simple. this is unconscionable to spend so much on this project. you have people as we've heard earlier here disabled people living on the streets. we are going to spend $240 million to make the buses go downtown faster. we need more buses on that line so people can have a seat especially the disabled people. sometimes you get two wheelchairs on a bus and a third wheelchair can't get on the bus and they eliminate a lot of seating. this is the only thing that we need to do is put more buses on the line. i want to thank, salute the drivers and the maintenance men who keep these buses running. they are the ones that keep the job going, they are the ones that we have to thank. not these people, again, the downtown business interest. if they want these buses to run downtown faster, let them spend the money. that's where you get it at. they have got billions

to spend. their stocks are going way up the board. don't come to the public here and put the dime on us. thank you. >> thank you very much. if you don't mind i can clarify. actually part of the budget of this project is going towards new transit vehicles and the issue that we see with respect to the crowding which is a very real phenomenon. we definitely acknowledge that crowding is an issue. but the issue we see is that you can't put more buses through the geary corridor as it is now because of the slowness of travel on the geary corridor. so this project is intended to allow us to put more buses through to alleviate the crowding problem and we are looking to put new buses on the corridor that are low floor and

more accessible to boarding and getting off the buses. i just wanted to clarify that point. >> next, we have bob planto. >> i'm bob planto. i want to use the documented camera to provide visual sample examples of why i think there is problems for seniors and people with disabilities regarding the staff proposal alternative. some of the time savings are going to come from eliminating bus stops that automatically means we have to walk farther and it's not just a distance. it's crossing multiple additional intersection exposing us to more auto

traffic. right now, what i have got circled is in the fillmore section. they propose to eliminate the stop at geary and laguna next to the chinese consulate. not such a good idea considering how much people go there. if you are pushing a baby stroller, if you are a senior, you have to go uphill. the worst one is in the richmond area. here again, you will notice the two orange sections are the proposed brt stops at 6th avenue and funston. eliminating the 9th avenue stop. that's a distance of 6 blocks between the two stops. the 9th avenue stop is where the elementary school. so kids are going to have to walk farther if they take the bus to

school. on the other side of 9th avenue and geary, there is a funeral home. that may not seem like much to a lot of people, but if you live in this city and you have the contacts and you wind up going to funerals. if you have to walk three 3 blocks in the rain to get to that funeral home, you may not go. it's not just that 6 blocks, if you look further in the outer richmond they keep the stops where they are. they are 2-3 blocks apart now. they want to remove the 9th avenue and replace the laguna stop. i'm suggesting they are not thinking of the population of the need of the benefit stops closest to their destination. kids, people with disabilities is a problem. they are looking

for all numbers of rider ship. not specific numbers of who is riding where. that's a problem we all should address. thank you. >> next we have a comment from david dippel. >> my name is dave dippel. i have been trying to get a point across. the basic concept is great. what they need to do is think about only having one lane in the center for commute direction traffic. keep all of the buses, all of the stops, even for the express line where they are. and that will accommodate greater push through of the numbers that they need and the express buses when they have finished their

stops and start to go downtown can go into brt lane. the problem with left-hand turn lane they are talking about stopping half of them in the richmond and that means those they have left will increase issues of pedestrian injury. they need to also think about coordinating the call buttons for the walk lights with the pressure plate for the left-hand turn so when somebody pushes a button it stops left-hand turns. if they don't have a push button, the left-hand turn has a priority and it's like every other light at their turns. i believe they have to go back and reengineer this so that we push the most amount of traffic in the

commute direction. it not the off hour traffic where you need that second lane. and what we are talking about is cutting the cost down and maintaining the number of stops for seniors and people with mobility problems. beyond that, when we had two street car lanes on geary up until about the 1950s, they were discontinued because of issues of safety. i had a great aunt who broke a hip getting off one 1 of those street cars. it's an extremely dangerous place to be and as it is now with the two lanes, they have got, i think about eight designated traffic issues being addressed on geary, plus they have the ramp on one side and the median on the other which takes a total of nine. if you

put in a left-hand turn lane, you have 10 lanes of activity. there is too much stuff going on on one street. it needs to be reengineered. >> thank you. >> and our last comment for this topic will be from jerry grace. >> i think i know they do what they are doing about brt because the transit is doing the same thing. they are trying to change everything around going faster and easy on foothills in oakland. they didn't want it and other places didn't want

