thank you all. if you can wrap up those conversations, we are going to get back to our meeting. our first one of the year. and again, thank you and welcome for coming to the mayor's disability council meeting. we appreciate it. i really appreciate you councilmembers coming out today too holding up the fort. thank you gary. he's helping me cochair. okay, we are getting back to the agenda and information team 7. the geary street bus rapid transit. >> thank you. i chester fung on

the mta. i will be giving the presentation on the transit. the focus is the staff recommended alternative. that is the news that i'm bringing to the council today. before i start, i just wanted to acknowledge and thank sf mta staffing paul bernardi who has part of the team during this project. this has been a partnership between the transportation authority and sf mta. the project is in the environmental review process. i will talk more about this. we are putting together the interviewal document and we plan to release that in the summer of this year. i will give a project background and talk about the staff

recommended alternatives and details and next steps. the geary quarter is a six 1/2 mile corridor. the busiest bus lines in the corridor that sf mta operates. 60 thousand trips are carried per day. the 38 local and 38 limited are the current and main line that run on the geary corridor. very heavily used very high frequencies today to 6 minutes at each peak. they travel less and not as reliable to show up when we want them to show up and when they show up, they are crowded when they get behind schedule. so these are the kinds of issues that we are intended to address with our project. our

proposal is what we call bus rapid transit. brt which is most prominently figures for the dedicated buses on the streets and a number of improvement that will speed up all the operations on the bus including when it's in motion going through corridor on the street and loading and unloading passengers particularly operating low floored vehicles to make it easier for people to board the bus . we are also looking out to improve pedestrian sections in the corridor. we heard how geary corridor is one of the high risk pedestrian corridors in san francisco and looking for opportunities to address those issues where we can in the project. for the geary

project in particular, what brt applied on the street means that the services and the local services will remain and the bus rapid transit service. i will try to speak into the mic. a little bit about the process is the preferred alternative is to advance to the next stage of engineering design. at this point we have for a number of years planning design, analysis and community input. we have done several rounds of community input. we think think this is the culmination

of the planning and the preferred alternative as we go forward. the project team has been coordinating with a number of agencies about this what could become the local alternative. we feel it's a pretty good alignment among the agency for the design. at this point we would like to share this with the community for feedback and the project team has been hosting community meetings along the corridor. two meetings were held in december. another meeting is being held at the end of this month january 30th in the japan town area. in addition, we are meeting with stakeholder groups individually and we've had a meeting with the house for the blind and we plan to create a focus group to look at the projects specifically and we

had a presentation that i gave yesterday to the sf mta mobile advisory committee and the club next month in february. we are planning to share our design with the community to get feedback and then we are planning to release a draft environmental document that contains an identified staff recommended alternative. that's where we are headed. i want to talk a little bit about the recommended alternative itself. the corridor is quite long and there are different conditions for different segments of the corridor. it looks different and operates differently in different segments. so when we go to create a recommended alternative we are looking in segments and identifying an optimal configuration for bus laying in each segment to

string together to create that staff recommended alternative. the four segments is the inner geary on the east side of the corridor and the fillmore area where geary crosses fillmore streets and the masonic avenue where geary crosses masonic and the richmond neighborhood. beginning with the inner geary on the east side. our recommendation here is to enhance the existing lanes. there are existing bus lanes where the corridor runs on the one way streets of geary and o'farrell streets and our intent is to color i was these areas for bus lanes and the short stretch between powell and market. the recommendation also includes putting in bus

bulbs at high rise locations and corner bulbs trying to address some of the pedestrian issues that we heard about in those previous agenda items. in this area, the curb side loading access that is important to some of the land use on the streets is retained. so moving to the west to the fillmore area, our recommendation there is for side bus lanes as well. this allows us to provide a surface station with new amenities and we think a strong connection to the 22 fillmore which is a high transfer activity area. we are working within the existing under pass. so we are not looking to making any engineer changes to the path but we are looking to increase lanes and that will allow us the opportunity to improve the pedestrian crossings in the

area and people will have fewer lanes to have to cross to get across geary. our improvements include a new pedestrian crossing of the geary blvd at by -- buchanan to facilitate a bus stop that we are planning at buchannon. moving to the masonic area where the geary street encountered the great separated intersection where geary goes in an under pass underneath masonic avenue, there too we are recommended side bus lanes at this point. we think having the bus lanes at the side on those service roads allow us to provide a surface stop which provides a very strong access and for safety and security and as well

as a smooth transfer to the 43 masonic which crosses geary at that location. we had an additional alternative that would have operated the bus in the under pass which would have -- necessity taetd a stop and while waiting for the bus as a personal security issue. we are responding to that feedback and we are choosing a side bus lane in that area so we can have a surface stop with the better pedestrian security and safety issues. just looking at the stretch between fillmore and masonic for a little bit, as we look at that stretch, we notice there is not much distance

