osullivan, acting captain of bay view station. from the ground level i can state that this legislation is much needed. i've been at the bay view station for the last two years and over the course of time on numerous occasions i've seen the impact that illegal theft has had on the district, primarily public safety in nature as well as environmental in nature. we have had instances where wires and copper have been removed and have caused the shutdown of traffic signals. as the supervisor alluded to, we have had individuals under cover of darkness landing at hunter's shipyard and stripping metal from that abandoned yet soon to be definitelied property and we have had both commercial and residential facilities that have broken into and stripped of wires. a number of years

ago at 17th and tejaro the police department moved into the facility there and getting that particular building up to speed, the entire infrastructure had to be replaced because all the copper and electronics had been stripped from the building. we welcome the legislation, we think it brings things in line, san francisco in line, with what is done statewide by redefining what a junk dealer is. and like often is the case with abc violations and premises that are required to be licensed by the abc, it affords the chief of police and the department and persons like myself at the station level to suggest conditions on permits should an individual who is permitted run afoul of the existing legislation. thank you. >> thank you very much. i do want to bring one technical before you to your

attention, change the date the existing permit expires from the end of this calendar year to june 30, 2013. you have in the packet that i circulated to you, in front of you, it reflects this change, this process has taken longer than i anticipated. that's the slight change i need to make. i would urge your support on this matter, thank you. >> thank you. it looks like a junk dealer permit is did $1,308 and can we adopt the amendments without objection? thank you. can we also move this forward with a positive recommendation without objection? >> thank you. >> thank you. thank you, supervisor cohen. mr. clerk, can you call the last item? >> item no. 6 is a hearing on the municipal transportation quarterly progress on

increasing and improving tax service. >> scott wiener. >> about a year ago i submitted a hearing request to request quarterly updates from the municipal transportation agency about taxi service in san francisco and efforts to reform and improve our taxi system. if we are ever to become truly a transit first system, muni, those critically important, will never be enough by itself. we also have to have in addition to great biking and ability for people to walk around safely, we need to have car sharing and very importantly we need to have a world class taxi system. we currently do not have enough taxis in san francisco. taxi service is not where it needs to be. people still have incredible trouble getting a cab, whether they are visiting the city, whether they are living in the city, and if we want people to be able to live

here without owning their own vehicles we need to give good cab service. i know that the mta has been moving forward with some very positive measures to improve service and i want to commend the mta for doing that and today we'll be having our quarterly update and miss hiashi is here from the mta so i'd like to invite her up to provide a update. >> chris hiashi, deputy director of taxis and accessible service. 2013 is going to be an exciting year for taxi service in san francisco. around the end of the year in a few weeks a report from our best practices consultant who is looking at best practices in taxi regulations throughout the country and internationally. we're very much looking forward to the results of this study

because, among other things, it represents a very comprehensive data collection effort from customers and stake holders that has not taken place in san francisco in many years and this will both quantify and validate our neighborhood service issues rather than having to rely on anecdotal information. in addition to analyzing the immediate needs on whether taxi supply is recommended it will also include a longer term structural analysis of how we might look at the licensing structure for taxi operations not only how many are needed but how we can structure taxi licensing to meet neighborhood service demand. and then in addition i believe that we'll see this report identifying a further potential for taxi usage in san francisco, as supervisor wiener indicated, if we are going to make san francisco a place where people don't need to use their private cars that is consistent with

the sf mta's goals of getting more people to use taxis and into other forms of public transportation. in addition to our best practices study which we think will provide us with a lot of very useful information at the beginning of the year, we're also going to be receiving responses to a request for information that was issued and those responses are due on december 28th. that is for the purpose of attempting to construct a data platform, if you will, for electronic taxi hailing applications to come into san francisco and be able to see the entire taxi fleet through these applications so that they can become more reliablely communicated with by individuals on the street using burgeoning forms of mobile technology that are available today. third, i'm very, very proud of the accessible services staff and the work they have done to implement our wheelchair

