love of the life of the people. thank you. >> last speaker, james hickman. >> good afternoon, i'm james hickman and i represent the lombard hill improvement association, which is our neighborhood association to take care of the street. it's very difficult to convey an understanding of what's going on in that street. these opinions just spoken are representative of what people think when they hear about this issue and i can assure you from someone who's there -- i'm retired, i'm there 24 hours a day, i've been there for 17 years. there's absolutely a safety

issue, among all the other issues going on,. what you essentially have here is thousands of cars a day directed on a tiny one lane, one block difficult to pass street that was designed to handle a few cars. it's like selling 100,000 tickets to a giants game when there's only 38 seats. the speed limit is 5 miles an hour on that street and we've had three cars upside down on that street. you don't see that going 5 miles an hour. hundreds of people congregate now where there used to be 20.

they stand in the streets, they feel entitled, they own it, you can drive up to them, they are aggressive, they think it's a park and own it, they threaten the neighbors, including my wife. there are a lot of problems associated with this. >> i have a couple questions i'd like to raise. thank you to those who spoke this afternoon. how does this play out with the ada? is there anything about this that prohibits the right of the ability for people with disabilities [inaudible]. >> there's no specific provision being made for people that are disabled as part of this closure. if you were disabled and wanted to drive down the street you would not be able to do so.

>> i'll put this in question form. you know, i don't want to step on all the work that supervisor farrell's office has done, but this is a concern we both had, not only affecting disabled folk, but many of our visitors are not able to walk up and down that hill. would it be possible to have an exemption to the ban for taxis. if you had a taxi exemption, it would allow those people who couldn't walk or able

>> it'd be great because of overwhelming success, but so we could weigh things differently in here, i've thought about that, but what are the most important things to get out of this and sort of a hierarchy. >> yes, i think that's -- i think with this issue, one of the things we've been struggling is exactly what would be a successful way of resolving the issue as people have mentioned there's issue of vehicles driving down the street and there's the issue of people visiting crooked street. it is only addressing the vehicular part and the way the vehicles interact with the pedestrians so the measures of success in this case would be lessening of the complex at

both the top and bottom of the street and also the removal of that severe congestion that backs up on to van ness. beyond that i think we'd have to see is there any other undepended consequences on doing that. >> i assume we'd do a vigorous outreach to all stakeholders involved? straightforward -- >> we, yes, i think media coverage has helped raise awareness that this is happening. i think that process of letting people know helps. we will probably as well once this is -- if this is approved, also be showing [inaudible] to let the public know and we've also informed s f travel that this is happening. >> have they weighed in on this one? >> i'm not aware of their position on this issue? >> thank you, members of the

board? director ramos. >> excellent report. i want to thank all the speakers who came out. i'm supportive of this idea. i think i like director heinick and rubke's direction of allowing for taxicabs or some kind of regulated driver to be able to navigate the system for those who can be the walk or -- i was going to ask about bicycles. if it would be still be available to bicycles. you know, i'll be honest. that's the most fun i've had going down that street is on a bicycle. >> which direction were you going? >> down, obviously. but i still think that we can do it. we share streets all the time when we open them up for pedestrians and restrict them to cars.

any sunday streets event we have, healthy saturdays in the park, there are still some cars that are allowed through that mix it up with pedestrian bs and bicyclists in a very safe way. i want to remind folks this would be a pilot. i would be interested in seeing what comes out of it, particularly with respect to the labor costs on managing this and enforcing access. it looks like we -- i saw from your pictures, no less than parking control officers out there at one time, which seems very expensive to me. and of course obviously, i want to apologize for folks that are suffering this lack of enforcement that we've got right know, talking on the sidewalk, you know, really endangering pedestrians. i can imagine every time down that street in a car, it has always been the way the legislative aid suggested, that it is in my experience. very much supportive of this idea.

i commend staff for putting together an interesting pilot and excited about the possibilities here. >> thank you. director lee, how about you? >> yeah. good presentation. the only concern i have is that i would really like to see some quantitative numbers. i don't diss disput the fact that sometimes it backs down to van ness because i've seen it that far. we've had the situation along with that, it would have been nice to see some numbers because when we say we do a pilot we have something to compare it again. my concern is -- you know, how do we ever resolve the problem where people park to take pictures. do we really address that issue down there too? i feel sympathetic to the residents who live in that area that have to face that everyday, so i'm in support of

it also. >> i'm generally supportive, but i'd like the idea of a taxi exemption. i also think the fact that it's 12:00 to 6:00, if somebody's life won't be complete without driving down that street, they can go before noon or after 6:00. i think the safety issues are definitely worth considering doing this project and see whag it does. and it's probably cost neutral since we have the parking control officers out there already, we're just changing the traffic flow so i think we're going to modify it before we make a motion? >> i just want to make one quick point or comment, question. on the enforcement piece in terms of the gentleman who mentioned parking on the sidewalk, it's also bad for

