>> [gavel] >> good afternoon and welcome to the san francisco board of supervisors land use and economic development committee. could we get someone from --

welcome to the land use and economic development committee. i am scott wiener the chair of the committee. to my left is david chiu a member of the committee and joining shortly is supervisor zane kim the vice chair of the committee. i want to thank sfgtv for broadcasting today's hearing and staff and i would like to just start this hearing with a moment of silence for the victims of the bombing at the boston marathon so if we could just observe a moment of silence. okay thank you. so as i think you can see we have quite a packed agenda today and

turn up of the public i think reflects that. we have an over flow room in 250 and i also want to note those that are here for item number six, the condominium conversion measure. that is the last item on the agenda, so if you're so inclined if in here come back so people hear for other agenda items are come in i invite you to do that but you don't have to. also for all items if you could fill out a blue card and which agenda item you would like to speak about and that will facilitate public comment and one title thing if you're here for hearing four which is a hearing i called on street furniture clutter it's

my intent that item be continued to a later date given how packed the agenda is so madam clerk it you call item one. >> item one is mayor's pedestrian safety strategy and action plan. >> thank you and supervisor kim is the lead supervisor of this hearing. supervisor kim. >> thank you chair wiener and is a cosponsor of the item as well as norman yee and i know there are people for multiple issues and for this item and a item later on the calendar so i appreciate everyone's time and this hearing is lengthy because it's an important issue for the city which is the issue of pedestrian safety. it's been two years since i first called a hearing on this item. when i began office in 2011 and the reason

we decided to make pedestrian safety a priority in our office is when we came in and started thinking what it makes our city and district safer we were alarmed at the data on pedestrians hit and killed by vehicles on our streets and we saw our data it was unsafe for citizens here in san francisco than anywhere in california and than new york where a lot of people work and tokyo and hong kong and pedestrian oriented cities and san francisco has a lot to do and we have done a lot but we have more to go and it's important to have an update where we're at especially with the mayor's release of his pedestrian safety strategy last week and we have a sense of where we're going. we have a lot of members of the community

that would like to speak on this issue and give input how they would like to see this move forward. just quickly i wanted to talk about some of the data which is unfortunately since 2010 san francisco suffered 14 pedestrian deaths and we see the numbers grow so these are real people with lives and we lost here in the city. we are still no where seeing the progress to save lives in the city, around the city's most dangerous intersections and we would like to target the problematic areas and we know it's unacceptable. it's a epidemic and why department of public health is here and it's a safety issue and when we're losing people because of car and pedestrian issues that is a health crisis. in fact one out of five traumas

treated in the hospitals is a person hit by a car and we have lot of attention to gun violence and important to work on but we have people hit by cars and i really appreciated a member of the believe that spoke two years ago that said "we should treat cars like a weapon because it has the same impact" even intentionsal or not when dieferg a car you have driving a dangerous weapon and you can use it wisely and you can really hurt people and kill people. i am excited to hear about the task force who worked in cooperation with the board of supervisors to implement some of the goals identified by the new sea wide strategy and i hope we can share this information between the

agencies. the daa is important and we need it to target the improvements and be project ready so they can receive the funding in order to be implemented so i am excited to hear from the presenters today. just an overview first we will have the department of public health present. the last three years of the collision data and the dangerous intersections so we understand the problem. then we will have sfpd talk about the enforcement plan and also we need to change behavior. part of that happens through the enforcement with sfpd. next we have sf mta to talk about the intersections that we are prioritizing the timeline. how they have been working with the data in order to identify the streets and the intersections we are going to look at, and we also have department of public

works here to talk about the intersection improvements and last we have staff from sfmta and capital planning how we fund the efforts that we have put together, so i know i said dph first but first we want an overview of the pedestrian strategies, so from the task force we have tim popdrio who you will present the overview. >> other opening comments from other supervisors. >> i'm sorry. >> supervisor kim anything else? >> no. >> president chiu. >>i would like to make a couple of comments and thank supervisor kim and our colleagues for the renewed attention to this very serious issue. in my first years before they were on the board i and others public

