have agreed on a concept, and for the single seating it will come in the second week of may and we will hopefully have the train in service in a couple of weeks to evaluate that as to whether or not that provides some relief. >> that's terrific. thank you for doing that. >> the other good news is that we are in the process of evaluating two bids for new lrv cars. what you see here is 175 represents the central sub way and the fleet and this is up to 260 and cover some of the planned expansion coming down the road. we are reviewing the two proposals

right now and hope to make an award later this summer in terms of who to get our lrvs under contract and as we talked about before we've tried to learn a lot of lessons from the purchase of the cars 15 years ago. >> who are the manufacturers of that submitted bids? have those bids come in yet? >> the bids are here and being evaluated. we have two responsive bids from two firms. one is a firm called caf and a spanish firm and the other one is semens. both make a lot of vehicles all over the world including light rail vehicles in the united states. >> thank you. >> to switch over to the bus side i think this is something. i want to point out while the numbers look -- are steadily going up and dramatically. the

blue represents the trolley coaches. they're the oldest and most unreliable equipment. we continue to work on those on a campaign basis but the message is the fleet is getting more reliable and part of the investment you have been so supportive in new buses and over haul buses is playing off and the red line is going up and it will continue to go up, and if you focus on the 112 new buses that we received in the last year the mean distance between failure is 22,000 compared to a year ago when you were down in the three's so this is clearly something that shows the benefit of replacing some older equipment with new. >> i just want to say for the record i know the mta got beaten up by sf weekly by the purchase

of the buses and the graph shows they're working and i think you can tell for anyone that actually rides the buses it's working well, so i think it's terrific. >> and again same approach and because of we're under contract to buy new trolley coaches the first will be here we expect in january of 2015, and the first ones will be 60-foot and go on critical lines like the mission and on the mission corridor, and in the meantime we're going through the fleet and continuing to focus on components that are failing, and taking care of them. again as i mentioned the new buses. on the infrastructure side we focused a lot on using signal priorities in getting the system up and running. we will continue to do that and also to maintain it.

one of the problems with the system that was on 3rd street wasn't properly maintained. we believe we now have a system in place where we will be maintaining it and on 3rd street we're in the process of gathering information now. not only do we have signal priority but signal preemption at six intersections so we're looking -- >> can you explain the difference there? >> yes. priority means if the vehicle is approaching a green light it will get priority whereas preemption is a step up above that. not only it holds everything in place as the vehicle is coming it stops everything else and gives preemption to the train, so any other signal you may have -- say if you have a traffic signal it would be downgraded and the train would preempt it so it's

just for us it should be able to give us when you look at the length of r from sunnydale say to carol and give us more and we will evaluate and come back to you on this. >> do you have an estimate of what it will be? >> the engineers are estimating it should be from the trunk from sunnydale up to cal train five to seven minutes with all of these in place which would be significant. >> and when do you plan to put this in place? >> it is in place. we're in the process of measuring it, its effectiveness right now. it's been turned on for about three weeks. >> that's good to hear and i was under the impression it was in place so i'm glad you confirmed that. >> absolutely. we will get back

to you on that. >> and mr. hailey one of the challenges that they have and you spoke about and how long it can take to get from the subway all the way down, and i know you're working to improve that, and sometimes there can be -- there's not enough service on the line which is partly because of the shortage of lrvs but particularly with the warriors new proposed site and rely on the t since it's not walkable on bart lik piers 30 and 32 but this is a t station there so theoretically it will do the trick so assuming that the central subway is up and running by the time the warriors open up, 2018 or

thereabouts. what do you think that we can -- what is your level of optimism that muni will have enough frequency and capacity on the t line, on the central be subway so we can efficiently get people in and out of the arena whether it's for concerts or basketball games? >> it's eight on a scale of 10. here's why. >> [inaudible] >> i think not only you mentioned the central subway. i think the central subway will make a big difference but the other things we can do is we're looking right now i think the key is to locate and move trains both more efficiently on the existing footprint and we're looking at what's called a tram way system for the service that would allow us to load trains

