aisle. that makes it harder to get on and harder to get off the tissue have to wonder way through the crowded aisles. in terms of making it clear to the passengers, there is a switch back or a turn back, again, with the articulating buses within the 7100 series but with all of the 40 foot buses, there is already voice announcement system. it does also have an autocomponent that plays in three languages announcement simply about the feet. the digital system only functions right now in english. why could it not have some simple announcements for a switch back or turn back in spanish, with chinese characters, that people can read it, and, again, a simple tape announcement, turn back, switch back at the next stop. that way the driver does not have to think about learning the language.

there is a visual and audible q four people on those lines. thank you. -- there is a visual and audible cue. supervisor avalos: thank you. any further comment? so, mr. hailey, we will continue this to the call of the chair, and we will have conversations in the next few weeks, and maybe for the rest of the year, we will come back with this hearing. very good. madam clerk, if you could call the next item, please? clerk johnson: items six, a hearing on the san francisco municipal transportation agency j-church street car line on

reliability. -- un reliability. >> i want to thank you for talking about this debate, and we have some students sitting in the back who are also here to talk about the j-church, so thank all of you for being here. this was built in 1917, and it is one of the street car routes that actually survived world war two, when many of the routes became torn up. it became part of the metric system after the subway tunnel was built, and in 1991, it was extended from its original point of the 30th street to balboa. it has the lowest ridership light rail line with just under 17,000 daily riders. a lot of the parallels bart -- a

lot of it parallels board. you're going to have the alternative drawn people away. there are some typical areas of the j, like where it goes underground, and that causes delays, in my experience and the experience of others. we also have around 30 street, on church. it just causes some slowdowns there, as well. we hear a lot of complaints from riders that with a better reliability, less crowding, and come in particular, more predictability, and so i called for this hearing so we can hear from the mta about what is the

situation with the j-church, what are some of the causes of the challenges that the line faces, and what are some of the things we can do in the short run in the long run to make the line better? so thank you for being here and doing double duty today, mr. hailey. i know you have given a lot of thought on this, and we appreciate it, and i look forward to hearing your thoughts today. >> thank you. it is nice to be here, doing double duty. i will not spend a lot of time on this, because i know you have familiarity with the line, but just on the overview of the line, a couple of points to make, because there are some things, basically three things, that make the j line unique.

the first one is that this is a shared line, shared in the sense of the m line and the f line pull out at balboa which can affect the service. secondly, this is the only one of the rail lines that historically for a variety of scheduling principles, we have scheduled dp had weight of somewhere between seven minutes and 13 minutes. that is different from the off- peak on saturday and sunday, when we can say every 15 minutes or every 20 minutes, so one of the things that i would propose today is that we have the sf mta

change the keep schedule to make it an even 10 minutes, so the people understand when the trains are coming, because by scheduling a the way that we did, we did in the hopes of balancing the throughput, but at the same time, i think it has caused some public confusion and caused a lot of public complaints about there is no j here, so that scheduling makes it unique. and then you went through that rich history of this blind. part of the terrain and typography of the neighborhoods that it goes through limits us to one car. we can only run several cars on the j libn -- line, and in this

line, we have to add another car and an operator. so just a couple of points i wanted to make on the profile of this j line as we go forward, just building on the some of the characteristics that we talked about, the same challenges online in terms of congested area, a lot of pedestrian, a lot of retail, and some of the delay information, this is over about a 6 period, and about two-thirds of the delay is are generated by a muni, and on a typical weekday, we have as many as

about 15 delay is and this goes into major systems, and we are looking in turn lead right now to develop a targeted and focused maintenance campaign on the doors and steps, the onboard computers, the propulsion system, and the braking system, all of which are responsible for the delays, this is something we believe we need to cure. this clearly has a negative impact on the surface. despite that, in the last quarter that we reported, they had a 17.6% on-time performance, and i think part of that had to deal with a declining trend in absenteeism.

some of the things that took place over the last 12 to 18 months, and this was affecting the reliability a little bit. in terms of the writer should, this is the outbound, and this shows pretty much people going home from work, and you can see unlike the 14 mission, this has two or three. where there are significant writers that get on or off -- riders that get on or off. supervisor wiener: in terms of the on -- on term performance --

the on-time performance, can you describe that and what the headway typically is for the j? "headway" is the gap between the first train and the next train after it? >> i apologize. that is transit speech. i will try to translate that into english. it is the interval between trains, so if you have a five- minute headway, where even if some of the other old-timers, not myself but people much older than me, they would say it is a five-minute street, and if it is five minutes of a hedwig, it is five minutes between trains. -- if it is five minutes of a headway.

