some of her previous private sector to bear and hopefully have a much more performance oriented organization in terms of how we manage and evaluate our own staff. she models this behavior herself meeting individually with each of her 16 full time staff members each quarter to review their plan and soliciting feedback in a 360 approach that has been become a model for the whole sustain able area. her skill with complicated communications and mentoring her staff an getting a quick understanding of the projects and challenge and getting them implemented and with her working outside of

agencies an finding a common ground and i will talk about those later which she's are coming to bear in a resolution for the community and the agency. for all that, aside from all the good bike and pedestrian stuff she does, she's doing a lot of the hard work in management that we are looking for and i want to recognize her for today and bridget smith who is her direct supervisor and i want to ask her to say something to the board. >> thank you. i'm very pleased to recognize slida. she understand that in order to do that, she and her team needs to develop and present improvement

proposals that are both compressive and transformational and she and her teamed have fully embraced this approach and i'm very grateful that she's with us and shares her leadership with us. i would like -- mr. smith to say something. >> i can't say in you have about slita reynolds and i want to thank you for taking the time to honor her. she's an outstanding manager and a great asset to mta. i want you to know that it means a lot to me and the staff whom are almost all here to recognize her good work. >> thank you. >> thank you. this is a recognition award. >> thank you, i know sometimes

manager is a 4 letter word. i really do love managing people and i really believe that people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. it really important and i want to thank in particular my team leaders for their dedication and hard work, bridged and bond for their strong support and director riis skin for your leadership and this really gives us the support to make a lot of tough decisions. >> introduce your family? >> this is veet a, this is cleo, and this is my husband jessie. >> thank you on behalf of [ applause ] of the agency please accept our

thanks for the great job that you are doing? in san francisco. >> thank you. next for the transit decision. i would like mr. austin to come forward. mr. austin has been with us for 3 years and west brook for just 5 years. so relatively new comers to munis but they have already been recognized for delivering outstanding service. here committee for putting safety first while transporting his passengers and a recent report,

accommodation was given to him for a quick reaction to seeing a pedestrian lying on the street until help arrived prevented the pedestrian from being injured further. this is above and beyond of what you learn and the new training and on behalf of the management team we want to this you for your great effort and service as role model for the great work you do in a very difficult environment out this everyday. so i'm going to ask mr. hailey, if he want to introduce the superintendent staff and say a few words. >> thank you, this is wine garten the superintendent and i antonio the superintendent. i would also like to say although you said it well, these are two individuals that haven't been

here a very long time by our standards in the ranks of operator ship. they have demonstrated great leadership and practical application of our core values about safety. you will hear what each of these individuals did, they placed their concerns for the riders, their citizens, acted in a highly professional laudatory manner that we are all very proud to have them represent us. so these are in fact two genuine heroes. i will let them, modesty to some degree will prevent them from going into what they did, but you'll -- i will turn it over to them. >> congratulations and thank you on behalf of the people of the city for your great work. >> thank you. i just follow what i was trained to do treat

a passenger like it was myself being treated once a passengerer -- gets on the bus. i do this day and day out. this is something i do naturally. nothing out of the ordinary. >> thank you very much. [ applause ] . and of course part of this will be from me being started everyday is the help of my wife. >> [ applause ] >> congratulations and thank you on behalf of the people of the city. >> thank you. i'm happy to be here today. i feel like my situation wasn't that great was a situation where a young man had just been shot. it was a situation where everything played out into his favor. i

heard the gunshots seconds before i arrived up on the scene. i was able to call center control and the inspect or who handled my call helped me get the call out to the police. the fire department arrived 2 minutes after that and they were able to transport the young man to san francisco general where he was able to get surgery and be able to have a second chance on life. i would like to think that any other transit operator in my situation would have done the same thing. everyday we show up to work, we are here to do our job in the best professional manner that we can to provide a service to the city and county of san francisco and try to protect everybody who rides our bus. thanks everyone for having us and i would like to say a very thank you to my wife for being so understanding with my

difficult work schedule and so forth and my cousin for showing up for the support also. >> thank you. [ applause ] i just want to make one brief statement and that is it's so rare that we can have a profound effect on someone's life and mr. west brook had that opportunity and we are so proud of what he did that way. i'm from mta from the woods division also. >> thank you, sir. >> directors and board members, thank you for this opportunity to recognize joe juan here for his good work and service to the people of san francisco. it gives him great honor to know that you are here to recognize that and to appreciate the good service that they provide for

us. thank you so much. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> so following that recognition of 3 great mta employees, we want to expand our recognition to our taxi drivers. they are out there also everyday providing great service and sometimes under very difficult circumstances to the people of san francisco. so we are happy to recognize several drivers today all of who provide exemplary service to the community and they help make a difference in people's lives and help seniors in the community and people with many disabilities to work and they face their jobs with pride and love and offer a service that

no other unregulated service will map for to us keep in mind. these drivers go above and beyond the call of duty everyday. they do amazing work and it's for the most part without a spotlight and without any recognition. they do it because they care about the people they serve. there is 4 of them. i'm going to give a brief snapshot of each and we have a little multimedia presentation. the first is -- an bailey, she drivers seniors to golden gate park so they can participate in a gardening program. one of her riders quoted an angel with wings on a sidewalk for picking her up after an all day hospital

procedure and she arrived and on time to make sure this rider got off safely. george, has customers he is pro you had to take to work every week and works with people and george has been driving a ramp taxi since the beginning of the program and one of the customers has been driving with him with a pager and contacted passengers. fred line, out of the most transit service in the san francisco taxi, he has many regular riders. he called fred when his mother was in the hospital. the passenger called

fred who was driving another client at the time and picked up the passenger and got in the hospital on time to be with his mother before here final time. finally mahmud, he provides service and his passengers rely on not being stressed out. after 8 hours of work, he's reliable on the pick up so his customers don't have to worry about getting home. one passenger instead, he is my freedom. this is powerful stuff by folks who often are below the radar but provide some of the most important transportation service that happens here in san francisco. so i would like to ask chris hashey to introduce the video.

thank you. this is the best part of the meeting, isn't it? on the subject of san francisco heroes, these are some heroes. for the people who are not aware of, the job of a ramp driver, it takes time to service each customer because of the need to secure their wheelchair and these drivers and medal yon owners do an excellent service to the wheelchair using customers of san francisco. i want to first of all introduce the video that was kate put together on her own time and riding around with some of these drivers and once the video is complete, i would like to have annette williams

present the awards.

