there's got to be a law about this. >> the buyers i've noticed more and more buyers are using. >> right that's going to continue to be a challenge as they pick up. what we see now i've mentioned laura it's a new port brand that lights up like over half of the online market but other companies are not there yet we anticipate those products will show up and you'll see them all over the place. so role the ordinance it doesn't stop them people are saying your abandoning e cigarettes every placed where i can smoke you can smoke e cigarettes >> yeah. this remind me of a

may or may not of alcoholic concoctions to kid that is an area that needs to be nipped in the bud. especially to the sense that nicotine is addictive this is a new addictive substance so it seems appropriate to regulate this as tobacco >> nicotine is addictive i'm gladly you brought that up. anything to say >> commissioners, thank you for the correlation. >> commissioner riley. >> you mentioned you get a lot of phone calls people are confused did you do any outreach like talking to bar owners or restaurants owners or school

teachers. >> yeah. we have recently because of the ordinance being introduced, you know, our offices had to do some outreach so transit both muni and bart we contacted and asked them. we hear about folks you're going them in confusion so i give them some education. i think who products are new folks are trying to figure out how to resolve this on their own i've seen bars and restaurants with signs but there's a lot of uncertainty and with this ordinance certainly there would be strong education to make sure with 9 public is aware we're just treating this as cigarettes to be aware of any law that you wouldn't see it applies to all now

>> thanks. >> commissioner dwight. >> and the odor is quite strong it's an invasion even if people's privacy to be subjected to an odor or sound around you keep it to yourself wear a patch and don't bother anybody but it should be rained in especially to urban quarters. >> any other commissioner questions before we open up for any public comment? do we have any members of the public who want to make a comment on item 57?

so moved. putting that 90 percent of the retailers that have the permit it makes our job for small business relates easier >> we move to support the prohibition of the e cigarette and prohibit the sales of tobacco products as otherwise prohibited. okay >> do we have a second. >> roll call. >> tamdz. commissioner dooley. commissioner dwight. commissioner ortiz-cartagena. commissioner riley. commissioner white. the motion passes. great. thank you very much this was a very good investigation.

the gary r t project this is a discussion item we have a people here from the san francisco transportation authority >> i'm with the san francisco transportation authority to talk about the gary transit project. i was before the commission in 2012 about this project. so some of you may remind me but i'm here to give an update we have made quite a bit of project progress that we're generating a release this year >> but this is the project that the transportation authority my agency is leading with the isn't it a fair statement, the folks who run muni and i want to

recognize a couple that represent the agency. in my presentation i want to give a background on the project we have what we call a staff alternative and i want to share this i believe it is good news from the standpoint of any of the community concerns and wanted to talk about some of the items that have been raised in some of the outreach in the area of small business community and the direct requests from the commissioner from the outreach on the gary corridor and the idea what can we kind of

insights to the outcomes for the prong. just a remember the project we're working on to input this project on the gary corridor so the main two services the limited and local service would become as it does and the limited is the bill of rights p brt. we talk about the improvements of the boarding and vehicles and to pedestrians that's an important piece of the project. the news we have done and you may recall and seen in the news we've been at the process for some time and over the years done community input and we feel we've gotten to the point we're

able to take that input and take 9 analysis and we've been to coordinate among the agencies including the sfmta and my agency on a preliminary recommendation and we're doing now sharing this staff recommended alternative about the community and this is part of the process of doing that outreach and ahead of us we want to identify this alternative as the recommend alternative in the document we've release later this year and ask the board of supervisors to adapt this as a preferred alternative for the final document. i'm throwing up on the screen the criteria just to share you know the thinking that went into the staff rementsd alternated.

