Skip to main content

tv   [untitled]    June 12, 2014 10:00pm-10:31pm PDT

10:00 pm
10:01 pm
>> >> >>
10:02 pm
the meeting of the san francisco transportation authority vision zero committee. i'm kim yee and breed and march and scott wiener on their way to the meeting. we would like to thank jessie larson and jennifer lowe and our clerk erica cheng. are there any announcements? >> no announcements. role call. breed, present, kim, present, mar, present, wiener, absent. yee, present, we have a quorum. >> thank you. can we call the next item, please. >> item no. 2, approve the minutes of april 10th #shgs
10:03 pm
2014. >> can we have a motion? we have a motion and second? >> any public comment on this item? >> seeing none. we have a motion and second. can we do that without opposition. >> i will have to take a roll call. commissioner breed, aye, kim, aye, yee, aye, wiener absent. item no. 36789 -vision zero progress report and achieving vision zero information. >> thank you. we have megan wier to provide an update on the vision zero project. thank you for being here. >> good afternoon commissioners very much. we included a two page summary of the progress to date in your
10:04 pm
information packets. i just want to briefly go over that update and respond to any questions. i also wanted to that had we had our first vision zero task force meeting this tuesday. it was well intended meeting with approximately 60 attendance and community partners. we also want to thank supervisor yee and many of the staff who were able to participate in the meeting and the level of interest and momentum and continuing this work moving forward. briefly with respect to our progress since this last meeting with respect to engineering, seleta reynolds is our engineer subcommittee chair. the zero project was reviewed by the subcommittee and she'll be reviewing this information. our education subcommittee leader is john
10:05 pm
of mta. we have had a lot of progress and former representative from the police department and the environment and school district. the early drafts of the campaign chaired at that meeting. that campaign is a citywide education and enforcement campaign on the corridor. it's going to be launched this june with high visibility enforcement in september. the mta submitted a cal trans campaign program on education and enforcement with half of the money going to the police department for equipment and increasing enforcement on speed and program development media and evaluation. this grant was a partnership between the mta and police department and department of public health with support from the mta.
10:06 pm
this program will will provide support to citywide and neighborhood groups and we should know more in august. the large vehicle working group is also going to be completing it's recommendations, has completed and will be forwarded by june . and for the recommendations that will be forwarded to the full board on the large vehicle working group will they include potential amendment to the administrative code and what's behind some of the changes? >> that is a great question that i'm going to need to follow up with you after the meeting. i don't have the specific details on that. >> the other question i would have so it could be noted is what the phase in might be for the different categories. of course we have our employees that drive the city car vehicles versus our large vehicle drivers and what the
10:07 pm
phase in might be for a city contract or and other various contractors throughout the city as well. one more question, who will be administering the vehicle trainings. will each department be responsible for the trainings? or will there be a centralized department responsible for training the various department? >> i will forward those questions. >> thank you. i will be happy to forward those to you. i know that's a lot. >> commissioner mar? >> could you give a scope of what the large vehicle working group is doing and how do you define large vehicles? >> sure. with respect to the scope of the large working
10:08 pm
vehicles. let me grab the handout so i can talk about it. the large vehicle work ing group included buses and other large working vehicles in our city. just focusing on the large vehicles while they are participants and while they are in a low collision. that's the purpose of the large vehicle working group. i know the participants included statewide organizations, teamsters, advocate, regional agency staff and other people who train large vehicle operators, public safety, department of motor vehicles
10:09 pm
private ownership and i was able to participate in one of those meetings and that was truly impressive. john be conducted a lot of outreach. large vehicles is defined very broadary. >> i know it's focused on reducing collisions and vehicle accidents. i know the mta has been looking at tour bus issues and casino buses and increase traffic conflicts tech and biotech like the google buses and also the moving of the bigger vehicles along golden gate park and bayview hunters point and what's led to them popping up in other spots. i know that is not related to collisions as much as neighbors concerns,
10:10 pm
but i would like to know more of what's happening with the working group and will make sure peter and i will work on the large working group especially given the casino busses and justly tour buses. >> i will definitely convey that to john. i know his report is really broken down with respect to short-term solutions that are implemented within 6-9 months would include the driver education curriculum and focusing on longer term solutions that might be more applicable to some of the scenarios you are describing. >> i know with the tour bus issues around al mow square and i see a reason for
10:11 pm
mitigating the impacts and regulate as much as possible. >> i know john mentioned that in presentations of the example of it being a safe way and analogous to other operators outside of the city and how we can partner with other agencies to increase safety in san francisco. >> thank you, commissioner, mar. commissioner yee? >> just a follow up with commissioner mar's question about the large vehicles. i didn't get a sense of the definition, but it seems like the divided line would be where there are picks up or considered large vehicles versus small vehicle. >> i don't think pick up trucks were included. that is with more company like larger vehicles being operated by larger institutions.