and move them with some cross over strategically placed. in other words, i think one of the things to add capacity -- there are two ways. one is add more vehicles. the other is more efficiently move the trains in the existing space and i think having some kind of an advanced, if you will -- i'm not talking about star wars kind of thing. it's simple signal system that both identifies trains and moves them. allows us to place them in cross overs so you could bring three trains in at the same time and run them down typically against the current of traffic, those kinds of things. i think that will make a difference. what we're also doing and it's back to page four as i mentioned this incremental approach. we're looking at little things that we can do that will get us a minute or two here or there in terms of

moving capacity. for example if you look at coming out of the sub way portal when you get to folsom and look at the traffic light and took the train across you might be able to save some time with those things. there are a number of things we're looking at to do those, so they're all worked out and laid out. when you begin to look at those things i think it will make a difference because obviously it's going to be -- you're not going to do it with single car trains the way we're operating now. i think one of the things i am anxious to see after a couple of months into the baseball season is how the second carrot kt trains during those hours how that's working out. how much help that is done? >> how about the idea of extending the e line down to dog patch? that would provide i would think additional capacity

along this stretch of the t line, and also would give people a different option of taking transit. they can go the central subway route or take the e line up to say the ferry building and hop on bart. what do you think about that? >> well, i think we have in our budget that's been approved by the sfmta board the plan in summer of 2015 to start the e line. i think one thing we want to do -- that's why integrating the infrastructure because it's one thing -- i think -- we've got a history to some degree of not putting necessary flexibility into the system in order to for the most part cut costs, and i think if you're going to talk about the e line in that capacity you need to

make sure that you have the ability to both move trains effectively. i mean even on 3rd street we would like to have a cross over, to allow us to turn trains north to south where we don't have it, so i think the design from an operation standpoint has to anticipate and give the system flexibility to handle the kind of growth that you're talking about. i think for the first time that's being actively discussed which is why i am optimistic we will end up with a system that will provide enough flexibility to meet increased demand. >> do you think we're going to see the e going down to dog patch? >> well, it certainly is a possibility. i don't have a crystal ball at this point but i think some of the scenarios we're looking at would -- it's

certainly under review. >> i think it's a great idea. >> [inaudible] >> duly noted. just a couple of things to point out. continue to focus on the safety of the system. communications that i know has been something that we have all talked about before. a year ago we didn't use social media. now we're using it on a real time basis. we continue to refine it to upgrade all of our systems. the question had been asked about emergency notification and so this is pretty much what we do right now in terms of getting out information out through the control center and what we call the line management center when we have major disruptions, and

i think we continue to make progress, but need to improve, and we're extending the hours for when we have people whose focus on using social media and outreach to the public, and we're upgrading our communications infrastructure as well, so this is something we have been focusing on. i think you all know and have supported which we both acknowledge and appreciate the gep and the growth of service which is we anticipate the first service increases hopefully in the fall. i mention the mission corridor earlier where we've used the signal priority system to reduce the travel time, and that's a number of other initiatives are planned in that area. again your point about earlier about

ridership and the system growing, so we need to address the crowding, and really position ourselves to achieve our strategic goals to grow the service. just a moment on the ongoing challenges. number one i referred a couple times to running the percent, the schedule of service. i think we've got to get that number up. we're right now on the matrix between 95 and 96. it needs to be 98 and to do that we need more operators in the agency and they have increased the resources. continue to focus on rehabbing the system. we have as you pointed out a neglected system in a lot of the challenges result from things like having two subway signal systems that have to be

maintained, all of those kinds of things. vehicles we're on track to upgrade and replace. security issues. we continue to have delays because of our operating environment and that encompasses a lot of things and again a big event in the fall is the beginning of the integration of the new control center which will start with the new radio system going onto some buses in september, so those are some of the challenges. the next steps to continuing improved service we have talked about most of these. i think what we're focusing on which is the basics to continue to improve the maintenance of rebuild the fleet, run the scheduled service. continuing to improve the supervision. we have done some things and had great cooperation from the work force in terms of changing their

