comments? no proof of thank you. -- no? thank you. >> good afternoon. i just want to introduce the item here. i want to thank the supervisor for is leadership for bringing forth the resolution in the first place. i know it is one that is felt by all of the members of the board and really anybody that was elected by people of san francisco, because i think as a unanimous vote by the board indicated, while there may be a lot of different ideas of what needs to happen in the taxi industry, i think one area of not just consensus but unanimity is that it needs to be a lot better, and from our position, the agency that is charged with implementing and realizing the city transit first policy, i think supervisor stated very

well -- i think supervisor wiener stated very well, having a good tax in service. we should have a good tourist destination based on the geography and density of our city. we should have excellent, world- class tax and service anyway, but the fact that we are endeavoring to be a transit first city where people do not feel the need to or desire to use or own their own cars, we need to have the transit, and cycling and walking rethink can cover a significant number of trips in san francisco, but there will always be a place for an automobile, times where the other modes of transportation will not meet the needs, and taxing services is one of the main ways we can fill that gap, so while there are many both perhaps inside and outside the

mta that might prefer that taxing services were not brought into the mta a few years back, i think it makes all of the sense in the world that it is there because it is absolutely part of realizing transit first, and it completes this as a full- service transportation agency, so as supervisor wiener said, we are an approved budget we are working on improving the tax and service and improving this in san francisco. it is extremely complex. there are often diverging viewpoints, and you may hear some of them today in terms of what will make the tax and service work better, and one of the things i found during my short time at the mta is not only are there very strong but often diverging opinions on what will improve the tax and service or what needs to change in the taxi industry, often the voice of the taxicab user is absent in

that conversation, and you will hear in the presentation a few ways how we are trying to address that. so i guess what i would say, finally, is that the request for the score with reports was made quite some time ago, so i want to apologize we have not got years sooner, and we look forward to starting a regularly -- a regular quarterly reporting. it is not -- there is the complexity of the industry and the limits of our staff and resources to be addressing it that we have not been able to come sooner, and the first thing you will find it is about baselines, because there was the quantitative reporting, and an order for us to do quantitative reporting, we need to establish a baseline of data from which we can compare and report out on, so that is the first thing that you are going to hear about, and

then we are going to walk through a sampling of the highlights of the various things that our tax and services provision is working on, focused on those that are directly related to taxi service. there is a whole host of other things that this unit is doing to deal with other aspects of tax and service and regulating and providing for tax the service, but we are really just focusing on those with the most direct service in packs that we are working on, and i will say that despite the divisiveness within the industry and the overall consensus throughout the city that tax and service needs to be improved, it is, from what i have heard in talking to many inside and outside the industry that under the leadership of chris hiachi, we are starting to

make progress for the first time in decades. the progress is not as fast as any of us would like, given the limits on resources and the complexity of the issues. i think we are moving in as good a direction and as quickly as we possibly can, so we recognize the issue. we feel it will grow with the work that we do at the mta, and we feel we are at the verge of turning the corner and having a good story to tell in terms of taxi service here in san francisco, so with that, i am going to turn this over to our director, and i look forward to any public comments and questions you may have. supervisor wiener: thank you.

i just want to know that we of public comment cards. >> my name is chris high option. i and the deputy director of the taxi services. the presentation we have for you today goes through the elements, as director riskin indicated. the first line response to the ordinance that calls for quantitative data in a report. as of today, the it industry is very much a paper industry, and we have been trying to move into another direction. we think this will provide a very good beginning for the quantifiable data and we have

maintained and best practices consultant from ottawa, canada, from the review of the files that we have seen in the past, with the time we have been in charge since 2009, there really has not been a comprehensive survey, and as the director indicated, the voice of the director has rarely been heard. and this is not just telephone base. they are going to go with another approach. and then they are interviewing stakeholders, which includes --

we want to make sure we are going in the right direction to improve service. as we go. we have got some specific service-related initiatives. the first one is the best practices that i mentioned. among the items in the scope of work includes surveying. this is to see how others have solved the problems, rather

than reinventing the wheel here. there will be a study to determine realistically based on the objective data. they will be helping us to develop performance standards and looking at what we need to do as taxi regulators. another thing that frequent comes up is the out of balance supply and demand during peak times, which is generally considered to be thursday, friday, saturday night and commuter hours, but can also include any time there is a high demand of taxicabs and not enough supply. they have authorized a new class of part time.

