tv [untitled] December 3, 2013 4:00pm-4:31pm PST
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commendable job. that meeting was in the west portal public school auditorium and was well-attended. i wanted you to know that people broke out in applause for this plan. people in our area have a problem and we need to find a solution to this speeding and we're so relieved that something like this, that you reached out to us, to try and work out a plan. we want this plan. we want a solution. and we urge you to adopt the plan. thank you. >> thank you and thank you for your service on the committee. anyone else caring to address the board on this matter? if not, members of the board, what is your pleasure? >> mr. chairman, can i deal with something personal? i did raise this with the city attorney and because i live -- my wife and i own a home in the affected area, it's been suggested that perhaps i recuse myself from this decision. i understand it requires a motion.
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>> we need a motion to recuse. director heinicke. >> motion to recuse. >> second. >> all those in favor, say aye? >> aye. >> you are recused. >> members? >> just a couple of questions for mr. carr. thank you. i think it looks like we're setting a new standard for community outreach and this time we have loads of compliments for you and last time we had loads of compliments for jay robinson and thank to the community members who served on the board. that is wonderful. one clarifying question. it's just the speeding humps that will be voted on by the community and that will be voted by the street that the speed hump is on? >> correct. our guidelines and our policy is that concurrent with city approval, the final approval step for any speed hump is a straight democratic vote of the
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housing units on that block. so an apartment building with 16 unit, each of those 16 units gets one vote. a single-family home is one unit and they get one vote. so yes, the final approval of the speed humps and i believe there are 20 -- either 27 or 29. that particular digit slips my head, but that all of those will be voted on by the residents of the targeted block. so that is our standard traffic-calming guideline that is the case wherever we propose a speed hump on any street in the city. >> good. i'm sorry, one more clarifying question. the first speaker mentioned that this project is not an attempt to divert traffic so much as it is just to calm the traffic and help us reach our safety goals and our goals of
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making bicycling and walking easier in the areas. and you would agree with that? you don't think this is actually going to divert traffic out of the areas, but simply making the traffic calmer and more safe? >> if the traffic-calming proposal is implemented, i believe it will go a long way to bringing vehicle speeds back into safe speed limit ranges. the proposal is not specifically designed to divert traffic back to the arterials, but if, in fact, does that, that is a desirable outcome. in any of these area-wide projects and this is actually the last of its kind, with the reformation of our traffic-calming project, but with any of these area-wide traffic-calming projects we do speed and volume collection prior to the project and we do
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after speed and volume collection as well to see if the impacts of what we have done actually are. and if we have any inkling that we're going to move the problem to another local street, rather than say, return folks who are cutting through a neighborhood back to the arterial that they should be using or that the transportation system has designed for them to use, we would look at how to address that diversion to another local street? but as i said, if it is a diversion back to the arterial, that folks are supposed to be driving on, that is a consequence that we are actually happy about. >> and the reason why we don't want to simply speed up the arterials and have them carry more volume or have a greater capacity goes back to the same safety reasons that we're bringing up in this project, i would assume? >> well, the same safety reasons and access, you know?
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we're look at a point where we're trying to balance our transportation system for the future, provide for alternate modes of transportation, that will allow us to continue to have a healthy transportation system into the future. specifically in this neighborhood, our arterials have had some work done on them over the past several decades. dewey boulevard was once four lanes, two lanes in each direction. there are people who suggested that that was the answer to this problem rather than this project. excuse me, laguna honda and 7th avenue as part of a build-out of the bike route network were modified to include bike lanes recently. that is again a balancing of our transportation system. it is not a specific effort to
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limit the arterial, but rather to provide balanced access to that arterial, which also happens to be the lowest elevation route across that portion of the city. so that we can continue to thrive in the city, continue to move around, and that folks in lesser used modes are not penalized or prevented from using those modes by our transportation system. >> good. thank you. no more questions. i am happy to move the project. >> i have some questions. thank you for the report and the presentation. i know in the staff report it breaks out speed cushions and speed humps and you explained what that is, which is very helpful. just to clarify or confirm, that is also subject to the resident vote, speed cushions? >> yes, speed cushions are treated from a block perspective like a speed hump.
