, or keep cars -- it impossible for cars to go on them. m judah on judy street is elevated and cars can't drive on it. they can only cross them at the intersections. so, that would be an effective way of doing it. but to balance it out to give drivers a chance, because driving across san francisco is a challenge. but you have to keep buses off of some of the streets that are, you know, more heavily traveled by cars. sometimes you'll go up portola drive and there will be a bus stop. they don't even have a bus stop. they just stop in the right lane and you're right behind them. other things like that should not be done. you should have them -- if you're going to dedicate certain streets for buses only or for light rail ideally, then
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get the buses off of streets like ocean pine where cars are able to go and they don't have to stop. i think if you start doing things in that regard, because while you're the sixth largest in u.s. rider ship, we should be at number 3. it makes perfect sense to take public transit until you actually do it. it takes you two hours to get from one place to another, three different transfers. i mean, if we had a system where you could easily go in a tunnel or go on some subway or elevated or light rail and you were whisked to the marina as quickly now as you get out to west portal or you work quickly at potrero hill, it would make more sense you'd see a lot more people riding it. if you had the option to drive, you might, you'd get there quicker and not have to go
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through all the different changes. i mentioned the grade separation. and i mentioned some other things you're going to have to look into is some of your lines are failing, like the n judah. you have buses now to supplement it because the rider ship is very heavy and you can't accommodate it. and one of the easiest fixes, although it would take some time and money, but connecting the sunset tunnel to the subway and eliminating those above ground blocks at duboce street would make a lot of sense. probably for the cost of all the other stuff you're doing, you could bore a second tunnel through this and you could have -- or make it large -- wide enough that trains, you could run a couple out there because the rider ship is so heavy on that. the same thing is true, you're looking at the grade separation on the m car at 19th avenue
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which is another choke point there and get people quickly -- state college and other sites that are out in that direction. so, you know, i think that you have a success with -- particularly with your light rail because i heard a statistic and i have every reason to believe it's true. three of our light rail lines, i think we have a total of 6 or 7, i forget how many lettered lines we have. but three of those, each one of which has more rider ship than the entire santa clara valley transit authority in the san jose area. and, so, it shows that we have a lot of ridership on these lines, but we have even more if we had more of them. and if they moved in a more efficient way. but i agree with a lot of the things you're trying to do and i think it's going to help in the short run, but there has to be some soderth of a long range
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plan, start boring tunnels instead of trying to go over them. it's inherently going to take a long time and use energy to drive buses over hills. thank you. >> commissioner moore. >> i appreciate the update. the one comment i'd like to make is about [speaker not understood], we're calling it political and it probably is. i'd like to talk about land use sensitivity, sensitivity towards populations which are being served and ultimately location of work time criteria. i happen to live along a line which a large number of older population is living who do not have cars, who also are going to retirement homes along the way, appreciate the block by block ability going to shopping and transferring on the bus. i'm talking about chinatown and the lower part -ile
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part of nob hill and russian hill. so, i think to look at it in a very kind of micro way would be important because part of the attractiveness of san francisco and the transit lies in the ability of convenience. many people over time chose not to have cars because they could indeed within half a block, walk to a strains it stop. that is important to the dense populations in the city and i hope you're doing a very, very thorough study before you decide to use the stop elimination as a tool to implement savings. i do think you need to give yourself a break and i see complimenting you com pearl speed by city, we happen to be the only hilly city of chicago and new york. you get three bonus points which you can credit yourself
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for efficiency. >> thanks. i would just like to say real quick, every neighborhood, we're taking a look at grade as well as land use considerations when we were making those -- >> including age of population, for example, you have a large aging population in the van ness corridor, with large apartment buildings being occupied primarily with older people. i think that needs to have a close look at. >> commissioner wu. >> thank you. i want to echo commissioner moore's comments. i think that obviously consolidation can become very political, but maybe the way to take it out of politics somewhat is to really closely consider the land use. so, when considering where though eventual stops go, where is there residential, where are there schools, where are cultural institutions or small businesses? i think that as transit become very popular which is something
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we all want, it is also becoming somewhat of an amenity in this city, really fashionable. but there is a population of people that need transit they don't have enough money for a car. so, i think it's important to make sure all of the needs of the people in those neighborhoods are already being metmet or will still be met. >> commissioner sugaya. yes, on transit times and speeds and comparisons between cities, the numbers you gave out i assume are aggregate all of the different forms of transit that exist in the cities; is that right? we're counting subways and buses and whatever else. is this a break out between the different modes and the comparison -- i don't even know if that's fair. >> so, the numbers i gave were the surface transit -- the surface transit average speed. so, some of those do include different modes.