they are required to work 365 days per year. this does not help our peak times service issues because during the peak times, you will never have enough taxis. you could have too many taxicab's at a time when there is not enough demand, or at least that is a consideration. and this is where the economic incentive will naturally be for them to work during the most profitable times. another way that we are going to make them be responsive to telephone a orders -- to telephone orders is for the single operators that would be waived if they meet a certain standard of meeting telephone orders, and that will be the first time there will be any

type of performance standard with an incentive or a disincentive for a taxicab to respond to a call. supervisor mar: can you tell us how you came up with that? to meet this need >> there are 1535 taxis that have been authorized that are on the road or about to be on the road. the 50 was an arbitrary number. we wanted to have this be an experimental program, and we do not know. it could be that we offer these permits to people, and they say, i am sorry. that does not work for me. we want to keep that with a workable number, where we can try out the system, if it works, we can add more into the system. does that answer your question?

ok. we are very proud with what we have achieved in the matter of wheelchair service, and i want to give credit where credit is due. they have been working for decades on the various steps for the solution. the first was the debit card system, which put in an electronic record-keeping free more, the same kind of electronic record-keeping fremont that i am advocating for the rest of the industry, where we're able to monitor the paratransit's patterns and especially the number of wheelchair pickups, and so we have created a carrot and stick process. those have not existed before. on the other hand, we have taken the savings from the paratransit debit card system, because we

have saved so much from reducing the fraud from the paper based system, we are able to put that into the paratransit's system to an offer that as an incentive to taxicab drivers who are actually picking up wheelchair's -- wheelchairs. supervisor mar: can you explain the difference between a ramp medallion and a regular medallion? one that can have a wheelchair with and it proved a little larger >> some can fit in a sedan, but these, the people in san francisco who used a wheelchair can have some taxi service available to them. supervisor cohen: thank you. is there an additional cost of utilizing this type of taxi?

>> not for the customer. there is for the driver however. the ramp driver is the unsung hero of the taxi industry, because the good ramp driver, one that does what he is supposed to do and picks up the wheelchair, they have to take the time to help the customer into the vehicle and secure in the vehicle, have to take the time to allow the customer to exit the vehicle, and none of that is paid time, so for a ramp driver, and they are doing a good job, we really should be acknowledging their service. but the paratransit is subsidized for the customers. the next slide relates to our capital plan. in the five-year capital plan, the sf emptying -- the sfmta has a couple of things. the first is the top light

comedy element on the top of the vehicle, that tells you whether or not a taxi is available. i was surprised to learn about one year after i was in this job is that there is incredible frustration with the customer and the taxi drivers when the plight system does not work to communicate between the driver and the customer when the taxi is available. for example, the backlighting of the advertising may make it difficult to see if the light is on or off. the fact there is not an off- duty light makes it difficult to communicate that they are off duty, but there is nobody in their back seat, or they are going to answer a technical call. when the taxicab drivers by empty, it makes people angry. if we created a uniform tax the top light, it will help the visibility of available taxicabs and help the taxi driver and the

customer communicate. it will help the public recognize what is a legitimate taxicab, and it will provide other tools, such as an emergency light and a manual switch to be able to turn the top light off and on. a second project we are very excited about is taxi hailing. the buzz words back then were open taxi access. i think i issued an example at the last meeting. but basically, this would be a real time, electronic gps-based platform that would be accessible through smartphones, laptops, desktops, or ipad, where you can see every single taxicab in the city and whether they are available. rather, you would see only be available taxis and hail them directly. we have no intention of bypassing the existing

dispatching services that have already built up their telephone business. we think this would just provide sort of an overlay that would still allow customers to choose their taxi companies but would give the customers the ability to find taxis that are actually available by communicating to the drivers on more than one basis. the next slide has to do with dispatch accountability, and we also think that is critically important. we currently have no standards to measure whether a dispatch is successful or not, and we want to implement the standards and start to measure how many times a company dispatch office actually put somebody in a taxi and then reward them for that success. we do not want people posting numbers and then never answering the phone, for example. it is not enough to have a dispatch company. we have to have the company that puts people into taxis when

they call, so we will be working on regulations to develop those standards. and speaking of regulations, for the last three years, we have been slow going over the entire body of tax-related regulations, but we think that the retention of this consultant is going to push us toward dramatically, and specifically on the service- related regulatory issues, we want them to tell us how other jurisdictions internationally deal with this problem we have in san francisco and is common in big cities where the taxis stayed in the downtown core, and it is very hard to get them to respond to telephone orders, so if there are any other solutions out there that other jurisdictions have found, we want to learn about it and improve our system as well. second, we have had condemned look at our safety standards to make sure we are doing our best

to keep the vehicles is safe and clean, and third, we asked what technology is available for improving tax and service in other locations. and finally, i am very proud of our new and improved taxi driver training. we get about 25 new tax in drivers to a class and reduced that from 50 so we would have a better educational atmosphere, and we have classes twice a month, that is 15 new taxicab drivers every month, and we are working on improving the curriculum, especially on disability sensitivity issues, because many of the service relates to disabilities and not picking up people with disabilities, so among other things, for example, we have the white house for the blind that comes in to introduce the taxicab drivers to a service dog and tells them how to handle

