>> gentleman. >> good afternoon, supervisors. >> i'm josh with the planning department staff i will start off today's presentation by giving you the expressway on gary how it came to be and some ann nation's and i'll be followed by two more colleagues from the transportation authority will

talk about the explorations into the future of the filing more area. >> so at one time before the construction cut gary was merely a seam in the african-american and japanese-american and jewish and filipino and other communications and had it span the two areas it was lines with businesses that fronted on it and it was an active corridor. not only the jazz entertainment center but it spanned gary. from this photo in 1958 just before the expressway gary was profiler about 60 feet wide north of market street and it was like an your own area.

here another photo before the expressway project was built. before the post world war ii area we wanted to remake the city in the western edition it was target number one. the first in the city cleared the two blocks between franklin and it fended businesses and demolished buildings and winded the debar into the wide expressway it is today. the next project came shortly after. so it's on both sides of gary south of gary. here i can see the photo it's grainy of the land clearance happening in 19 61 you can see the decrees way on gary and

there's a wide slot of land. here's the photo of expressway happening from ground level with the expressway. in on the token of this it went from there to steiner. you can see from the engineer drawing you don't see the pedestrians or other activities it's meant to be an efficient auto thoroughfare with a lot of attention to the community on either side. on this photo you can see the redevelopment area with the now a japan center buildings on the north side of gary. so the expressway had the

intended fact of dividing community with japan town open the north side and the lower income and largely african-american communities focused on the south side of gary. the expressway represents not just a psychological barrier for folks it was unpleasantness and pedestrians had to cross two parking lanes. indeed like buchanan you could cross the street in between before the expressway it was eliminated. on the other does the pedestrian crows were prohibited. the crossing prohibition sign on the corner there. and those crossing had to be

prohib prohibited because their unsafe. and so as a nod to pedestrians - of course, pedestrian overpasses are now are pretty well ill-conceived but as the supervisor noted it's more common for people to dash across the street rather than use inconvenient overpasses. so it's notes surprisingly with this narrow sidewalk and a big ditch that buildings along the frontage road they init's folks to walk along gary. it's a far stretch from shopping an gary. those buildings were products of

the same area at the time. but the design of gary over the years has given the motivation for the buildings to transform themselves for more development. jane center was built for japanese businesses and when this proved to be a less productive use - here's an image looking east from fillmore street. the pedestrian crossings are not so difficult but crossing on the break-in on fillmore is hard. the japan town cultural heritage and economic strategy is several

years in the making was endorsed by the planning commission and before the board for endorsement tomorrow. this is the first time first of its kind for sustainability in japan town. there's constitutional it does draw gary boulevard with the idea of a difficult place to cross. the project improves the pedestrian crossing and improves the investment to opening it up for gary a more attractive endeavor. san francisco recognize our infrastructure in the past. addressing them with more solutions. san francisco has been at the forefront of the movement in order to reconnect neighborhood.

we've torn down major portions of the freeway. now not a ditch like the cut through to fillmore the removal of the boulevard is in this picture. gary was blasted through the neighborhood as part of the interstate freeway project. the construction of octavia billboard reconnected the boulevard. buildings have made a intentional idea to rebridge the community. there's life on the sidewalks and the neighborhood flows across the boulevard rather than

intashth. it's not just a way to get from here to there. a conversation about undoing the fillmore cut in redesigning gary in this area has been spanned by project. is it intends to improve the project and it will improve street life along the corridor. there are many neighborhood benefits there's financial cost issues that he there's more community design work that needs to be done. the gary brt project runs the entire length of the city. fillmore is anyone mode that is a very complicated one and the presentation will show that. and how this concept might be

moved by the brt for future design work. i'll turn it over to my mta colleague to talk about the project >> good afternoon, supervisors andrew lee i'm the sfmta project lead. i just want to give you a broad update of where we are and my colleague chester will be giving the update on the fillmore complex. right now, we're approaching the end of the environmental impact analysis stage of the bus rapid transit. and the ta is the agency lead for the environmental review and the sfmta is our partnership. we have joint meetings established and we're working