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it's not just bus, but it is all transit surface, like the subway was included. >> oh, all right. so, there is a more fair comparison, then, between. and this is kind of a funny question, but you're familiar with pay by phone? >> excuse me? >> pay by phone? >> pay by phone? >> where you -- i have it on my phone. >> yeah. >> and you can pay your parking meter with it. >> right. >> now, have you seen any information about the effectiveness of that or its success with respect to encouraging more driving in the city? >> actually, i can't speak to that. i'm not sure. >> you might want to think about it because you go to a park and you have to have your 8500 different quarters? in i didn'terglove compartment to feed the meter. ~ if you go to a restaurant, you're always looking at your watch shall to see, do i still have my 30 seconds left to dash
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back there? ~ the advantage of pay by phone, although they do charge you for it is that once you've punched in the number of minutes, then they send you a secretary message on your phone that says you have like three minutes or two minutes or something left. and you can add more time to that meter from your phone. so, it would seem to me that suddenly we're making these even more accommodating to the driver through this particular method. and i know i've used -- i don't use it all the time but when i go to a restaurant because you don't know exactly the length of time you're going to be there and it's convenient to be sitting there and get a warning that says, ah, you know, you're going to run out in a few minutes and you can just punch in more minutes. so, it would seem to be an incentive. it's just a comment. >> commissioner moore.
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>> there is one comment i'd like to add, looking at increasing the availability of adding bicycle transport on the buses, which is at this moment very intermittent and there are certain routes where that might be of help, that is balancing the need for bicycle, wenttioner changes or people are tired or whatever. and the second thing, that is probably not being able to [speaker not understood] given the current technology we're using which is indeed sometimes not helping the helpfulness. scheduling buses or intermittently serve on the same frequent of routes. >> is there any further comment? commissioner borden. >> [inaudible] making it more
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than 2 bikes could be on the bus would be helpful. >> okay, thank you very much. next. >> commissioners, if there's nothing further, we can move on to item 11 for case no. 2013.0647t - article 2 simplification and definition consolidation. this is also an informational presentation. >> while aaron is setting up there, commissioners, i did and fordthv members of the public, wanted to advise that we just received via e-mail from the representative of the d-r requestors for items 16 a and b, that they are withdrawing their discretionary review application.
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>> good afternoon, president fong and members of the commission. are you excited? i know i am. how often do you get a chance in government to make something more efficient, which is what we're doing today regarding transit. so, what i have here, i have props, is the san francisco zoning and map and book from 1947. it includes the maps and the zoning code, and the zoning code has four pages in it. i'm going to let you look at this so -- >> what is the date now? >> i'm getting to that. [laughter] >> and then what i have here is the zoning code from 1979. it has six articles, 236 pages,
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and it's in one handheld convenient binder and a stylish beige. look at that if you like. >> watch your back. [laughter] >> what i have here is our current planning code. volume 1. volume 2. and volume 3. it has 11 articles, 1,335 pages and three volumes. so, somewhere between 1979 and 2013 we added 1,0 99 pages to the planning code. ~ [laughter] >> thanks for the city attorney
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for letting me borrow that. i didn't want to bring it all the way from the department. so, to put this in some sort of perspective, 13,000 residents or 4 square miles, that make it about 27 pages per square mile and 600 residents per page. in comparison, you have new york city which has 2.85 million people spread across 200 square miles and its zoning has 3,595 pages so that's an average of 11.nine-pages per square mile, about half as much as and 275 residents per page. so, what does it mean? it's just a simple way to illustrate that san francisco has a very complex planning code, especially for the size and population, even in comparison to a more complex,
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although arguably not amazing as the city of save. so, like new york we are a very dense city. and the fact we're the second densest region in the country, i learned west hollywood is denser than san francisco which kind of blew my mind. and we have challenges and concerns that you don't get in other places. there is a short supply of land which makes it difficult to meet our housing needs. this addresses infarcting housing, inclusionary housing. this includes manufacturing industries in san francisco so that not all the industrial land is used up for housing. we have code -- sections of the code dedicated to improving streetscapes and planting trees. sections dedicated to bicycle parking. of course, we have 38 neighborhood zoning districts as well as formula retail controls to maintain neighborhood character. then we also have unnecessary complexity.
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and it doesn't mean just because we have a complex code that the code needs to be inefficient and hard to use. we have three sets of these definitions in the planning code. you have to flip through the different sections of the code to find information for the zoning district. we have a lot of redundant information in the code that doesn't often get updated when it should. and we have significantly different organizational structures throughout the code as well as confusing language. so, how did we get here? well, as you saw, the original code is very simple and it maintained the same basic structure until 1987. all development standards and general definitions were located in article 1 and use definitionses and use controls were located in article 2. region 1 was four-pages, the
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second one was 200 some pages. 1987 came along and we added commercial districts to the code created in article 7. from the time article 7 was dramatically new way of organizing the planning code and thinking about land use primarily because it uses vertical controls to regulate uses. however, because the structural differences between article 2 and 7 were unable to use the definition in article 7. shortly after article we added article viii also addling a separate section to the code. so, what we have today is what you could call the rue goldberg machine held together over the years without anyone taking a step back to see how it could be more efficient. the proposal i'm introducing today is an attempt to tackle two of the most obvious areas of infish ~ inefficiency in the code. where are we going? what's next?