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>> okay. and just i want to compliment you on your community work with this project. this is really great. i know that speed humps and speed cushions are a sensitive issue for the disability community. so i just want to encourage you as you move forward and as residents vote and as this moves forward and speed humps are contemplated to work with the accessibility task force and the mayor's office. >> thank you. motion and second, any further discussion? all those in favor, signify by saying aye? >> opposed -- no, the ayes have it. next item, madame clerk. >> item 13 awarding contract no, 1266-133rd street light rail program phase 2 central subway train control system to thales transport and security for procurement and provision of proprietary equipment for an advanced train control system for a total amount not to
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exceed $3,350,424 and a term not to exceed 1000 calendar days and awarding contractor no. 1266-2 3rd street light rail program phase 2 central subway train control system to thales transport and security for proprietary software and systems integration assistance system, et cetera. directors you have no members of the public to address you on this matter. >> we have a well-written staff report. in that case, is there a motion? >> move to approve. >> second. >> any further discussion? all those in favor, signify by saying aye? >> aye. >> ayes have. it thank you, mr. fong, great presentation. [ laughter ] >> okay >> item 14, presentation and discussion regarding the central south of market land use and transportation network. >> we have staff here from the mta and from the planning department to give you an update on the many things
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happening in south of market. >> good afternoon. >> good afternoon, president nolan and director. i'm going to introduce to you steve werheim, the project manager and the acting director for planning. >> could you use that microphone, please. >> sorry. deputy for strategic planning and i'm going to introduce steve werheim and also acknowledge josh, who is the acting countywide planning department for the city planning department and also mary hunter on my team who has been incredible at corraling all members together. the concurrent studies that we worked on through the last few years, the trips project looked
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at the entire neighborhood area and an outcome was to focus on improving multi-modal transportation access through this area. one of the products that have come out of it recently has been this -- what was called the central corridor project now recently renamed central soma project. it's been a great example of mta and planning and others working together to figure out a very complex grid that is radically changing with all the development, all the new jobs that are coming in and the transportation system is playing catch-up, frankly n in that area. with that framing i will introduce steve and have him walk you through the project itself:good morning, steve werheim project manager for the central soma plan.
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if i could have the slides, please. this is great for planning and mta to work so closely together, really valuable for all of us. i keep this quick, but of course it's difficult to distill three years' of work into a few minutes so please ask questions when we are done. so why are we even doing the central soma plan? there are many reasons. the first and foremost the bay area is continuing to thrive and grow. we expect based on regional numbers 2 million more people and a million more jobs through 2040. so we're expecting to take our fair share of growth, about 200,000 and 190,000 jobs. people want to live in transit
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rich areas and walkable neighborhoods and soma has both of that. the advantage of soma is that it has a lot of development potential, that a lot of empty lots or underutilized commercial buildings that don't require displacement and are advantageous places for development to occur. of course there are many challenges to developing in any neighborhood. one of the biggest challenges is that soma in many ways is already an excellent neighborhood. the land use works well and it's extremely diverse -- tech companies want to be there, there are all kinds of income ranges and a neighborhood that has world renown and it's difficult to do a zoning or planning process in a neighborhood that maintains what is already there and enhances what can be changed. that was one of our foremost challenges. we're here today to focus on
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transportation and maybe the leading transportation issue is the pedestrian -- the red areas are where the sidewalk is less than the minimum required in our better streets. >> quick question? >> yes, sir. >> i can't read the numbers on the boundaries of this. i can see harrison and townsend, but what are the other two? >> market, 2nd to 6th. >> thank you. >> thank you for asking that question. we have been working on this process since early 2011 and probably had a hundred of community meetings and met with hundreds of stakeholders, in addition to working with many agencies. so these are the challenges and there are other transportation challenges. i'm going to turn this over to mara to complete the
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presentation. >> very quickly, what are we proposing from the land use standpoint? we're proposing to maintaining the zoning especially north of the freeway, where the c-3 or mixed-use neighborhoods that are already successful. what we have south of the freeway are industrial zoning that doesn't allow residential uses, it doesn't allow office uses. we spent a lot of time in san francisco in the last ten years to create protection areas further to the south where these uses can thrive, but it doesn't necessarily make sense of millions of dollars of the transportation infrastructure being built to have industrial neighborhoods that have very low density and while industry is still important to san francisco, it's not the driver of the economy in the future. and so that proposal as can you see in the southern part of the southern part of the map was