it. they are the same way. what they try to do a little bit different in what oakland is trying to do, brt they are trying to get faster and quicker. yes the car can go around it. and get more people on brt faster and especially where those stop by stop on for them. -- >> can you pull back from the microphone. >> i didn't know i would be that close. the other part of it, yeah, the buses going to stop, but some of the buses

limit place by place but the brt is faster and quicker. yes, the big crowd is true, but it's faster and quicker because the counties have one down there too. i think that's why. that's why they do it. this is a question i wanted to ask. i want to know how many businesses of brt will go. how many buses will go on geary both sides and how many traffic will go down to. i know there is one. but i wonder how many buses will go down. >> excuse me. this is public

comment at this time. questions can be answered. you can ask that and they will get back to you. for the timeframe we don't have time to go back and forth for questions. thank you very much. that was the last public comment for that part of the presentation. we want to thank you very much for coming and presenting today. thank you. right now we are going to move into informational team item 8. light rail accessibility and boarding platforms by annette williams. thank you. we are going to hold off on questions. we are running on our time. thank you.

>> hi. i'm annette williams, manager at sf mta. i appreciate you inviting me to be here. i wanted to introduce a few people so people know and have phone numbers. i have three of the staff people from the accessible services department here with me today. matt west with munis operations with accessibility with the red tie and virginia who works on capital projects mainly munis and fleet and the sixth route vehicle and sandra padilla who is working on pedestrian on bikes and she is the one that got the compliment earlier and parking issues. we are all available to you. we want to hear from people. the phone

number. 701-4485. another important resource is our multi- modal accessibility advisory committee. there is four people from that committee, jackie bryson and gene green and damien williams. we want you to know that you can get in touch with people in the community and the multimodal accessory meetings. we want to be a resource to you. please use that resource. what i was asked to do is give you a little bit of a history of accessibility. today we are talking about the munis metro system. what we used to call street cars and light rail system. which goes from the downtown out into rest of the city. munis was the first

public transit system if the country in 191-2100 years ago last year. it wasn't accessible for many many years until the 70s when we built the underground munis metro which is the stations that are familiar with in embarcadero, powell, civic center and montgomery. at that time all of those stations have elevators. that was the first step in terms of accessibility. that happened in the 70s with the opening. and prior to that underground we had the old

those vehicles were outfitted with high low steps. the steps can go up and down and underground the steps came up and you were able to board at all level. after we had done that and we wonder how can you make the rest of the system accessible out on the streets where you are going up and down the stairs. we designed a way side platform. i will show you pictures later in the presentation. i will show you some purs pictures. i don't

know if it's better to look at paper or me. what happened was at that time, we started to look at what can we do on the surface system. what we were able to do was to ramp up to munis. we were only able to put those in places where munis that had right of way where the land was part of munis which wasn't in the street. some of those examples, we did seven of those back in the 80s like carl. we were able to do it at the end of the lines where it wasn't in the street right-of-way. so at that time we did about seven of those way side platforms and in the 90s there is the passage of the americans with disabilities act. one of the requirements

was to designate key stations. you can think about boston or new york or the systems especially new york they have an underground systems. they need to go through their systems and decide what will be key stations and put in elevators. we put in those requirements with reference to stops. we put in key stops and determined which should be ak ccessible under the ada. we looked at where there were more aboardings at the stops at the transfer location and other transportation options where it was an end station or major trip generator like a hospital or school or something that one would interpret many people

would want to go to. at that time we did a plan and had a lot of public input and we determined key stops and we then and bob can testify to this because he was involved with us. we went out into community and worked with the community to put platforms into the middle of the street. that was a difficult process because you are dealing with issues regarding parking, regarding drive ways, businesses, it's wasn't something that had been done in the past and it wasn't an easy process but it was a very important process because it allowed people with disabilities to get to the parts of the community that they hadn't been able to get to before. as part of that we put

an existing line. we made the line access to the car system and put in six key stations or key stops in the middle part of market which is the lower part of market between embarcadero and van ness. soon after that we put in new tracks which replaced that area before and everything between castro and van ness was accessible and then we did the entire embarcadero. it's difficult but the darkness doesn't show through. you can see the blue stops, the blue dots are all

access -- accessible platforms and all the new sections are fully accessible. one other thing i wanted to mention in the 1990s is we also did a lot of upgrades to the platforms we did in the past. one is to put in landings because the run of the ramp was longer than 30 feet so people wouldn't have to go up 35 feet without having to rest. we replaced a lot of the platforms with new ramps and put new railings and made them to comply with ada. i think we are only one of the systems that did the platforms prior to the 80s. most of the country