supervisor wiener: it takes quite a long time for a train to arrive. i know sometimes that statistics can mean different things. >> the way we measure on-time performance is both a combination of visual observations as well as some data we get with our systems, so they should died fairly closely, and there is going to be certain trends that we look for. we really do have a lot of data, so there will be instances where somebody said, gee, you are telling me that it is, 77%, but i always wait a little bit longer.

those experiences should match up. if you get on the seven-minute train, for example, or you miss it, and you are waiting for a 13-minute train, and the 13- minute train is late, by the time the next one comes, it is much more crowded and much heavier. i think they will have a better understanding of when the next train is coming, so in terms of

the experience, i think it is a combination. i think the data shows what it shows, but i think also there is a big concern with the way people perceive how long they are waiting, and we have contributed to that by saying it is going to be somewhere between seven minutes and 13 minutes, which is the only line we do it on, so on this particular page, this is, again, meant to show you, and the upshot of this is that the majority of the ridership on this particular line, from 30th and church, these are the locations when we do switchbacks on the j line. again, it is not 38%. a relatively low percentage of trips. it is one-third of 1% that the switch back, and, again,

following the principles that we talk about, the next page has the tide of complaints. through jan. korea -- through january. from january to february, the number of switchbacks on the j line dropped because we ran a pretty reliable service, and when you do that, the number of switchbacks will drop. on page 11, we begin to talk about what are some of the things that we would like to consider and take a look at. supervisor avalos: just a

question, on page nine, 348? where do those occur? >> pretty much, the majority of them have been at 40th street. if there is a train, we try to give an earlier announcement. in the last three months, we have had the ability to make sure there was a decision to switch back.

supervisor avalos: at 30th and church. is this peak time or off-peak? i imagine if you were trying to respond to a demand downtown -- >> i do not have, i did not bring the data with me, but i am happy to provide it.

i am happy to provide the exact data for these months, but this is what it will show. supervisor avalos: there were things that were brought to my attention, and i was very concerned about service to people south of the 30th, district 11, and it seems like it is already somewhat of a policy, 348 is a huge number in my mind in three months' time.

this affects most of the people in my district, especially the people along the j-church line. this other was eliminated from the service back in 2009. in district 11, they are left without service. that issue of turning the bus around at 30th and church. is this number, this 348 in three months, is this you a number -- is this a number that the mta feels compelled to lower? or is this something you feel is acceptable and that you want to continue? because i find it unacceptable. people in my district, people who are in great need of service, they would like to see a higher level of service, and we have fewer options. we talk about san francisco being a transit first city, and

when you live in a part of san francisco were the options are few, you are going to get in your car more often, and we're not serving any one by having fewer options before you are from the downtown core work, so this 348, is this something that the mta wants to continue with, or is this something you're trying to desperately lower to a more acceptable rate of switching back? >> well, i would like to switch back number to be zero, but given the practical matter that we operate on, on the surface, and conditions under which we operate, that is not going to happen. in terms of what the right number should be, again, the more reliable service, and that is what i wanted to highlight the delays. the let's pause for a switch back. i do not have a number in mind

to say you know, i would like to never have to switch back, because it is not a goal or objective. it is a tactic we can use to adjust service. as far as the number at 30th and church, in switchbacks is try to make the switchback so that it has the least impact on the number of riders and 30th and church is as far as we can go other than balboa itself and turn trains. if you turn them at 16th or 22nd, but it would inconvenience more teem. people. so if we have to switchback, turning them at 30th benefits more riders and impacts the least number of people. and in these cases, what we're talking about, these are not scheduled switchbacks but switchbacks as a result of a service problem.