pick-up both incentive program and disciplinary program using this carrot and stick approach we find that our 100 ramp taxi vehicles that are accessible to wheelchairs are much more in service now than they were when this program was beginning to be enforced at the beginning of this year. and then, finally, not the only thing we're doing but i'm trying to give you a sense of the highlights, we are implementing a color scheme performance standard system whereby if color schemes don't meet certain basic pass/fail requirements and by color schemes i mean the taxi companies, if they don't meet certain pass/fail requirements they will not be able to grow their business by attracting more medallions until such time as they do meet those pass/fail requirements and leaving the pass/fail requirements aside, using a scoring system to rank these companies based on their

dispatch success, the level of paratransit performance, the number of complaints and compliments received but it will be very heavily weighted toward dispatch success, not just number of phone calls but based on a per taxi count of how many times people successfully are able to get into that vehicle as a result of a dispatch call. so i think this is the first time that we are going to be holding those companies accountable to public service and i'm really looking forward to implementing that in 2013 as well. so those are some of our service-related highlights and i'm happy to take any questions. >> thank you, miss hiyashi, i want to commend you and miss bose and others for our strong work moving this forward. i know it's really challenging. i work but i think the agency is moving in a positive

direction. do you have, i know this is -- everything in san francisco takes a little bit longer than we anticipate, just the nature of our city, and i'm wondering if you have maybe a gross estimate for how many years you think it's going to take until we have what you believe will be adequate cab service. i know adequate cab service might be in the eye of the beholder, but just trying to get a general sense. >> i was thinking more along the lines of it's always going to be a moving target. there's always going to be solg else we can do to make things better, but i think the best practices study that we are expecting soon is going to be a really valuable platform torus to look at what other cities do, what options we might have, what sort of creative solutions we might have. for example, san francisco is the only -- other than las vegas -- is the only

town in the united states that has part-time permits and we did that in order to try to deal with peak time demand. there may be other creative ways that we can get more taxis into the neighborhood. for example, the 8,000 series of permits that was just issued to companies are not allowed to pick up at the airport. we may find that we want to implement some zoning kind of criteria to make sure that certain taxis stay in certain neighborhoods or find other incentives and motivators to get more service out into the neighborhoods. so i don't know that it's something -- to me it doesn't feel like a chronological exercise so much as how creative can we get and really identify what the sources of the problems are and try to do something about distribution. >> and i agree distribution is a big issue. there are parts of the city where it's almost impossible to hail a cab on the

street and challenging to get a dispatch cab. i'm glad the agency is considering those issues. i do believe that as supply increases we'll probably organically see cabs moving to a broader swath of the city and in my view i think we have a real pent-up demand in this city. there's a lot of people who don't even think about taking a cab because they don't believe they can get one. as we have more cabs on the street that pent-up demand will be unleashed so i'm optimistic about that. >> colleagues, any questions? >> just a quick question. we heard a hearing on car sharing and new types of programs that might seem to compete with taxi service and i'm wondering how as those types from zip car to

city share to new types of zip cars coming into the city, how will that affect taxi service and competition with taxis. >> pier to pier sounds like a fancy way of getting grandma's old corolla out of the garage and making yourself into a taxi. we are serious about getting people into taxis by whatever mechanism it takes. we are not afraid of technology and we're not trying to be anticompetitiveness. however, there is a factor of public safety. we need to make sure when somebody gets into a vehicle that that's a safe vehicle and a safe driver. with that said, we're all in favor. if we can satisfy those concerns there's also a concern

about unregulated meters, for example, and what the customer can expect. some of these sfrlses, services, will say it's a suggested volunteer donation and it's no different from the casual carpool but what they don't say is in their 26-page user agreement when you put your credit card on file that if you do not make the suggested voluntary donation that it will be automatically deducted from your credit card, making it neither voluntary, suggested nor a donation. this is not a viable consumer situation. motor vehicle for hire regulators exist in order to screen the safety of the drivers, screen the safety of the vehicles, and make sure that the basis for the fare is fair. so if those considerations are satisfied we are in favor of anything that will increase transportation service in san francisco. >> supervisor cohen. >> i just wanted to say thank you and acknowledge your

