pedestrians, particularly with it being the only target in the city. and also the westfield mall. >> yes. i am going to ask that greg reiskin, the transportation planner address this. >> good evening, members of the board, greg reiskin, transportation planner for the project and we did look for a qualitative assessment. so we did look at the meterone, because when we established preparation for this project, the meterone was existing at that time. the target was not in there at that time. so that was not part of the cumulatives because it wasn't in the nop right?

my apologies it was in there. the target was in there, yes >> could you talk a little bit how you established the base line, the pedestrian activity? >> yes, so as my colleague deborah was saying that we look at typical pedestrian activities and a number of questions were raised why don't you look at a peak event during moscone and why isn't that the baseline? the reason for that we look at typical conditions and not maximums. any analysis we're looking at peak representative conditions. so typically, in the case of this project that would be the pm peak hour during the week day. because that is the peak of activity time in the downtown area. >> i believe that you looked at both midday and peak pm. >> yes. so for pedestrian condition we also look at

midday -because people go to lunch. >> why do we not study the weekend because this project in and of itself is a museum and moma and moscone and the meterone? >> because there project was generating trips in the pm hours. it's relatively small museum compared to moma. >> the development in and of

itself may not have a impact because of the size the mexican museum, but ceqa state law says we have to study cumulative impacts and we know it's the moma and it's expanding and i could keep going over the list over and over again. why didn't we look at the weekends? the cumulative impact kind of lens? >> what ceqa requires is that you look at the cumulative impacts, such as they are relevant to the impacts that the project is creating and resulting in? the project's contributions to the cumulative impacts to the conditions on weekends would be -- would not be something that would rise to a level of significance. just on the basis of understanding the number of

pedestrians in the area and the increase -- the incremental increase from the project, it's clear from the analysis that this project in no way has the ability to create a considerable contribution to that cumulative context. it's just going to be a little bit of a drop there. so given that, but what ceqa provides for is that we look at the cumulative conditions, as i said, such that they are affected by the project. the situations in which we look at weekend transportation conditions are those where the project itself is generating a lot of weekend activity. we have looked at cumulative transportation conditions, for example, for grocery stores, also for the recent beach soccer fields project is one where we expected a lot of

weekend activity generated by the project. so what we're focusing on is the impacts of the project. relative to the environment, both as it exists and in the cumulative condition. >> so i think this comes back then to kind of my overall concern of how where we do environmental impact review, particularly for a neighborhood as dense as this is and expected to absorb even more population growth and density. so there the way that you have articulated that, kind of brings back miss brandt-hawley's analogy, which is that you can just have a glass of water and pour a little bit in at a time and it will never be considered significant because of the increment and it came up last summer with the at&t light box question and at what number do we hit and say it's significant; right? and clearly there was an answer to that. with each individual project we

tend to do eirs for each individual development project and at what point do we say it's significant, where the project spills over? so i guess my broader question is at what point do we say that we are really impacting a neighborhood and not thinking about the mitigations for it? >>well, i will start by answering how we make that decision in the context of our cumulative analysis and then i'm going turn it over to city attorney marlena burn to talk about the case law around that issue. we do consider that issue very closely as to at what point does the scale of the impact of a project result in a significant impact on a cumulative condition? for example, in air quality, we have the evidence to support

the fact that when we are talking about a setting in which there are already severely degraded air quality conditions, that is a situation in which the incremental effect of a single project does have the potential to create unacceptable conditions and therefore, requires mitigation. so i think air quality is a good example of an area where we have differentiated that out. in terms of this project, what is happening with this project, we did do a side level of service in the area and found that the levels of service as they exist now are around the -- really around better levels actually, around b and c. so it would take a lot, substantially more than what

this project could do to result in unacceptable levels of service based on the various metricks that we look at for pedestrians. i can identify a situation in which are we did feel that this -- that we really did need to look at what any one project was doing to tip it, which again was the transit center district plan and in that we found several cumulative pedestrian impacts, but the transit tower itself, which is a couple million-square-feet of office space was only significantly contributing to one of those. so i think that we applied our expertise and understanding of how these various transportation impacts work and concluded that the context in that area did notice have the potential to rise to the level of this being a cumulative impact. but i am now going to ask

marlena burns >> deputy city attorney, marlena burns. so sort of synthesize the case law around cumulative impacts, the law analyzing the statute require a two-step process, which is what the department went through here, when you look at cumulative impacts first you have to analyze whether a cumulative impact exists in the first place? and you look at, you know, past projects, current projects and reasonably foreseeable future projects. usually, or you can do the plan-based approach that looks at growth projections for the area. and sometime it's appropriate to do kind of a mix of the two, where you look at especially if you are talking about a relatively compact geographic area you may look at what the plan says, but also what projects you know are come online in a particular area. so off and once you have identified that, in fact, a