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changing the zoning to zoning conditions that allow housing and allow office jobs or other kinds of commercial uses. the build form in soma is not like downtown. buildings are less tall and have more girth, if you will. and so that is kind of what we're trying to replicate in the neighborhood. you can see the height nodes from the map and mostly along the transit stations, but otherwise, we're expecting the support of bigger buildings and is that possible because of the large parcels that reflect its historical industrial nature. finally let's speak to what the build-out could be? so there is already a lot of uses on the ground today. we have a 700 houses unitss and 50,000 jobs in the neighborhood. and just to talk about jobs for a second, the real impetus of this plan is to support job growth. we have done a lot of planning in the planning department for
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the last ten years for housing. the housing market is in demand all over san francisco. there is very limited demand for jobs in areas outside of transit. so we looked at this as an opportunity to up the amount of jobs that could happen in the neighborhood. with that being said, if we didn't change existing zoning, there is capacity today and a lot of parking lots and even in the neighborhoods that are zoned currently for housing and office. there is a lot of development potential and we could almost double the housing units without changing at all and could add another 20,000 jobs. if we changed zoning to central soma, adding housing units and jobs, depending on the market and the time, the market is flexible. we prefer to see jobs -- we'll push to have more jobs, but we understand under certain economic conditions, developers will prefer to build housing units. so with that being said, i would like to turn it
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over to mara hunter from mta staff to get more in-depth about the transportation that would accompany what we're proposing for the land use. thank you. >> thank you. good afternoon. >> mare hunter with the mta. so as steve mentioned, much is happening with the land use changes. so our work with the -- we partnered with the planning department to then look at the transportation network and make sure that we are allocating the right-of-way to meet the demands of the new trips generated by the addition of a lot of residential and employment opportunities. in doing so the mta had a number of groups coming together, local streets,
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transportation, engineering, traffic engineering, transit engineering, strategic planning and policy, and we looked at a number of different plans in the area to make sure that at the edges, that all of those things worked together nicely. as mentioned earlier, we took the work of that to really develop the plans for folsom and howard. and tep earlier from sean kennedy's presentation, making sure that we're accommodating the other things that are already taking place, as well as what we anticipate to do in the future. there were six principles that were artic articulated in the central soma plan, pedestrian, cyclist, transit riders as well as people going through the area for commercial purposes,
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deliveries and such. so these principles we identified a number of objectives to focus on each corridor in the project area to look at how we can improve pedestrian conditions from wider sidewalks, more crossing opportunities, calming traffic. we know that speeding is a major concern, because we have a lot of regional traffic coming through, meeting a local network. we need to protecttransit and in protecting transit, we're effectively protecting traffic, because you have separated those things. cars are not getting stuck behind buses weaving in and out. so that is a win-win. we're also aware of parking needs and loading needs and finally, but not -- last, but not least, biking. those numbers are growing with the bike share program coming
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out, we know we need to provide facilities. that was something that came out of the public workshops that steve had mentioned. a lot of people were commenting on lack of bike facilities in soma. >> what does restricting curb cuts mean? >> restricting curb cuts, for like driveways and such, we want to minimize those, because they are opportunities for people to get hit while they are walking. >> not for corner cuts, but driveway cuts? >> yes. >> and one more question, my memory fails what "end trips" ? >> the eastern neighborhoods transportation >> thank you. a bunch of new buzzwords for us. >> can you explain that curb cuts again? >> when you are walking on the sidewalk, curb cuts for
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someone's driveway or for a garage or something, we want to minimize that, because it's just more opportunity and increases the exposure to pedestrians to be hit. >> oh, okay. >> so this slide just demonstrates all of the corridors that we're touching. steve mentioned the boundaries before and you can see where really we developed concepts for everything in the north, 3rd and 4th, just the north half of the 4th street and central subway is taking care of the southern portion. 5th street was identified in the bike plan. so that is moving forward separately. and then mission street is also moving forward separately through the tep. in light of the mayor's
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directive for pedestrian safety that was released in april of this year, in this graphic you can see all of those little segments may block our new opportunities. central soma blocks are long and people tend to dash across this -- at least it will provide a safe place for them to do that. so they don't have to jay-walk. so the next few slides are cross-sections of the corridors that we have developed concepts for. i want to make it clear that these are general. the corridors are long. they vary from block to block. so again, very general. for harrison and bryant, knowing that this is an area where we have a lot of regional traffic coming in, we need to make sure that we can