department's hard work. i appreciate you putting in the effort and looking into this matter. as you remember last year, earlier this year, we have always had this on-going conversation. i certainly had an opportunity to talk to you about my concerns around the taxi, not only the concerns but the challenges around the taxi industry. so thank you for coming back to us and making this report and i look forward to seeing you again. >> thank you. >> thank you. shall we open this up for public comment? please come forward if you would like to speak. >> ro*pb on miller, i took a taxi to get here from market. it was 7.95, i gave the driver a $10. there's only a shortage if you are hysterically running

around with your head cut off. if you call for a taxi you can get a 5 or 7, 10-minute wait, a taxi will come. we need more planning on individual lives and less running around as if we were competing on donald trump's game show to be the most active and most aggressive. so you plan and you call for a taxi or you go on a busy thorough fare, you flag one down in 5 or 10 minutes. these new pefky little taxis, what do they call them, cyber come things. we have a california state law that says you are not supposed to not be texting and not be on these mobile devices while driving so we don't want more people looking on their gps and rushing here and let me see -- again, my same theme today. we just don't need more speeding and i hope you will text the

hell out of private automobiles like london does, $25 a day for every car that comes into california and put it right into muni and taxis. and tax the hell out of automobiles every day, every car that comes into san francisco. i said that twice on purpose. thank you. >> mark gruberg, taxi association. i wanted to call to your attention what the mta is doing with regard to drivers. this is extremely important in terms of service because the drivers are the ones who provide the service. if you don't have good drivers, you don't have good service. if you don't have experienced drivers, you don't have good service. so far they have taken more

than $25 million out of the taxi industries, they have approved the leasing of medallions to cab companies, 150 to 200 medallions that are being leased by cab companies cutting off the drivers who have waited for these medallions for up to 17 years. in the next year alone they will receive a minimum of 20 to 25 million dollars from the taxi industry and possibly as much as 50 or 75 million or more. i am not making these numbers up, they are real numbers, i can pencil them out for you. they have taken drivers' futures and thrown them into the gutter. this is what this agency is about. i'm not laying this on staff, i think staff is trying to do their job within the constraints but the pressure is from above and it's all based on money.

these rogue taxi services that are out there, they are based on a false and fraudulent premise that they are not providing taxi service. they are providing the same service through the same means as taxis. you can't have two parallel systems providing the same service, one of which is regulated and the other of which is not. it doesn't work for anybody's benefit, especially the public's benefit. and that will come to pass. thank you. >> next speaker. >> nola gravis, also with united taxi workers. always a hard act to follow when i

follow mark or anyone follows mark. if you want good cab drivers, if you want good cab service, you've got to have good cab drivers. 25 million dollars out of our pockets. and out of the industry as well. the mta has about 10,000 drivers. 5,000 have health care, have optical, have medical, have dental, have paid sick and vacation days, have a retirement. then there's 5,000 workers that don't have any of that and they have to buy their job on top of it. and the money that they are using to buy the job, the part that doesn't go to the bank for interest, is going to the mta and i would presume is going to pay for the benefits of the muni drivers who get those benefits that we get none

of. i have driven a cab since 1973 in this town. i would love to retire. obviously that's a physical issue for me. but as long as i can sit in the cab, i have to sit in the cab because there's no retirement. there aren't enough cabs. just before i got here i checked about down at the airport. there are over 100 cabs waiting to get into the airport at 1:00 this afternoon. that's 100 waiting to get in. that means there were 286 cabs there waiting already in the line and 100 were waiting to line up behind them. they wouldn't be there if there was business here in the city. thank you. >> thank you. if there's

anyone else that would like to speak, please come forward. seeing no other people, public comment is closed. supervisor wiener. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to thank everyone who came out today and thank you to mta for the update, i would like to move to continue this to the call of the chair so we can schedule it in the future for the quarterly update. . >> colleagues, can we do that without objection? thank you. mr. clerk, is there anything else? >> no, sir, that completes the agenda. >> meeting adjourned. (meeting adjourned).