cumulative impact exists, then you look at whether the projects that you are examining contributes to that impact. so you could have a project level impact with no cumulative impact and conversely, you could have no project level impact and cumulative impact if you have an existing bad situation and existing cumulative impacted a. then your project does contribute and the legal terminology is whether that contribution is cumulative considerable? clearly it's a judgement call. is there cumulative impact and does the project contributing in a cumulative considerably matter? you look back at the standards of significance and here we

look at pedestrian impact and the things that the board and the department considered around the eir are issued around safety and access, et cetera. >> actually, i really appreciated that and i think that helps to clarify a number of things personally. i think on a broader level, though, it still doesn't get to how wes as a city think about that. because i wouldn't say "never, but we'll rarely have that level of impact on cumulative impact study, and what i am saying is that this neighborhood is heavily impacted and i'm curious -- and i will quote this from the planning department's response

, how do we define "acceptable level?" as a pedestrian walking down 3rd street on any given weekend evening, it is -- it can be almost an infuriating experience, the numbers of cars and people and those who may not obey the law and it may not be an environmental impact itself, but it's incredibly frustrating not to be able to cross the street and have cars constantly coming at you and i get worried when we say analytically it's acceptable and we will never as

a city make the downtown area a place that people want to live. >> gregory the transportation planner. how do we quantify that impact? we specifically look at sidewalks corners and crosswalks. so for this project we looked at all the crosswalks, all the sidewalks and all the corners, mission and 3rd street and along the 3rd street sidewalk, along mission street sidewalks. so we'll go identity out, and take counts and take the real width of the sidewalks. and figure out the level of services from a to f, just like the traffic. we talked about what is your baseline condition? so on a typical day, which is what we

studied, when there is an average event at moscone, but not a big event. level of service, on the sidewalks and crosswalks and corners is in the b to c range. good to okay. certainly during a big event, it's congested and what we established our baseline on a typical day, that is when we take the counts. so that is why you are seeing acceptable operations. >> i wanted to talk about special events. what would make a special event more typical? how often would it have to happen in a year? >> that is a good question. again, a judgment call. i think when we were deciding this, there are a handful of really large events at moscone event, for example, the oracle open world or auto show and those are both twice a year. oracle is a weeklong. but once or twice a year we

feel is not typical of conditions. so we look forward the average-sized event at moscone. they come in all flavors of size from large, multi-day, huge events with up to 40,000 attendees. down to much smaller and occupying only a fraction of the size. >> how long was the oracle event? >> a week long. >> when you say once a year, you are talking about events that may last 5-7 days and twice a year, you go up to 10-14 days. so again i guess the question is at what point do you start to examine that as a base line? what number would we have to get to for us to examine these special events as a base line? >> i don't think of we have defined an exact event or an amount. again it's a judgment call on the part of staff and ultimately the environmental

review officer. >> i understand that and that is what i'm trying to get at. for me, pedestrian safety is a huge concern and i think the qualitative experience, not just the quantitative, which you are talking to and i think it's interesting, when planning decides to go quantitative analysis versus qualitative analysis. if you were to do a survey of most pedestrians in the area at 6:00 p.m., probably would speak to a very negative experience of walking in that area and would say that they feel very unsafe, that they feel that cars are always trying to come even during the pedestrian crossing light and i'm not going to ask for an answer, because there clearly isn't one, but we need to ask at what point does this need a baseline target, to have an event of that size? and i don't think we should say it's a judge call

and we'll be able to tell when we see it and it reminds me of the definition of "porn," i know it when i see it. again, i feel like i represent an you are that is very dense and compacted and i want to know that the planning department is looking about the future production of this neighborhood and how to make it both a complete neighborhood and really a livable neighborhood. >> good afternoon, i do want to point out that in this eir, we were considering very closely and this is an issue that we have been paying more and more attention to in areas like this. the issues of the immediate effects of the site arrangement of a project on pedestrian conditions. what is interesting about this project is that since they are using an existing garage, and there are

fewer residential in and out trips than visitor in and out trips, the conversion of these spaces to residential spaces actually reduces some of the conflicts that exist at this time related to that driveway. that issue of driveway related conflicts and other site-related pedestrian conflicts created are one that we pay very close attention to in our focus on pedestrian issues. we also in the case of this project while we did not find that the project would have significant impacts, we did identify in the eir a number of measures to improve the pedestrian environment in this area in terms of reducing some of the sidewalk clutter, you know? providing some better crosswalks. so activities or

actions that the project sponsor could take to improve the overall environment. >> i actually appreciate that. i don't know really if residential cars have less in and out versus commercial or visitors may. i don't know if you want to respond to this, because i want to get to public comment. on the weekend jessie square garage is fairly empty from my understanding of the data. so i think there is a ton of traffic congestion on 3rd street on saturdays and actually on sundays as well. i think just because of the number of visitors that are coming to an area. sometimes there is more traffic because of the tourists who use the major corridors whereas residents know different streets and routes. one other qualitative assessment, do you look at the