through those issues in close collaboration. when the stage is complete the sfmta is going to be in charge of operating this. just a quick overview it's one of the longest corridors in the city. it's definitely one of our most important transit corridors with more than 50 thousand passengers per day. we have two lines and during the a.m. and p.m. peak hours we have an express service so it's common to see a bus coming along less than 3 minutes. that's why it's critical for us to have smooth operation technologies because with a smooth transit l it's

possible to have the buses come together. from end to end it take the local service about 60 minutes for a 6 and a half mile corridor that's not particle fast we you want to speed up the transit. here we have a photo simulation of what the gary bus transit operation could look like not only for the transit characterized but the opportunity to rejuvenate the neighborhood at gary. and this proposal in particular shows the bus running lane. some of the project proposals is the dedicated bus lanes and higher quality bus stations and station with a level boarding so

once we have the buses we're in a rolling progress of getting that passengers could get on and off more quickly and reduce the congestion. in addition to that some of the improvements for traffic signals and padded access so overall this will be great user and system reliability without the interns from traffic congestion and result in savings because we'll be able to run one bus down multiple corridors. just a quick timeframe of what they're at we're looking to complete the environmental process at the end of the next

year. we'll - the sfmta will move into the design mode for the next two years. but in the meantime, because we don't want to keep the customers waiting we're working on sincerely improvements flaw. we have pedestrian bulbs being done and we plan on painting the bus lanes early next year. we have a rolling prurmentd of buses and once we get the environmental clearance we have plans for near terms brt service that wouldn't contain some of the more - >> can i ask for the painting of interior lanes how does that

work. >> we're proposing to paint them in the gary street between that r market and venice. those bus lines are running and there you go to stay on the side >> okay. thank you. >> with that i'm going to turn it over to envy colleague to talk about the fillmore project and a good afternoon. i'm chester fong with the transportation authority. i'm going to talk about and share some of the design and analysis work with the brt has done in the area. this is only one angle that we think is needed to look at. josh talked about what was in the area.

this slide shows you an overview it's an aerial photo of the under pass. it's a giant dip. it's between webster and steiner with the bridge at fillmore street with the board passing. if you take a theoretical slice of gary at the bus stops you'll get what is shown on the slide here. there's 3 traffic lanes that go underneath. on the top there's two service roads on the sides where the bus can stop for loading. that's what we're working with. in the b. r. t project we look at what are the utilities in the area. there are a lot of utilities p

there are several pipes. there's also a pump station that keeps the water from pooling in the underpass. all those utilities need to be dealt with so we want to keep that in mind. for some technical constraints on us. the b. r t looked at those issues. from our standpoint as we've done our analysis many are not practical. you don't i won't go through all the options but to give you an example. we thought about how to put the b. r t lanes on top instead hang the stations over the underpass. we thought about how to narrow the underpass since it's 6 lanes wide. we also thought about ways to

button the b. r t stations in there and we finally we thought about how to run a bus way on the viaduct which is buses staying near the surface on an evaluated structure. new from the standpoint of visibility this structure is is giant dip it puts constraints for example, we can't put a station under the underpass there's not enough flat surface. so there's an issue of vertical clearance. the underpass is dug down where we can put a bridge at fillmore. so thinking about the underpass on both sides of fillmore

there's not enough vertical clearance to put a desk because the cars will hit it. that's how little there is that we actually have we looked at also, if we, you know, had the space in the undertaking underpass like putting something floundering like a parking structure. we have costs involved. in the end the conclusion of our work is if we keep the existing underpass then really the most cost-effective use for running the bus lanes is to run them on the top of surface streets. the other conclusion we made is if we want to run the bus lanes in the center then it requires filling the fillmore underpass and also doing the fill project

for this underpass is the most cost effective way. that's our conclusion and we have included both of the options in our document and they're under consideration. having said that there is - this is only one option to redesign a street and put it back together once we do the fill. there are many other optioned, in fact, another option the team has thought about is one that's called the billboard example like on octavia street. in this example the way you could put it together is you have local access on the side lanes you have a raised medium and a tree and the raised medium for other traffic.