that if they are allergic or a brisk two dogs, how to avoid any issues with getting the dog hair on the seats, anything that they might have a concern with. they addressed the concern, and all of the taxi drivers that the dog. we are trying to bring more real, multimedia situational, useful information into the taxi driver training so that they leave with a better understanding of how to be a good driver. supervisor mar: i just had a question, chris, ms. hayashi. other issues that i guess this curriculum would be important to build around if there are limited english-speaking drivers, for example? >> we do make an effort to keep

our regulations and materials in clear english, but we do have a requirement that our taxicab drivers be able to read and write english at least on a conversational level. we have not tried to do any kind of translation of materials or a training materials. we are afraid to do that because if you take it from english to arabic, you could introduce new meanings that you may not want their. we are trying to keep the regulatory language clear, and when we meet instances, for example, where we think somebody is having a hard time on a language basis, at least for the medallion, and we want to make sure they are a taxi driver and not just to make sure that we watched the been written. when you get into a taxi, and this is an important part of tax and service, you should be able to communicate with your driver.

supervisor mar: is there any kind of study within the industry? >> yes, i am proud about this. they had asked about what is the first language. we have all different spellings. we are trying to clean up the data, but we are on the verge of having gender information, which i am fascinated to learn, some age information, and some first language information. we are so excited about the agree to new driver training and all of the new elements that we want to communicate to the new drivers, that we want to have a mandatory retraining for drivers. we are hoping to roll back out for june so that people who have to renew their driver's permits in august will be given the opportunity to take this class,

and i cannot tell you exactly what it will include because we are working on the curriculum, but sensitivities to disabilities, customer service, and traffic safety. that is the other thing critical that i think. we have the bicycle coalition come into our new driver training to talk to them about the principles of how you maneuver a car around a bicycle, and we think that will be really, really helpful, and we want that information to go back to the existing drivers, as well. supervisor wiener: to make a point on the specific issue, when i first came into office and started to really talk about this a lot, i noticed that some bike advocates were not particularly excited about increasing the number of cabs, and the message i kept getting over and over again was their perception that cabdrivers were

too aggressive and even less by friendly than other drivers, and i would argue with them and was disappointed because we want to be allies in pushing for all sorts of different types of transportation, including bicycles and cabs, so i think it is really important to address that in making sure there is communication and that we do not have any kind of official divide that should not exist. supervisor mar: i was just going to thank you for the new driver training improvements but also for the retraining that is mandatory, and it looks like it is by june 2012 for this coming june to do more updating of the educational requirements for 7000 drivers? is that -- and one >> the idea is -- we changed the renewal cycle.

it used to be every taxicab expired on december 31. that is not workable because it is hard to process that many people for a system on any certain date, so we changed the system to be around the birthday, said the renewal around a driver's birthday. the first renewals will come up in august. that is why we want to have some curriculum in june to give them at least 60 days to deal with the requirement. supervisor mar: so i do not see any other question. supervisor wiener? supervisor wiener: thank you. the purpose of this hearing is not to just slay the mta and say, "you should be doing this or that." is to assure that there is good work being done within the agency to improve service. i appreciate the detailed

presentation. i hope it is helpful to the public. in terms of the process of a more significant potential expansion, the number of taxicabs beyond, i think 85 potential medallions that were authorized, what is the timetable looking like? i know we have some ceqa issues. could you just flush out what the timeline looks like? >> we are already talking to planning. i would expect -- our consultant is coming to town this week for our kickoff meeting, so i will have more detailed information later, but i would suspect that by summer or fall we would have a determination at the latest of what the consultant considers the appropriate numbers of taxis

or san francisco. supervisor wiener: we want to make sure we comply. thank you very much. colleagues, questions? comments? ok, we will open it up. we have some comment cards. supervisor mar: 3 minutes per person. supervisor wiener: 3 minutes per person, and when you hear the bell, your time is up. [reading names] and i think alen. go ahead. >> i wanted to start out with -- let me start out, first of all, some of you know that i drove a taxi for seven years. and it was a pretty interesting experience. but i wanted to state that i

lived in hayes valley, and i heard you say that was typical to get a taxicab in some areas. it is difficult in the valley. and i agree with you. i just wanted to mention something about improvements. it was a great system. a and b you're able to pick up a lot more calls and make more money. i also liked the ability of electronic waybills. electronic waybills for people

who have vision problems, being able to sit there and write, you know, as you drive on these waybills is absolutely ridiculous. you have to stop and right, which takes away from your time. but there are so much more needed improvements that i would like to state, and i am sorry i am going fast, but i only have 1.5 minutes. one of the of the things is with the sensitivity training. to expand that just passed people with sensibilities. people with different ethnic backgrounds, people with a different sexual orientation. i can tell you firsthand as driving a taxi in san francisco, when i came out at work, i experienced some very,