>> [video] good guy. always has jokes.

[ applause ] >> thank you, kate, for that video. would you like to present the awards? >> thank you. we are very proud of these drivers and i think one of the things that's really important to point out is that these are representative of many more drivers that work here in san francisco as taxi drivers and we provide almost 400,000 trips a year in the

taxi program and they are some of the examples of the amazing drivers that work in that program. we are very proud of them and very proud of the work that they have done and the relationships that they built. you can see in the movie that it's a different thing, it's really the connection that happens between the customers and drivers that makes a difference in the lives of both the drivers and the passengers. can you please come forward. [ applause ] >> congratulations on behalf of the people particularly with those you serve so well with dignity. >> i would like to thank you so much for taking time for this award. >> you have your family here also, right?

>> yes, my daughter is here. >> thank you. >> you are lucky because they are on spring break and they can get out of school. >> can you have bailey come forward? [ applause ] congratulations and thank you on behalf of the people of the city. great job you are doing for them. >> thank you. it's an easy job. [ laughter ] this is my family right here. [ applause ] thank you very much. >> george wade. [ applause ] . congratulations mr. wade and thank you for all your work all these years. >> thank you, tom. and all the other board members. i'm going to introduce my family. this is

my great granddaughter maria. and this is my wife jerry. and my granddaughter zoa and my other great granddaughter. >> thank you so much for your great work. thank you. >> and fred lean. the driver who has taken more passengers than any other driver in san francisco. [ applause ] >> thank you so much.

>> okay. moving on. some highlights on a couple projects that have garnered a lot have folks interest. first on the bicycle project we got a request from a previous meeting for an update. director ramos made some reference to it as well. the update is and this is a project that was approved late last year. the bike and pedestrian improvement on oak street and baker and scott and on baker began -- on february and will continue and what we have done is rescinded the lane on oak and changes to left turn only on oak preparing for baker. restriping. the final

completion is contingent on the completion of the construction work at the kelly moore paint. they have scaffolding up that blocks the sidewalk and so they are using the parking lane which is the future bike lane as their pedestrian path of travel. we obviously can't advance the work until that work is complete. the work on baker and oak is a lot more labor intensive and requires more coordination with i improvements that we are able to do on feld street and they will remove signs and parking meters and modify the traffic signals before the separated bike way can be installed on oak and will be done in phases to ensure safety of bikes and vehicles. other projects

components such as concrete medians, this portion of the spronl scheduled to receive full fund ing in june and will be completed by the end of the year. we've heard concerns by director ramos about people using the lanes relative to the traffic, until the final improvement we will put post on to delineate the buffer between the bicycles and drivers. i think when we first brought to you late last year we said we were going to do it in phases because we didn't have the fund to go do the full project but we wanted to get the first phase in the ground first. we will add the post and take a look at the signage issue. i can see if someone is not can

customed to that can miss the sign. also the improvement on the polk street project. a project that is funding by prop b, the streets bond that was passed in november 2011. recall it was a bond to have a street paving and a lot of work that we previously in the city didn't have a funding source for. one of the main goals of the project is to improve bike and pedestrian safety. collision rates for bike and pedestrians along polk is higher and one of the higher incident cord ridors in the city and because of the neighborhood commercial of it there is a lot of pedestrian activity and because of the

relatively flat -- topography it's a major bike route and they will be doing repaving around 2014 to be able to make these safety i am improvements and generally enhance what's already a great and very rich neighborhood and unique neighborhood commercial area. we did develop a number of conceptual proposals for how to make these kind of i am improvements on polk and they were done with public input from an extensive community outreach process that include 2 rounds of public meetings, 6 walking tours and we are doing online surveys and meeting with small merchants to get feedback from local residents and

business owners and we have been looking at ways to the extend that anyone of the proposals would reduce parking on polk which is a concern from the neighborhood and looking at opportunity to find additional capacity adjacent to polk. but, we have heard and you've probably heard and i think maybe you will hear more today some pretty significant concerns about various scenarios and how much parking would be lost as a result. so, we had identified the proposals of certain degrees of parking laws. we were not advancing any particular proposal, we were not proposing new scale or polk and some had a loss that generated concern by the community. i was invited to the

meeting of the neighborhood polk association and i think i saw donna trena, she's the head of the association. i have had the pleasure to work with her in the last few years. the meeting was a regular meeting but there was a very large number of people there expressing concerns about the project. it was very constructive feedback. we met with don and some of the representative the community and building owners to understand what the concerns were so we can articulate where our process was and out of all that discussion, what we have committed to doing is less options that would entail some

less parking and maybe some trade off to safety or other benefits. there are very different situation for different parts of polk, the lower area of california and more of the northern area north of broadway and area between each of them are different and maybe different solutions depending on some of the feedback we get. our next step is to bring back the proposal we have but also additional proposal for different configuration for less parking loss and we have an additional meeting scheduled later this month and in may and we'll gather feedback and come back to the board later this year with recommendation based on all that process and what we are gearing towards is get ting this complete and get the