wheelchairs. if there's anything -- can our enforcement folks handle that kind of -- i would very, very heavily suggest and recommend that we look at that very carefully and seriously. that's a huge safety issue for a lot of folks if addition to the concerns the residents raise. i'd be willing to make a motion to amend the -- >> to exempt taxis. >> is there a second? >> second. i'd like toe ask a question on it. as we discuss this, i want to make sure there's no immediate staff reaction. we didn't get it here but if there's an immediate staff reaction as to why a tax exemption wouldn't work or supervisor farrell discussed that or wouldn't work for these reasons, but i think we're talking about a relatively

pilot project with traffic ongoing on the street so it seems to me a taxi exemption could work. i don't want to assume that, because you all have studied that far more than we have. >> this isn't something that was discussed. there are been a lot of discussions dating back a few years and over the last couple months to read to to this recommendation. we could ask miss stephanie if she had thoughts on the matter. it wasn't something discussed. it would certainly change the volume of vehicles going down the street. the number of private residents is fairly small and probably not a lot of vehicles would go down. with the taxi exemption that would change. it would change what we're evaluating, doesn't mean it's not something that can be done. i don't know that we have any basis to respond since it's just something that hadn't been discussed with the public or supervisor. >> would director rubke's approval, if i have it, i'd suggest we modify our joint

proposal to be that we amend it to have the staff put in the taxi exemption if, upon a little bit of review, it seems feasible. i hate making the policy here and not giving staff chance to think about it so it's almost like we're giving staff discretion to put in the taxi exemption if that will serve some goals of helping tourism and those who can't climb the hill at the same time, not undermining the point of the pilot program. >> is that okay with the makers? >> yeah. >> we have a modified resolution. all in favor, opposed no. the is -- >> that was the amendment. >> now, the only -- yes, on the amendment. this will not be the only neighborhood in the city that comes up with something that's unique. i'm concerned about that, setting a precedent for

it. >> i'm glad you said that because this is the second time in a very recent period where we've been asked as a transit agency to balance the interest of tourism with the interest of transit and i think there's a perception that this is an issue of resident access in an affluent neighborhood, but i think we recognize this is also an issue of safety and transit. and that's why i favor the pilot project, but like director lee, i'll -- i want to see some results and find out how this works because i don't think the balance on the other side is nothing. i think the interest and accomodation of our tourists is a very important thing to consider. it's a limited pie lol project, if it can work and the taxis can go up and down too, that's

even more limited. when i say taxi i mean registered medallion san francisco taxis only. >> we have a motion as amended. all in favor, i. opposed, no. the [inaudible]. thank you. next item. >> >> at this point you are going back up to item number 7. the director's report. >> thank you. first, i would like to ask our taxi and accessible services director to give you an update responsive to your request from last meeting on the status of the various taxi data issues that have been before you over the last year or so. >> good afternoon. >> good afternoon directors.

so you may remember back in november you authorized to enter into an agreement with integrity vehicle solutions, or the acronym ivsc. this is the contract that we acquired to implement the eta system, for us to build a public data supply for e hailing taxis. at the time you reviewed and approved that contract, you requested staff to implement the contract without using the on board devices that were available to be supplied by the contractor and to try to develop this data using the

existing service that were already collecting that type of data in the taxi. so that's what we did. and we did work directly with the payment system providers. we have three payment system providers in san francisco that's wireless, ver phone and creative mobile technologies so if your credit card is processed in a san francisco taxi it's one of those companies. we're now complete. we're 70 percent of the taxi fleet and that represents any taxi that's using wireless edge equipment is now visible or integrated into our ride integrity software. the other 30 percent serviced is well underway. those companies have been cooperative and they're just next in the integration process. we started with wireless edge in part because most of the taxis are on the wireless edge

system. when we asked for approval of a $6 million contract, the budget you saw at that time included about $3.86 million of that contract amount was for the on board device equipment and the air time that would be required to get the data through that equipment. you recall that the on board devices were available to connect directly into the engine's diagnostic port; however, that was at a substantial cost. if you remove the cost of the on board devices and air times, we're left with a contract for about $2.14 million, which averages out over the five years of about $400,000 a year. this is a qualified success and we're very happy with what we have achieved. however, the choice not to use the on board devices has saddled with some technical

limitations. first, is that the data refresh rate we're getting through the payment system provider system is at about 20 seconds and in order to support a viable e hail application it would be need to be closer to six seconds. we have not got to that refresh rate and if we were going to push forward to achieve that kind of refresh rate, that would require these third-party payment system providers to make adjustments and improvements to their systems which is time consuming and expensive. while we may continue the progress in that direction that's not where we are right now or where we can get immediately because we're