>> this is smack in the middle of the tenderloin neighborhood where there are 50,000 people within walking distance. you see the kids that are using what's provided, but there is so much opportunity for this to be a stronger, more welcoming, healthier, cleaner, safer place for the people in this community to play. there are going to be new green areas, a full-size basketball court, outdoor fitness equipment, community gardens, a brand-new clubhouse. it's going to be a much more welcoming spot for a neighborhood that really needs it. ♪ ♪ the city of san

francisco sfgtv meeting of the san francisco transbay joint powers occurring november 19, 2012 will begin shortly. >> good morning and welcome to the special transbay point powers authority board of directors meeting. today amonday, november 19th, and could we please take roll call? >> sure, i will note for the record that director harper is joining as ortiz's alternate. and with that, director harper? >> here. >> lloyd. here. >> metcalf. >> here. >> kim. >> here. you do a quar um. >> thank you. are there any communications today? that i am aware of board of directors in more old business?

seeing none we can move to the executive director's report. >> good morning directors and members of the public and just a few announcements before we move on for our construction update for today. it is now displayed to the public at the academy of science and that will run for a number of months. so we would like to thank the california academy for putting on display the mammoth tooth. and we will be looking for a new home in 2013. and finally on october 17th we had number one of our regularly schedule committee meetings to provide a construction update to our neighbors. so everything that moving along well. now to give our construction update with steve turner. >> good morning, directors. steve, ru, with turner construction, construction oversight. i don't know.

is that up? there it is. >> another good month, of work or almost a month and a half since we filled you in on the last period. there were no recordable incidents. we did have one near miss. but, brought to light some issues with the excavation process of sight lines and so that has been dealt with successfully. and allowing the excavator to work while the folks down below were able to position themselves appropriately so they are not in the way of it. we have 550,000 craft hours now, about 60,000 since the last update. 157, chefs, and i will show you the chart for that in a little bit and the excavation continues into zone three, and 1, 2, 3. some of the other activities, have been awarded and submitals have begun. and the final utility,

relocation package 4.2, the aux silry package is under way and we will work through the holidays on mission street and will continue on early into 2013 and because we are doing the first levels of excavation in zone three. the archeologists have been on call and on site. and nothing dramatic yet. and they have trained the operators well in spotting archeologycal finds. coming up in the next 90 days, we will mobilize that below great subcontractor and will start working in ground one on the geothermal packages. they should complete zone three all the way to freemont street which will give them a run through howard on to froe mont

street. >> the butresss should continue and should be ahead, estimating 164 by the end of the month. and the micropile program should move into zone two over the next 90 days. >> give you some updates, on the over all schedule, and the time line of the project. it continues to remain as a october, 2017 completing. and bus operation date. below grade structure will be starting shortly here at the end of the year. and then, of course, the super structure package is out for bid right now. and we expect those bids back in early january. >> what was going to be installed on veteran's weekend it will be installed next year. possibly on president's weekend after more work is completed on

zone four and gives more room to work, things are moving along as still originally planned. >> the over all picture, the sight has not changed much, although it gets closer to closer to freemont street. both traffic bridges are in and excavation continues. and here is the excavation map that the program managers put together the area, of the darkest red area is the deepist, that is the minus 41, 42 foot, that is the bottom of the excavation, that is about 60 feet from the street level and you can see the succession of the bracing as you move from the west to the east towards zone three. you can certainly see the significant amount of change from the left in early october to the photo on the right at the beginning of november, and end of october and the access tressel has progressed further and bracing as well. just to give you an idea of what the quality of bracing

actually looks like, we took a shot from the west and looking back. and gives you an idea of how much temporary steel is going into that excavation and its depth and it is quite a project. and for a little bit of scale, there is your average, 6-foot tall gentleman standing on one of them two-thirds of the way down into the excavation next to the trussle bridge. the micropile progress in zone one, you see the rig there, drilling in the micropile close to the shoring wall underneath all of the bracing. just some more views of the bracing and the excavation as you are looking west along the tresle as long as the lower levels. to give you an idea of what the work is that is going on and the scale and the magnitude of the size of the hole that we are digging. they finally crossed under the first street bridge and this is excavation under that first street bridge. and they will move in