didn't start doing it until after the ada. we also, let me move forward to the map. that will be easier to see. we also added a stop to broaden it's limits because it was one of the places in of the gaps in the system. i will show you when we get to the map. then in the 2000s, we extended the line from the foot of the embarcadero along the cal trains station and we built full stations there high level so it's accessible by all the doors up to cal train. a few years later we also added in

way side flat forms on the side of all these sides to run historic street cars to cal train. then also in the 2000s we added a whole new line, the t line which goes to the border with san mateo county out third street. every single station on that line is fully ak cezanne -- accessible with high level platforms so it's accessible at all doors. we had another stop at the city college. it was difficult to get to the city college because of the hill. we added another stop to the other side to make it easier to get to the college. now we are up to 2010 and in this decade we were able to get a grant from

the federal government from the fta for funding for project that go beyond the requirement of the ada to work on conceptual engineering for additional stops to fill in the gaps between our accessible stations or stops on the surface. we also were able to get these new stops included as part of the transit effectiveness project which is a project that mta looking at the entire system and ways to make it more user friendly. and for those of you who ride the j line you probably have seen we've added a new stop on market street coming inbound. that has been helpful for people going to market street but also if we have to have turn backs of service and

transfers sometimes we have to replace with a bus with lines that are down and people are able to transfer right there marking would get on the bus. it provides a lot less flexibility for any problems that come along the way. it's for something i think people really appreciate it. so now to where we are going from now, we have two more stops at balboa park. there is already an accessible platform when you come into the station. we are working with bart to completely -- if you come from city college there is now a ramp that comes down to balboa park station that will go over on a new platform. where the metro trains come in they will be able to enter the bart station and all the doors will be

accessible. then we are putting in as you go out of the yard, right now wheelchair users board there and have to wait for the lay over and so we are building a new platform on the opposite side to be able to get on the first train that is going into service. right now we have a gap in service between 19th it looks like 28 is best for that. now i'm going to show you a few pictures that will illustrate some of these platforms if you are not familiar. the first one here is

one of the center platforms on the t line. in this particular stop, the platforms in the center and train stop on both stop on both sides. if you are going inbound or outbound, it's full level at all the doors. the second one is high level side platform so it's only serving one direction. all of the doors are at the full high level and the steps would be up on the train. this is a typical stop for the s line. you have the low level island where people who are ambulatory would board from the island and you have at the end the high level portion where the driver would move the car forward and they use a bridge because those old historic cars don't have high low steps. you use the bridge which covers the steps and

allows the user to board. people are able to use all of the historic cars and we modify each one with a special bridge so people can go on the english car or the car from italy or from japan. many of our riders they have not had a chance to go on those cars before. i think the f line has been something that people really appreciate. one thing i wanted to mention on this flat form is ideally we would love to have a 2-car island and then a ramp and the level platform on the surface of the metro line. in most cases that is not possible because of the length we need and the fact that there is almost no where that you don't have a driveway in that distance. generally we have to do other things to make it work, to make it fit. a

wheelchair user or anyone who is going to board at that stop walks up the ramp and first there is a high level platform and ambulatory persons walk down the steps and the island coming after it so it doesn't cover the full length of the 2-car train and people who are boarding in the front of the car and front car can board from a curb and don't to have board from the street. this is a platform at 30th and church. actually church in that particular location was wide enough to do a switch back in as part of the ramp. you can see there is a driveway just passed the ramp and we couldn't have the ramp extend into that driveway because then there wouldn't be the turning raise for someone to enter into driveway with their vehicle and we were able to make a turn within the ramp so the

wheelchair using is coming up from the intersection and make the switch back up to the ramp. so these are just some examples to show you how kind of innovative you have to be of trying to figure out the geometry to fit these platforms into an environment that is really built back in the early 1900s. this is another example at ucsf and we were able to bold out the sidewalks to the car. in many cases that the not possible because you build the traffic lane too much and the traffic lane becomes too small but we were fortunate to be able to do that in this location and this is obviously an important stop because many people go to use it. this last one is something we don't want

to repeat. on market street there was a few locations because of bart and munis we did not have a ramp. we don't expect this to do this in the future because anytime you have a mechanical thing you are dealing with the issues of reliability. we all know, things that are mechanical breakdown. the last one i wanted to show you which is the most important thing is where is the red lines are there