officials tried to increase more public attention on this issue but today i really think that the current generation of this board of supervisors including supervisor kim and whose district along with mine has seen the highest number of pedestrian fatalities including supervisor wiener and a transit advocate and supervisor farrell focused on these issues and supervisor yee whose story everyone knows and about the injury and we have a moment to move forward an awful lot and one of the issues i raised in 2009 and 2010 is we had close to a dozen city agencies responsible for different aspects of pedestrian safety but not able to coordinate and i think that has changed. i want to thank the agencies for the work and i hope that continues. i want to say one other thing about the goals that we set as a city. we hope to bring down

the injury and fatality rate down and as i said walk to workday last week we should continue the aspiration. there are states like nevada and utah that have a zero fatality goal on the streets and it's a vision that makes sense for us and i know we're doing better and i want to thank everyone for the combined community efforts in reaching these goals. >> thank you president chiu. i failed to acknowledge that we are joined by supervisor mark farrell. i just want to make a few comments and i will turn it over. thank you for calling this hearing. this is a big, big problem when you sit down with the fire department which responds to all kinds of human tragedies. we know that this

is among at the high end in terms of what they're responding to. we have way too many pedestrian accidents and we need to change that and we know what we need to do. this is not rocket science. we need more and better enforcement, more and better education, and we need to make physical changes to our pedestrian environment to make them safer, to have shorter crossing distances, to have better and safer environments so that cars and bikes and pedestrians could all coexist and be safe. thank you president chiu for raising the issue of number of agencies are involved which is large, and i am glad there has been some improvement in coordination that i can only imagine what it was like back then because i will

be honest i think we have a lot of work to do to improve interagency coordination around pedestrian safety improvements. i don't think we have narrowly enough coordination. we have some excellent people working on the issues in the various departments and in a vacuum they do terrific work but what i see over and over again in my district every time you try to do a pedestrian upgrade it's like running an obstacle course and you have different departments and objections and they're not talking to each other and it could be any person in that department. it's not always escalated to the top so it's a very disjointed process. where i see pedestrian safety projects that have broad community support it's like you have to be a cat with nine lives and be brought back to live and another department comes in and there is a problem and brought

back to life again and there -- it's not efficient use of resources. i have legislation pending and i wish it weren't necessary but i think it is to force better coordination and have a inter departmental working group so if a department has an issue with the pedestrian upgrade instead of ending the project working together to find a path forward. we also need to make sure that all departments are involved from the beginning. for example we are now tearing up and rebuilding pretty much every corner in san francisco to put ada curb ramps which is an important project. we have been doing that without the mta's involvement as far as i know and while we're tearing up this corner maybe we should put a bulb up there too and it's cheaper and several

intersections in my district have been torn up and built the same with the ada ramps and we should have put them there. i think that is improving and we will see improved coordination on that but a way to make sure that all of the talented departments are working together to have one vision and improve the physical environment and with that said supervisor kim i will turn it back to you. >> thank you chair and i do want to acknowledge we have a enlighten board of supervisors in terms of our understanding of pedestrian safety, and i think a lot of that also is due to a lot of activists and community members who made this a priority issue to educate government and members of the community on this issue and of course they have been impacted on this as well and hopefully through the hearings we can push and encourage for better working --

a better coordination amongst a variety of departments and this sits in a lot of different purviews so again i want to invite you up and chaired the task force and a member of the sf mta. thank you for being here. >> thank you supervisors. i am deputy of planning for the sf mta also the transportation task force, co-chair with dhp. i'm going to give you a quick overview of the strategy and then what we're going to be talking about in the hearing so you can hear from the various departments on what they have have done since we have been developing this report. it's really important to note that we have been working over the last two years as a team and moving concert with the changes and the strategy is reflecting in real time what we're doing and moving forward and there is obviously a lot of challenges moving forward but i think together we will