demographics of residents when you think of pedestrian safety impacts? >> we look at the mode split conclusions are based on the census track. in some cases the demographic of the neighborhood, but that is the level -- that is the level at which we have evidence to make a determination as to what modes people would be using. >> i suggest especially as we go into moscone expansion that we look at demographics of the neighborhood. i think there are a disproportionate number of senior citizens who live in the yerba buena area. i even in market rate development we have older populations because of its proximity to downtown and

access to multiple facilities. i think that actually has a different type of analysis of what we consider appropriate or adequate pedestrian upgrades to be in that neighborhood. okay. >> thank you, supervisor kim. i do have i guess one set of follow-ups to supervisor kim's comments and like her in addition, to the shadow concerns i have had concern around the impact on traffic and pedestrian. and i would say just as a global comment, i would say the analogy of a cup of water and how that plays out is one that puzzles many of us. where we considered the traffic impact, and especially what we were told is because building

an enormous hospital on van ness, that adding 28,000 car trips a day wasn't going to make it that much worse because it was already so bad. when i think about this area, particularly 3rd and mission streets. the traffic at many times during the day is horrendous and whether i read the analysis, it seemed to suggests that traffic congestion is bad and adding to that is not going to make things worse. from my perspective we're talking about near gridlock and talking about getting close to absolute gridlock. so i wanted to make that as a global comment. the residential owners association and their appellant renter suggested with regardion to the traffic and circulation impacts there were inaccurate assumptions, that the analysis didn't account for vehicle delays resulting from an increased in pedestrian volumes. could you, and i read the planning department's response

to that and essentially seems to indicate that these questions were raised before and essentially asked and answered, but could you address those points and why you don't think there are traffic and circulation impact issues that we should consider? >> so gregory, transportation planner. i really enjoy when i come to talk about the traffic analysis and critical movement. we have it all written up thoroughly in the response to comments in terms of how we did the analysis and the appellant's requested how we determined the critical movements and we feel strongly we did it correctly. so we stand behind that analysis. in terms of what exactly is los? we make assumptions of how cars are going to get to the site and how they leave the site. especially in terms of the

critical movements the appellant's concerns were the access to 706 mission off stevenson street and that also get backs to pedestrian safety, because we the planning department determine it was variance 6 and 7 that would have widened the exist curb cut on mission, would have been much worse for pedestrian safety and having better for cars to use existing alleys than to widen a driveway and make it a two-way driverway, especially with more pedestrians on mission street. and there is also issues with the bus stop, which is why we did not ultimately recommend those variances. >> on the issue of whether the increases would lead to more vehicle deliveries. >> the increase in pedestrian comes is accounted for in the

traffic analysis. you input the pedestrian comes in the crosswalk and it does delay the cars. so that is accounted for. >> okay. so the appellants say it's not accounted for, but your assertion it's built into the model. okay. i guess a final question, your professional perspective, if this project is built, you do not expect to see additional congestion at these intersections? >> no. in my professional opinion, no. it's an interesting case in the eir. when we do an eir, we are overly conservative, and this case we have an existing parking garage that will be repurposed and to be overly conservative we say all the cars that are going there will keep going there and all the new cars associated with the residential units will show up

as well. whereas in reality there would not be more traffic going into or ought of the garage and, in fact, there would probably be less, because residential uses typically you have one trip in and out per day. whereas a public parking garage would have 7-8 and expect conditions to marginal improve. i am definitely not going to say that congestion will go away on 3rd street, but imperceptable. >> any other questions, colleagues? if not, let's go to the project sponsor who has up to 20 minutes to make a presentation. who is speaking for the

project sponsor? >> good evening i think given the testimony and hour, we stand behind staff's report and would be happy to answer any questions that the board may have. >> colleagues any questions for the project sponsor? >> with that, my guess is that there might be questions after public testimony. why don't we hear from the members who wish to speak on behalf of the project sponsor and each speaker has up to 2

minutes >> good evening, president chiu and supervisors. my name is norma wagner and very proud to be vice-chair of the board of trustees of the mexican museum and i am here to speak to the support of the agenda, the mexican museum and the residential tower project. we have been working extremely hard for over a decade to complete the vision of yerba buena garden to truly represent the project.

the report is before you today for your attention. however, as we all are aware there are a group of individuals that have filed appeals to the processes and findings of the eir, all of which are without merit. first an institution created by the community for the benefit of the community. we have a collection of over 14,000 art works, which are community and public at-large have been waiting to view and learn from. we're the first organization of its kind in the city to become an affiliateof the smithsonian institution and ask for your support to complete the yerba

buena district. thank you very much. >> thank you, next speaker. david del torre. with me today are many of our members and cultural organizations and committed supporters of the mexican