we care about the bus alternative and this give us some good things in terms of traffic time but we care about the effects of the alternative on the that you had safety and access and including things like off street parking we've heard comments about before that's gone into the identification of the staff recommendation alternative. this is a diagram showing the sectors of the gary corridor this is our staff recommended alternative. as you recall gary is of and a half miles it's different from place to place along the corridor this is the logical

segment we determine whether 9 bus is on the side or center and string those segments together to get to our staff recommended alternative. so stoort at the east side maybe it's a little bit hard to read the east side represents the eastern the right does the eastern side of the corridor in the denounced corridor and west into the ocean so you can see from the diagram in the downtown area where there are existing bus lanes the recommendation is just to paint the lanes where they are then as the two one way streets come together to form gary billboard you extend west across the fillmore and the recommendation there through to

west of masonic avenue is to run side lanes and after that to come into the center and run buses in the center of street for the duration of that stretch up until about the richmond area and a stretch of 5 plain clothes to 23rd avenue and then no bus lanes it decreased to the point we don't need bus lanes and it wouldn't be as much benefit. i'll step through the next few slides the details in particularly of the segments. i want to show you we're seeing strong bus time savings we're applying the brt treatments and

benefits in reliability and ridership we're seeing more people attracted and pedestrian benefits we're putting in specifically and purposely. starting an gary in the a visual similarization you'll see the red painted on the one way streets and to colorries the existing lanes and do some spot improvements at the congested intersections. moll west to the fillmore area we believe we can provide a surfaced station for the 38 brt that gives us a good connection

to the fillmore that's a high ridership we're doing here we're not touching the underpass that at the moment. and the beer you're going that as working with it but we see an opportunity to reduce the number of lanes from 4 to 3 and to use the additional space on the street to provide pedestrian crossing benefits we've heard from the pun the issue here is safety to were going to take the opportunity where currently for instance, webster and stein the crossing are more to be desireed.

the similar idea we're competing to run the businesses on the side service road and provide o a service stop which is not high activity area and this responded to the community input regarding strong access and safety issues so we can avoid if we do do a service station here. moving westward the recommendation is for the consolidated stops. so the project has a nuance. here the recommended alternative is for the local and bart to stop at every stop so we're seeing the time savings in this

segment of the corridor and protecting the busses from right turns we're seeing benefits to the local and brt service. there would be fewer overall stop places in richmond so the two services would be similar in this stretch. this alternative is able to preserve parking. there are no loss now we're seeing now with the alternative and the reason with if you may recall the prefer alternative the bus stop had to provide for the local stops where the local businesses would to the but not

the brt so the bus lane had to be 3 lanes would i do one for each direction of the buses as well as the busses the brt to get around the local businesses that's the traffic in the area. we've heard feedback about the amount of off street parking so we think this alternative really is strong in that it laws us to use the bus you lane without 9 significant loss. this alternative builds two new medium we're ripping out the two and this provides us with the opportunity to do better landscaping and tree planting and lighting and that's

pedestrian improvements. we're looking at doing pedestrian safety improvements so every bus stop there would be improvement that will facilitate access to get you from the sidewalk to the fatality better lighting and all so to have a shorter walk. the cost of the recommended alternative we're going to look at $20,240,000,000 is the medium point we have not raised all that fund but we have commitments and we're going to look at federal funding and we think we're competitive. van ness the project has been

previously successful at getting federal grant and we see gary is much more competitive than van ness that's leafs a gallop of one hundred million or so and he we're going to look at other opportunity to fill that gap. we're putting our shoulder behind finding that money so we've got into consensus to move forward. so in this time in december and january and here now we've been i'm continuing to had been doing a big public outreach push to share the staff recommendation and to continue the conversation with the community. as i mention already eave talked

about the off street parking and at this point, we're looking at a corridor wide reduction of about 20 percent nearly no loss in richmond i've mentioned with the key part it the fillmore area because if we're using the side service road there's not quite enough that room to have a bus and vehicle and parking lane so the parking lane has to go away because we want the vehicles to continue to use the side services road. we're continuing to look at opportunitys to replace designs and looking for opportunity on the side street i've have more information if there's interest