approach to managing the service and the system because we will always have delays and our ability to react to the delays is very important. again critical when we had back in october we had a long weekend -- i believe i actually heard from you a couple of times mr. chairman -- >> i would never do that. >> -- result of a problem with the train control system, and it extended basically from friday night into sunday afternoon while we first tried to diagnose and find the problem and some of that has to do with the two systems, but there's critical elements in the subway that have never been replaced that can cause extensive delays and we have a program in place to replace -- excuse me, to replace

those key components and finally this is a big year for us. as you all know with the help and support of the mayor's task force and the recommendation to provide us with additional funding which will both sustain and then anchor the critical needs of a system like ours over a period of years, so this becomes critically important to the future, to our ability to handle -- not only provide the level of service and the reliability that people are expecting, but also to meet the growth needs, so this is something that we're excited about. and look forward to working with you to continue to make the case and demonstrate how effectively we will use any additional funds and improve the system. so with that we are to

the report card i don't -- i think we provided paper copies for obvious reasons because i don't know how easy it would be to read that in that print, but that really concludes -- i appreciate the time -- my remarks and i would be happy to take any questions. >> thank you and thank you for noting the transportation task force work. it's been ongoing in the last year or so in terms of a potential capital bound for muni as well as a local vehicle license fee to restore the vlf to what it was before governor schwazenegger slashed it and debilitated the state budget. just a lot of funding for transit uses and it's pretty clear from your presentation that so many of muni challenges are really about under investment over many years in

the system and i think the agency really is trying hard to reverse that, and it doesn't happen over night. i know it's challenging. there are ups and downs but i think there are some positive seeds being planted that will bear fruit over time and these measures for the november ballot are incredibly important. in terms of communications with riders i know you and i talked about this a few times. there are -- this is more of a subway issue than a bus issue. there are times in the subway when -- i don't know if it's central control or the station agents do a very good job at alerting riders that there is a problem. sometimes there's -- usually there's very, very little detail and i know sometimes you can't always estimate, but it seems to me that sometimes whether it's the

operator announcing people on a train, or announcements to people waiting on the platform there is very, very little detail in terms of what is happening. is this likely to be a major problem or be resolved in two minutes? >> sometimes there is no announcement at all. i know i contacted you this morning. there was a large gap of service and zero announcements and then there is the issue of the twitter and mta website in terms of alerting riders to problems. i know the agency has tried to step that up, but for example when the unfortunate incident hoopd with the chinese -- new years parade for example major huge event in the city that completely shut down the subway. caused a lot of sort of transit

havoc. the man that was unfortunately -- the homeless person that was run over by the train. there was -- i guess because the agency doesn't update twitter or the website on weekends there was no information provided to passengers and i am wondering what mta is doing to improve communications? this shouldn't be -- it shouldn't be as hard as it sometimes seems to be and i think can you take some of the sting out of problems just by timely alerts to people. >> we agree. i think there are some things. i mean i think of extending the hours. we've now placed public information officers in the line management center so they're able to generate real time information and they're also skilled, if you

will or polished communicators, so we have been very lucky in the caliber of people we brought on is terrific so they can distill technical and confusing information and get it out and keep it out on a regular basis, so step one would be to expand their hours. step two is to continue to focus on making announcements, not placing the burden on the operators, but provide them better tools so that they know and the operators and the control center i think some of the things will from a technology standpoint will improve as we shift from antiquated radio system to a new one that will allow somebody to make announcements at multiple locations on a cross -- more than one at once so i think that is important and we're

continuing to look at any other potential outlets. i think the arrangement with the station agents i think today when we looked at it there were annoucements some of the trains but if you're on the platform you wouldn't know that, and the station agents usually are called -- there's a process where they're called immediately. they're provided some information, but i think part of it is shaping continuing looking at the messages to try to give people an idea how long they're going to be waiting, and i think as you point out repetition. we have to update people. if they're going to be there for more than a couple of minutes we need to keep feeding information as to what is going on and what potential alternatives they have. >> and the weekend issue? >> weekends. i think we're looking at extending the hours