figure those out, so what you will hear today, the overview i will touch upon, and then the departmental efforts to support the goals and objectives and you will hear from public health, the police department, and mta and public works and we go into funding strategy. how are we going to fund this? we know there are certain gaps in certain areas. what is the plan of attack to get there? and both the mta and capital group are going to present that and key next steps and we have to come back to you regularly to show the updates so just a quick record on the strategy itself. it was in response to the mayor's objective to reduce fatal injuries and increase walking trips as well. as a city we're growing. we will have more transit oriented development which means more pedestrian trips and look at

making it safeer and workable and then we have to look at completing safety and action items for the rest of the strategy. this chart shows you the current trend over the last 10 years the severe in the light pink and the fatal in the dark pink and the trend it was on a precipitous decline but now holding steady and on the increase so a lot of concern there and we will talk about that in more detail what is mapping so the key challenges ahead of us we have a great city, very walkable. a lot of people walk and since the inception of the smartphone and walking and driving and taking

transit and these issues we're working on, but the key issue that people driving are failing to yield for pedestrians. that's the bottom line and we need to correct that and importantly as well of all the collisions involved with pedestrians in the last few years and this is the area that we looked at a lot involved cars turning left so projecting the left turn, making it more visible is one of the key obstacles going forward. we know that we can do more of these core issues and like supervisor wiener was speaking of changing the street scape and they're becoming more complex and means more focused areas and we need to look at this from a city perspective and the multiple agencies how can

we have it done quickly but robustly and a challenge in our street network so it's a targeted area to focus resources on. through the process it helped determine what we are doing as city agencies and how to implement this so the key finding that the report talks about is looking at our intersection city wide, giving more crossing time and reopen what we call closed crosswalks

and we only have one or two legs open and open all four to make it safer, look at streets around schools, finishing our signal count down program, having target enforcement at certain corridors, develop the education and awareness program, and really looking at developing and funding the core program and developing something which is looking at pilots, a lot more pilots to see the efficacy of the treatments and we haven't applied these in san francisco yet so we want to test them out for efficacy and as they prove themselves we can make them as part of the capital program and do more likely so you will hear about that. also we're not going to sop stop with this support. we will have a task force development criteria for the next steps and then every year

provide an annual evaluation report on what did we do? how well did it achieve the goals and how close are we to the achievements? and then develop the five year prioritization of projects so we keep feeding them into the city's capital plan so that is a high level overview. i will now have the departments come individually and let you know specifically what is happening and how we can move forward. next up is dr. batia from the department of public health. >> i have a question. so when we have a pedestrian safety projects moving forward or formulated who is in charge? >> who is in charge of the actual -- >> who is -- which department or which position? who is actually responsible for making sure it goes forward? because i think one of the challenges that we

had is that you have so many agencies involved that have legit mast goals and interest that we sometimes don't have the level of centralization that we need and one thing i have seen we like to operate by consensus and it's the best option if you can do it but there are times when you have disagreements and you have to make a decision and move forward so who ultimately is in charge? >> supervisor that is a good point. that's an on going theme of the task foshs and as we looked towards the mta and the ultimate decision with the projects and working with them and that's basically where we have to make the decision to move these projects forward. it really needs to be there. >> so if another department has

an objection. >> we work with them and figure out the key issues. we have advisory committee to talk about the issues. if it gets to a point there is a disagreement and philosophical or whatever it is have to meet one or one and figure it out and with what we know if it's pedestrian safety issue we need to move forward on it. >> can you think of other examples and you had philosophical disagreement s and the mta said we respect your position but this is important and we need to move forward with the project. >>i think most are resolved at that level. mostly it's when thinking about the project and the scope of work. sometimes there are issues with the width of the street and turning and

that type of thing, the number -- it's very specific to the projects but we generally get to a point nonetheless we need to move forward and accommodate the needs and rarely do we have opposition from the city departments. on an on going theme as we do more of these transit type projects we need to come forward and think that through. >> just another observation i have sometimes i feel the projects when you have opposition or concern from other departments it ends up the project gets severely watered down. that is my experience and i would love to see the mta be more proactive saying we need to deliver this and of course taking into account the feedback from the other departments but when there are some of the good faith disagreements not just watering down the project.