relying on third-parties. in addition we lost data, robustness by not using the on board devices, in particular were not able to get actual emissions data for the fleet so we'll have to continue to calculate emissions based on we know what model it is, we know what the emissions data for that model is supposed to be and we use excel spreadsheets to calculate it out and that's how we've done it. we can continue doing it that way, but won't be able to get actual emissions from the engines. in addition we won't be able to get realtime speed data from the taxis. initially we had the capacity with here on board devices to be able to see how fast a taxi is going at any particular moment. we will be able to get to speed data, but it requires an extrapolation of the smaller data set we have so as we see a taxi moving between these 20

seconds pings we can calculate how fast they're going, but it won't be as robust as if we had it through the on board devices. but we have the data we need for a lot of functionalty, but the functionalty that we don't have at the moment is the data set necessary to move forward with the implementation of an eta system, to provide our taxi data to private app developers to build e hail platforms on . the good news is that while we're going through this process, the e hail platforms available in san francisco have been signing up more drivers and vehicles. i think that's really great news for the public because that means if you have an adequate supply of taxis on any

particular smart phone app, you have an hope for success. over the past years somebody might have attempted to hail a taxi on an e hail app that only has 100 taxis and that's not enough to support the kind of anticipation demand that we'd anticipate to come through the e hail platforms. the news is that we were not able to get to the kind of refresh rate that we had envisioned when we started the project, but the good news is that the public still has what we were tryinto provide to them. the benefit of the ivsc platform is they did have this ride integrity software already

built for the purpose of fleet management for people like me, specifically regulators, in order to be able to see all of this transportation information in an integrating fashion and make us more effective. the very good news is that we now have a demo dashboard that's available to taxi services staff to access realtime trip information from our desktop so we can see both the completed historical trip information as well as the dashboard that we can see from our desktop and roll the mouse over any taxi and see who's driving it, what vehicle number it is, the type of vehicle. i'll walk you through that dashboard quickly. that data has been flowing since april 15 and we've been adding more and more vehicles

to it. they'll see a comment filed by a company manager saying we thought it might be this iphone but not this one, and then you'll see the investigator comment come up over here. and by the way, the software offers and automated manner of matching reported lost items and reported found items so it cuts down the staff time and increases the efficiency of getting people their lost property back. the software also has web

portals for the taxi companies that they will use to add drivers and remove drivers. this will substantially reduce the data entry time for our sfmta staff. it's also going to streamline the weekly reporting requirements for the taxi companies and reduce their administrative burden. currently they print out a lot of stuff and fax it to us and it's a really cumbersome system. the software is going to automate the vehicle approval process. the company will introduce a new vehicle that will come to us for approval and once we approve it it will go to sfo ground transportation unit who will inspect the vehicle and when that inspection passes

they'll approve it it'll come back to us and be electronically routed. and [inaudible] where everything will move very seamlessly together. and right now we're in the process of designing the customized queries and reports for regulatory and transportation planning purposes and that's one of the really exciting things coming out of this. we will have aggregate information that transportation planners can use where the hot spots for pick ups, drop offs,

the corridors drivers tend to use, how much of the time is a taxi hired and not hired. this is a major policy issue i've always wanted more data about. if we know taxis are empty half the time, we can devote our effort to get them more efficiently utilized. average fairs, number of trips. i mean, in order for us to tell you how many taxi trips are taken in san francisco, it's still a back of the envelope exercise so now we'll have all this data with precision. let me show you what it looks like.

when i put the mouse over this you'll be able to see the screen pop up that tells you more about that driver and vehicle. but also, one of our para transit climb up into a ford escape so we'll be able to supply vehicle types like this and people will be able to select from vehicles. when we get bike racks into vehicles, that's another vehicle type we would be able to reflect saying if you want a taxi that has a bike rack, these are the available ones. this is an exciting screen and in the interest of time i won't

walk you through the rest. you can come together any time in our offices. there's a trip view and that shows all of the completed trip information. there's a vehicle view that shows our entire vehicle inventory. the driver view has all the driver information there, the supply demand view is what we're looking at now and to the right there there's a parameters view. that's where we'd be able to do things like set geographical fencing.

whatever we can do to incentivise that, that gives us the capacity to draw those geographical boundaries and monitor for that. i think this is a really wonderful transition to monitor and respond to the taxi need. >> thank you. [inaudible] come back for comments. >> sure. and i just want to acknowledge the great work that the staff as we as our it staff has done to get to this point. we have the regulatory system we wanted and got the outcome we wanted on the e hailing side so both great steps forward and doing a lot less money than we had anticipated. few other things, one, we were here in the last