between fillmore and masonic especially if you consider how the buses might transition between the center and the side of the street if we choose to put the buses in the center of the streets in between the two great separated intersections. what we are recommending because we are going to be on the side at fillmore and at the side on masonic that short stretch in between, we keep the buses on the side rather than try to bring this em to the middle of the street and back outside again. the recommendation is for side operation all the way through the masonic area. that leaves me to the rich manned -- richmond area. this area of the corridor the recommendation is for the brt and the local stop and every stop to become a brt

and local stop and every bus make a stop. that means the bus stops do get further apart in this area for the local service. but we think this is a really good compromised and a good bus design that we can go forward with and respond to a lot of the community feedback that we've heard. i will get into that in an a little bit but expanding on this recommendation. the recommendation is for these new bus lines to be in the center of the street with new medians one on either side of the bus lanes. at the bus stop, the bus stations those medians become the loading platforms and they become the higher level sidewalk platforms and the people will have less to step

up and get into the bus and make it for a smoother operation. the platforms are currently longer. we notice sometimes they don't get to actually pull all the way up to the sidewalk and people have to step down to the street in order to get on the bus. this will fix that. this will be an operation where they will be able to pull up towards the platform. >> other pedestrian safety improvements that we see with this alternative include reducing conflicts with left turning vehicles. we heard with that previous presentation about left turning issues being prevalent on geary. we are looking to reduce the number of intersection where vehicles can turn left. and for the ones that are remaining, we are

looking to put in those left turn arrows to separate the phases. excuse me, i need to get some water. >> other pedestrian improvements that we are looking to put in this portion of the corridor include pedestrian bulb outs at strategic locations. you can see the image here which features improved crossing includes high visibility striping. we are looking to put in new lighting as well and bulb outs where we can and another improvement that we are looking to put in here gets to again one of the things that we talked about at the previous

presentation about longer crossing triumph. -- time. we are looking to increase the length when we operate the signals for the geary project. so benefits that we are seeing from this staff recommended alternative in this area for center bus lines and consolidated stops include some very strong bus travel savings. we are seeing 30 percent reduction in travel time as compared to a no project situation with the current bus operation. we are seeing higher reliability because we are pulling the buss out of the right hand lane and we think this alternative provides transit ride benefits to the

most transit riders including the local riders and the brt riders. finally this preserves parking. on street parking is one of the concerns we heard from the community. this alternative preserves most of that parking because we don't need to provide a bus passing lane that would have been needed otherwise to allow for the brt buses to pass the local buses because they are all stopping at every stop in the richmond area. so that's one of the things that we think responds to the community input that we have heard in this ace. so looking at the corridor as a whole that's what the recommendation is for side lanes from the downtown area from the east through fillmore and masonic sections and coming into center for the richmond area before going back out to the side an then as we get

passed 33rd avenue we don't see the need for bus lanes even though the buses will continue to go all the way to 48th avenue. taking a look at the cost and funding. our cost estimate for the projects are between $225 million and $260 million. $240 million is the mid-point. that is the estimated project cost at this point. we have some funds identified. the prop k includes $38 million for the geary project and we also intend to compete for federal fundings and discretionary programs and because it's a high rider ship line it's going to compete very well even across the country it's one of the highest rider ship bus lines in the country. we think we'll get federal funding here

and that leaves us with some additional money to identify. previously during the meeting there was a reference with the mayor's transportation task force which has identified geary as a project. we are grateful to get on that list and we think that we are going to get additional funding. there would still be a gap after that, but we are looking for continually looking for opportunities to fill that gap as well. as we've been going through this community process we have recognized a number of themes of community input and we continue to respond to those issues and today is part of that process. some of the themes we've heard include issues about on street parking and issues about trees and landscape and transit access.

we recognize there will be an increase in walking distance. that is an exchange for a faster trip. we do recognize there is an increase in the walking distance there and we know it affects some transit riders on the corridors and reaching out to some of the populations along the corridor and we are mapping senior centers and the corridors and we are targeting them for outreach in this current round. in terms of schedule, we are doing outreach in this month and as a continuation from the outreach that we've been doing at the very end of 2013 and while we do this outreach we are continuing to work on the environmental document which we plan to release in the summer of 2014. that document we expect to have a recommendation for an alternative to move forward and there will be a

public comment period -- accompanying that document. in the fall we are to seek action from the transportation authority board, that's my board and the sf mta board to endorse an alternative. between now and then there is an opportunity for public comment and continue all dialogue. we intend to finish the process winter of 2014. that wraps up my presentation at this point. i'm happy to take questions. >> thank you very much. well have questions from the council. derek? >> first i just wanted to make sure that everyone is aware that website that they can go to. >> it's www.geary.org.

>> if people don't have a computer and they want to get this information, where can they get it from? >> we have a fact sheet that we printed and i have brought some copies today. we have them at our offices at 1455 market street 22nd floor. people are free to come up and get some copies of the fact sheet. if they would like a presentation for their community group. we are happy to give a presentation. i will give my phone number. 415-522-4804. my e-mail at chester er dot