and bringing on additional public information officers on the weekends. that becomes -- and we're doing it right now because as we approach the season of spikes and special events we have a number of special events from beta breakers to pride week and outside lands as well as the usual parades and fest fals coming up so we are in fact a seven day a week 24 hour a day operation so we need to -- i think that we're locked in on this now and the improvements are coming and not fast enough for everyone but i think something will continue to be talking about but we expect to do better. >> okay. thank you and i really do appreciate. i know that it's challenging but i appreciate

some of the improvements that have occurred and again as i said before some are seeds that will bear fruit in the future so thank you for that. supervisor cohen. >> thank you very much. just quickly because we're running out of time here i wanted to talk more about what supervisor wiener, the point he was driving home how important it is to communicate critical changes to transportation. and i just want to check in to see how we're doing on communicating these changes in other languages? >> i'm sorry? >> communicating these changes of service changes and major interruptions of service in other languages so we're ensuring that we're communicating in a very smooth fashion, not only sending out tweets we're sending out -- using the social media component but in various languages. language access is important in the southeastern part of the city and other parts of the

city and i just want to make sure we're addressing that. >> okay. we're trying to attack it. you know the social media we're trying to extend the hours of the people that work there, the public information officers to include nights and weekends. it's something that's been important. second we were looking at the platform signage to make sure they're upgrades and working. we are reminding operators on the vehicles, not just on announcements, because like with anything else we need to give the operators more training and we have planned and how to make announcements, but also the destination sign, or what you see on the front of the rail car. we need to make sure that's set properly because ironically when we're talk going one of the maintenance failings in the campaigns there's a thing called a thumb wheel which was

something we placed on all of the lrvs this year which contributed if the thumb wheel isn't set properly because it's not set properly or there say mechanical problem the communication gets gar belled as well so we are looking at it pretty much top to bottom and it's important to review each of the incidents as we have them such as the one that was referred to as on the -- not only the day of the chinese parade but the exact time of the kick off of the parade so looking at better communications and emergencies as well as on a day to day day-to-day basis, so i think it's a work in progress and we appreciate the feedback and recognize it's a challenge

for everybody. >> great. thank you. supervisor kim. >> just to kind of add to the comments about the announcements and all of that. i mean the feedback they hear all the time is that people just want clarity in terms of what is going on, what is delaying the train so they can make a reasonable decision u how long the wait is. when you hear there is a delay and you're under ground and could be short or longer and i think because sometimes i know there is sensitivity around information like that when there is a fatality involved and we want to be careful about the news that we share but i think being honest and clear from the get go creates less confusion because what i heard from folks in the train stations that day there was a lot of stampeding in and out and nobody knew what was going on in the stations so i don't know what we can do to improve the clarity of the announcements so people are able to make the right decisions for

their transportation home. >> great. thank you very much. i appreciate it. >> okay. thank you. >> we will now open up item three for public comment. i have one public comment card. francisco decosta who i do not see in the room. is there any public comment on item number three? seeing none public comment is closed. [gavel] . colleagues thank you for allowing us to take the time today. i think this was a helpful hearing and with that i entertain a motion to continue item three to the call of the chair. >> so moved. >> okay. we will take that without objection. madam clerk can you call item four? >> item four is a resolution for "rescue row" for alabama street and 15th and 16th streets. >> supervisor campos is the author of item four. he is not here. i don't know if his aide will be here. i will just

speak for this. i think this is -- actually i will add my name as a cosponsor. i think this is terrific. we in san francisco it's just really unbelievable how many amazing organizations we have, both governmental and nonprofit, just absolutely dedicated to animal welfare. and it's just shows the passion of this and compassion of this city, so i think this is a terrific proposal. i am fully supportive and hopefully supervisor campos can be happy with my opening remarks so supervisor kim. >> thank you. i am happy to add my name as a cosponsor. this portion of the area used to be district 6 and i took a tour of the area and this is an area where we have many