there. we're also looking at other issues like bus stop location these how that effects seniors and those with disabilities and we're also tend to you know how the project is treating trees and landscaping as well as construction which say, i, talk about. the construction impacts we've done thinking about was it would look like and it's similar to a resurfacing project the kind of impacts you'll see the sidewalk and traveling access will be preserved the overall project will take a couch of years and the duration for 0 typical segment is from one to 5 months

depending upon how complex so it would be closer to 5 months. we have looked at what we have seen as best practices in managing construction for instance, we've done some homework by now and endangering with other projects that have gone through construction and the key things to do. we've come upon a few things to make sure we build in restrictions to the construction work schedule you, you know, we preserve shopping windows as well as making sure that we're providing signage so we can b let the public know everything is open during construction. those seems like the number one things that other prongs that have been successful have done

and make sure we're plugged into the retail community to led them, you know, about construction updates. okay. now i'm going to switch gears and talk about the must not outreach. as we've done our outreach there's been a request to reach out and talk to the merchant on gary and we've done that. we've done several things one we've had a survey of the gary businesses and we've traveled along gary we've done some targeted outreach reached out to the 34r7b9 association and we

spoke to them in the summer of 2013. we spoke to other organizations and they're supportive of the project. we've spoken to the japantown merchant association and in that case one the gentleman has been appointed to serve as one of the japantown citizen's advisory council of the gary project folks. and we've looked at touched braxton basis with the union service improvement areas. regarding the day to day business survey we door to door in may of last year sent a team out there they had fact sheets and that reminds me there's a

fact sheet that shows details it's open the table over here. i think it provides a lot of good information about what the staff recommendation alternative is feel free to pick up the fact sheet. there's two presentations existing presentations we've previously given to our cac about the merchant outreach safer as well as and the visitor survey i don't have time to go into all of them but there's a lot of good information. i've left handouts. back to the door to door survey

we've managed to visit, you know, over 5 hundred businesses and got survey responses if 2 hundred of them and we visited businesses on cle time we've been out on the corridor to make sure that people are aware of the project and what we're proposing to do. we have a couple of interesting finding from the surveys and we've been able to collect information so we understand what the business landscape is along gary. for example, this is a quick sample slide showing how many xhurz customers on a average day. there's more of those charts in the handout. we were able to survey visitors

using a internet safer so people were out on the cooperates taking surveys. we have information out so you know understand what the visitors are saying about gary. a couple of interesting things again in those handout you can read about how people get to gary corridor and opinions about the improvements that would be deserved along the corridor. i recommend picking up those handout. so we've taken the input and considered it and we've used to

shape the recommendation i've gone through. the staff recommendation and feel free to pressure reduce that information i'm happy to get back to you with information if you have questions. that leads me to the economic questions. this is a request to do some economic analysis to try to understand what might be did economic outcomes of the bus rapid transit project. we can't do really a direct model experience the economic models are out there but we can't differentiate this. so what we're able to do is look at other cities case studies from brt studies and look at the

imperial study in terms of businesses with and without parking. i'll give you some information about this from our efforts. here the case study we did of cleveland the euclid youth line that was implemented a few years ago we've designated the bus lines in chesterfield certainly we've seen increased private investment since the brt system was built and there's definitely a response to comforting the transit and infrastructure on the street there. we've also seen some implementations and results from new york city in the bronx on ford up road there was a traffic

time improvements. in that can i they were able to look at the retail sales embarrassed to borough wide we've seen other cities improvements in the economic outcome. and so what we did was take a look at the imperial information on gary corridor of the existing conditions. we have business diode on gary that are located in front of a bus stop and we have businesses that don't aren't located their away from bus stops we compared the sales outcomes for those two types of businesses to see if there's any correlation so we

took the sales data to group together with businesses that with parking vs. the businesses that don't have parking. we can't find a correlation between parking and sales. this slide shows a medium sales per square feet in the green and in the businesses that have parking and the purple are businesses that don't have parking. you see there isn't a clear distinction, difference in the sales performance of the two. this is borne out in the statistical analysis that shows you there are other things that differentiate sales as per square foot. i want to mention in december of last year