the b. r t traffic could run along the side >> let me just pause with this octavia project at oak and octavia and market those are two of the most dangerous intersections in our city yet this is possibility proposed in terms of public safety. can you explain why this is better for gary boulevard then what is experienced in octavia boulevard as it relates to public safety >> we really need to flush out all the compacts of the boulevard design. are one of the things that's different is some of the issues you encounter is if you look at

obama staff there's a lot of traffic coming on and off the billboard and this creates issues where o staff crows market street. we think with the gary street in this area we think we can come up with ways to handle some of the cross traffic which is lower than the cross traffic you get for example, in market into octavia and the freeway. there are circulation issues that need to be thought about in more daily but based on the work we've done we think it's promising. from the standpoint if you have a boulevard it circulates out the circulation it is a benefit for the bus that could run in the inner lanes and not get

caught up in vehicles trying to park and turn right. as he mentions there are a lot of benefits to this. on the whole from the standpoint of building a whole street it would be traffic calm and have a nice urban design and we think in turn that will improve the material zone and the neighborhood collaboration that we've talked about. as you mentioned there are destiny considerations that have floated up and how to handle the cross traffic and it's one of the considerations. also how to deal with the sidewalk if we want it winded. also, we want to think bs about

how bicycles move in the area and in terms of economic development. we're thinking about the interface of the potential land uses in the area. there is - at the underpass its quite wide we we have to make decisions about that if we fill the space. we can take all of it and use it as street functions or narrow the streets in that area and improve the land use innovation with gary there. again several issues that we think deserve a more expensive community process and a chance for dialog and consensus on how

to deal with those. we've heard loud and clear of the priority to complement bus transit as soon as possible. so understanding the issues our approach is to go forward with the initial b. r t. but providing a pretty good fillmore project to go forward as we're implementing the b. r. t phase >> and let me just add from mire prospective additional what i've seen happen in the city in terms of pushing those projects forward aggressively. clearing this agency a great project for the city and i don't want to see it desolated but

it's mom and dad's that the gary boulevard it is a part of the e r t process and no decision has been approved so the time to take into consideration correctly is now regardless of how rapid we need to push it ford forward we should make sure we push it forward and do it right so it's effective and serving the folks it's intended to serve but it's not necessarily just about being a legacy project for japan town. this is a advisors advisors public issue that's plagued our community for generations. so if we're talking about speeding up bus service and most

important with the increased number of bicyclists throughout our city. that's clearly important so i want to make sure and i'm no transportation expert but we all use a lot of those methods of getting around and some of us have different experiences. and i see in this area it's a public safety concern that exists there currently and i want to make sure we're looking this that we seriously consider this san opportunity to do something about this boulevard and hopefully funding support could be made possible to do it. so if you just said to make sure that i mentioned that

>> thank you. >> obviously, we're open to dialog here. i'll show you where we're at and we can discuss more how those two things relative to each other. the gary document will include a place document. we think this is a great head started start. once we put back the street there's one of the reigns it's the piece of work this boulevard some kind of treatment we will be doing some environmental documents of all the sub surface so we think this get the community further head of time the fillmore project in particular. and we have one option for the

circulation effort but again i'll reiterate that's one option and one vision and certainly what we want to put there after we put the fill back is worth exploring in more detail with more angles then austin how to get the buses through. this next slide shows the project schedule that andrew has walked through. we - on the right side we think this might be a project schedule we can have for the fill more boulevard idea which needs to continue a year longs community process to work through the circulation issues then it will