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we want to take something that is very complex and has a lot of functions to it and a lot of information in it and features and we want to make it able -- easy to use by any user, kind of like the ipad. now, the department has been thinking about doing this for sometime. in fact, when article 7 was added to the code, there was discussion about reorganizing article 2 to mimic it and deliver to local cities, even draft an ordinance that reworked article 2 ask moved definitions into article 1. and this work is the basis for how the department is proceeding on this project. my illustration, though, and kind of excitement about this came from a trip i made to san francisco loma last year for exhibit on [speaker not understood], a famous industrial designer that made everything from record players to coffee grinders. and his quote kind of stood out to me. there were a lot of quotes, but this stood out. there is no room for irrelevant thing.
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we have the resources. irrelevancy is out. he was talking about the things in your life and the objects. but i transferred that to the planning code, getting rid of irrelevance because we don't have the resources for that. so, actually, based on the design principles, i came up with four guiding principles on how we're proceeding with this. ~ first one is innovate. i want to create a format that better utilizes web-based access. the second one is to make it useful and accessible and pro side a centralized location for zoning districts that provides an overview of use and development standards. we want it to be sustainable. we want to create a format that can change and expand as we had more complexity to the code. and, of course, we want to make it consistent which is something that's not [speaker not understood] or create one set of use definitions and
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another format throughout the different zoning districts. so, the main goal of the proposal that we're just introducing today to get your feedback on, we want to reorganize article 2 so it's more useful. create zoning parts or use charts with the zoning control tables. we want these tables to be centralized location [speaker not understood]. this will not only help planners review projects, it will also help members of the public who have questions about certain projects or their own zoning or developers. secondly, we want to rationalize the youth definition. like i said, article 7 and 8 have their own definitions [speaker not understood]. finally, we want all zoning districts to use those definitions. this last goal will have to come in the second [speaker not
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understood] project, which brings me to the two phase approach. this large ordinance you will eventually be seeing, it will be larger than the northeast legislation that you so thoroughly enjoyed. and it will also help staff focus on fewer sectionses at a time. we'll consolidate the definition into one location and reorganize article 2 into a format that is similar to articles 7 and 8. phase ii, we'll delete the use definitions in 7 and 8 and modify so they use the consolidated section in 102. this is the other work we've done in the department to present the concept to you and get your feedback on it. the next step is to host at least two outreach meeting to the public to just explain the proposal to them, get some feedback from them on that, get them family with the concept.
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then we're going to finalize the ordinance phase 1, transmit it to the city attorney's office for their review and hopefully we'll be able to bring the ordinance to the commission for introduction in september. phase ii will then start when phase 1 is complete, hopefully by the end of the year. so, that concludes my presentation. there's more in the executive summary about the peril of what we're doing, and i'm happy to answer any questions about my presentation. thank you. >> thank you. is there any public comment on this item? commissioners, andrew junius. i really couldn't help myself. [laughter] only a land use attorney could really love. although i have to admit i'm a little disappointed in not getting another one of aaron starr's fantastic animations that drill forward the legislation around the restaurant definition. this is absolutely an effort long overdue. it's going to be extremely important, i mean, even for practitioners who look at the
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code every day. it's cues fusinging and frankly i thought the code was going to explode when the eastern neighborhoods passed and they squished another few lines into article 2 that together, it's gotten a little crazy. i hope to participate in it as well. thank you. >> thank you. public comment on this particular item? at this time i just wanted to be able to discuss about -- because i know it's getting ready closing, this is about various housing for the -- at the end of the sector, i think there was like 1400 block market. i was deeply interested. i was displeased when i saw the information that me and karen had submitted was public information. somebody changed the information and took the "i" out of mima and significantly i am just -- like disgusted. however, i wanted to be able to
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close about the transit. i had active one before with the drivers, when we were getting to our housing loin indications and they were talking about the reduction of the time. make it short and simple. i requested two of the drivers the exact bus to get to the pacific heights area -- >> ma'am, i'm sorry, we're talking about consolidation of the planning code, discussion on transit is no longer on the floor. i understand that, but it's significant about the planning in the codes for the new construction. there were three [speaker not understood] that i had built in russian hills and pacific heights. so, however, when i got to the destination, the bus did take a long time getting there. it was with discomfortable. [speaker not understood]. when people make complaints and say [speaker not understood], i let them know there is evident before i enter here. significantly about the planning codes, and i want
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