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accommodate those traffic volumes. so we are going to keep this a major thoroughfare and do just a minor lane reduction. the top is existing conditions and the lower is proposed. it goes from five to four lanes. as part of making sure that we can accommodate traffic volumes a number of our concepts introduced time, time of day type of uses. so in the lower left-hand street -- excuse me, lane. it will be parking in the evenings. but a traffic lane during the day, during peak hours. oh, i just wanted to mention that all of these, again, do try to accommodate all of those principles that we identified in the central soma plan. in this one we're widening sidewalks. this happens to be a bryant street cross-section that is
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going eastbound. so transit-only lane for the 8x. cross-section for brannon. this is an opportunity to introduce bike facilities as requested by the public. they want to see more opportunities for that and we added cycle tracks and lined the sidewalks and of course to do that in the finite right-of-way it requires taking some parking. and so we have done that, and we're hoping it will be in place hopefully with minimal impacts. for 3rd and 4th streets, this is 3th street going northbound, but they are mirrored. we're attempting to beef up that transit-only lane and make sure we can protect that. we are adding a -- proposing to add a cycle track and again to do that, we need to take
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some space from parking and traffic. we did work closely with traffic engineering, ricardo's group and working closely to make this feasible and not just pie-in-it-sky kind of idea and by protecting transit-only lanes it will inspire people to use these other modes. widening sidewalks it will be easier and safer for people to bike and easier for transit to be more reliable and efficient. so hopefully people will move out of cars and into these. >> can i ask a question? >> yes. >> i understand what you are trying to accomplish. how do you accommodate service vehicles then? >> like fire trucks? >> delivery vehicles? >> again >> it is just a cross-section. there will be loading bays for
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commercial loads and drop-offs. it will vary from block to block, depending on demand. >> this goes back to the discussion that we had earlier that i couldn't participate in, 3rd street is a major north arterial there. that is what folks who are getting off the highway are using to get into downtown -- that is pretty much the straight shot to downtown. so i guess my question is on some of these less thoroughfare roads where we're expanding sidewalks and where we're putting in cycle tracks and that sort of thing, i see the trade-off. we're not going impact traffic a great deal and we're going enhance the neighborhood, if anyone has walked out of a ballgame knows needs wider sidewalks. on that particular street, is the trade-off really worth it? if we could put that slide back up, you are taking out two lanes of traffic.
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>> i'm sorry, i don't know how to do that. >> 3rd street. >> yes. so we are in the midst of environmental right now, and if we learn that this is a complete disaster, obviously, we will revisit. >> well, hopefully the standard isn't complete disaster. [ laughter ] the optimal flow here and it just seems to me that the cycle track on this particular arterial maybe do we need to widen -- bikes and pedestrians can go lots of places and i'm in favor of these improvements on non-arterial routes. but now we're hitting one that is san franciscans coming into san francisco and the traffic on 3rd street is already not great at certain times. so that is my concern is really
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3rd street. >> i think director heinicke you have a really good point and similar to the tep point that director reiskin responded to quite eloquently. this is the maximum thing we could do on 3rd and 4th street. obviously when we do the analysis and get more into detail, the ability for us to do all of this will be dependent on many factors. so we may decide that the transit lane is the most important thing to do, if we're going to see a huge impact on regional traffic. we as a city haven't really made clear our role on regional traffic. so this project is really pushing that for us. so we'll figure that out as we get closer to the analysis. i take that point. >> and we'll be looking at capacity as well, won't we? >> right. >> because i know that we look at a bunch of cars in travel
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lanes, and we think that is moving loads and loads of people, but the reality may well be with the transit lane and with that cycle track and widened sidewalk we'll have the ability to move more people. and 3rd street is people coming into the caltrain station. >> other way, 3rd street is northbound. >> 3rd street onto market street. you are exactly right and one area that the team is looking at is the ridership on the bus, looking at the current ridership of people on bicycles and don't forget from moscone to market street, as mare mentioned in the safety strategy, this area is one of the hotspots of pedestrian safety. so we're going to have
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to trade-off regional traffic priority, local traffic priority, et cetera. >> do we get better car through-put when cars are traveling on a street with no parking lane? i know in san francisco we seem to have parking on every street, even arterials, even sort of van ness and geary, that i would think in other cities would be arterials with no parking. do we get better car through-put when cars are traveling on a street without parking lanes? >> i think we'll see that in the analysis, what that looks like. but general observations from other places is that when you have less weaving of anything, whether it's transit, bicycles, parking, through-put tends to be more effective. >> so we could end up with the same through-put with fewer peak hour traffic lanes? >> potentially. we'll
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