supervisor avalos: i'm just concerned that as we are -- a system where this is a common occurrence means that i have no real leverage in my district to encourage people to get out of their cars and to use muni. i want to to that desperately. i want to make sure that people are getting out in their cars less and using muni more, using transit as much as possible but when these numbers in up, that's impossible for me to do. it's impossible for me to speak about muni being a reliable service and something people should use rather than their cars to get anywhere in san francisco and that's what i'm concerned about when we talk about these types of numbers happening. it does not meet the reality of the needs of people in my district. >> all right to go to page 11, a

discussion of some potential ideas that we would want to consider or we may want to consider with the idea that what are the things that we could do to reduce the travel time along the j line and understanding that the j line, like all of our light raul -- rail lines has, if you look at the throughput, the scheduled throughput in the subway, we operate in the range of 97% of what's scheduled getting through the subway. the issues of reliability and on-time performance are much more acute on the surface when we have to operate amidst traffic, so in terms of some of the things we may want to consider going forward for discussion at further meetings would be, first of all, we put

additional p.c.o. deployment in the last couple of weeks to take a look at trouble parking, which is a big problem along segments of the route, and we'ring about to continue tothat for a little bit longer to see what trches that would make because that's obviously, particularly at some times of the day at mid afternoon, a big problem. schedule changes, one of the things that i mentioned earlier that i believe we should take a look at is to reduce or change the schedule, reduce the difference of nine to 13 and make it a 10-minute interval during the peak period. secondly, if you want to look -- and i say this with the caveat

that, unlike the physical constraints on the j line where you cannot operate two-car trains, if you wanted to add capacity, reduce overcrowding, we would have to add both an terrible car and an operator which adds to our operating cost, obviously, and right now we don't have additional cars. if we did, we would schedule them into the service. so i think in terms of schedules, there are some adjustments. i would urge the committee strongly to consider. i'll come back and give you a more detailed analysis, but scheduling a straight headway of, say, 10 minutes, so that the public would understand during peak periods when a train is supposed to be there. secondly, based on the ridership and the heavy ridership from 30th and church in, there is an opportunity to consider and analyze, taking a look at

whether or not we ought to be scheduling trains through 30th and church. there's a number of options that we would -- calling here on page 12 "engineering," but they also could fall into the category of traffic management. and somebody mentioned earlier, one of the operator mentioned a turning on the mission, a left-turn arrow at church and 16th. i think there is a need to look at expanding the signal priority and i'm not suggesting we wait until 2013. that's when the new radio system will be in and will tie it closely together, but there are some things to to. i think there's two other traffic techniques we should look at in the short term and i'm suggesting this as a

experiment where we can set up some measures in a defined period of time to see whether or not we could take some of the four-way stops and make them two-way stops as well as take a look at whether or not we could replace some four-way stops with traffic signals and those are the locations we could look at there. i think the j line is an ideal candidate for some stop consolidation to take a look at that as a potential way to help reduce travel time in line with the other measures that we're taking and then finally when you look at it particular line, like many of the others, the single biggest delay in our travel time

is the fare transaction. and while we have begun the process and have installed card readers for clipper in the rear of vehicles, we still have signs that say don't board in the rear. i think what would be necessary for us to do this is any line, but particularly here on j line, i think the enforcement part would take care of itself. i think we can take a look at redeploying people on that end, but what we need to do is give customers the ability to get a ticket before they get on to the vehicle which means, one of two ways that i can think of, either a ticket machine of some kind at a couple of locations along the route or, in fact, an arrangement with a grocery store, mom and pop type store or any other business along the way where somebody can get a ticket and get on to the vehicle that way.

so i think some combination of these may make a difference in helping the line reduce the travel time and the customer experience. this is not meant to be mutually exclusive or definitive, just to get the dialogue going. >> thank you. first i want to thank you for -- this is a very, we can agree or disagree on different aspects of it, but i really appreciate the thoughtfulness of putting all the ideas out on the table and i know a number of them will be -- could be controversial in terms of different segments of the line but also any time you talk about stop consolidation or adding or removing stop signs or anything else, there's always going to be a conversation about it but i think it's important that we at least put on a piece of paper all the different options. i appreciate you doing that. i have a few specific questions. one has to do with the fact that

the "n "and the "f" come up along the j route to enter the system. so they come from balboa all the way up and on some point north on church street. on to their own line. and two questions about that. one is that i've -- correct me if i'm wrong -- when you use next bus for the j church, i don't think it necessarily distinguishes between whether an f or an n or a j is coming and i would ask you if that's the case. because the problem is that someone might get there and it says that a car's coming in five minute and then it ends up being an f and the operator decides not to pick anyone up and then the person's been -- received inaccurate information. can you sort of enlighten me