10:12 pm
>> i think i understand when picks up are not included. >> i think we need to clearly define what is a large vehicle. this is back on the enforcement piece to go back to your earlier part of the presentation. with the $2 million grant allocated for equipment for sfpd, is this covering the speed radar or the hand held devices? >> correct. >> when we extend the hand held devices are these just the motorcycle traffic division? >> i don't unfortunately have the details regarding the actual scope of how many officers will be, but i will follow up on that. >> thank you. i also want to recognize that commissioner wiener is here. if there is no more discussion on this item, i would like to open for public comment. >> i actually only discussed
10:13 pm
half of this item. >> i'm sorry. continue. >> with respect to enforcement, the update from the police department includes the focus on the 5 campaign is actively continuing and citations are up and st police department is coordinating with them and the program will be rolled out and to educate the public about it. for monitoring, i lead that subcommittee and we've been working to evaluate that campaign. we actually have data collectors that are now out on the street on the high injury corridors that will be the focus of that campaign. we are working to create a data base that is collected by mta but we don't have a way to have it entered and routinely analyzed. we are working to create that data base which will have data up to date by
10:14 pm
the end of the summer. we are working to release a public version of our transportation data base which links data on injuries to other streets characteristics to help facilitate the monitoring evaluation and efforts for vision zero. we also have two work groups updates that is led by dph. an existing partnership which has agreed to work with vision zero partnership. this partnership also applied for another active transportation grant to provide transportation tool kits to schools and support multilingual outreach and traffic enforcement. and we have a cycling safety workgroup. it included members from our agency as well as planning and environment and the transportation authority and the police department. we
10:15 pm
received preliminary analysis and data and finalized the high injury corridor map and based on that analysis they are working on recommendations and we'll report back at the next meeting. that's all. >> thank you. seeing no other comments or questions from the committee. i'm going to open this item up for public comment. if there is no public comment on this item, i will close public comment. madam clerk, can we go to our next item. >> item no. 4. project delivery. an information item. >> thank you. we have director reiskin from sf mta to
10:16 pm
deliver the process. >> good afternoon, chairperson of the committee ed reiskin on behalf of sf mta and dpw to give you information on the progress that you previously requested. this slide will show what i will walk through here and we'll have staff here to help me answer any difficult questions that you have. maybe before i start i will say i do appreciate the leadership that the commission is putting forth with regard to vision zero. i have been out a lot in the community lately talking about the transportation 2030 plan and when it comes to talking about vision zero and about the city seeing the people dying in the streets is not okay, it's not something that we should
10:17 pm
accept here and talking about the goal of vision zero of getting to zero traffic death in 10 years. i hear and see a lot of support for that and the preponderance -- public is behind this and i thank you for your leadership in this. in terms of project delivery is what we are going to do a lot of to achieve vision zero. this site reflects a lot of work that has been done in recent years. i know we all share an in patience about the pace of getting projects started but just a lot that's happened in the years. everything from complete street projects to paving and curb ramps to bike projects and signals and traffic calming. there has been a lot
10:18 pm
happening, a lot going in the ground and a lot of improvements been made. i think that's an important context point as we are working to improve to deliver. there is a lot that the mta has gotten in the ground much including those things in line with the walk first corridors and intersection. >> i'm sorry, i didn't see a key. could you tell us what the green, yellow and red stand for. does the green stand for completed projects and red is what we are waiting for. >> let me bring up an expert to help answer those questions. >> the green are completed, the yellow are planned and the red have nothing planned. >> these are the high entry corridors highlighted? >> correct, these are the pedestrian corridors
10:19 pm
highlighted. >> in terms of the project process i think you all know this. but at the risk of over simplifying all projects big and small basically go through these main phases of project development from the time they are conceived to the time the construction is complete. there is an over lay of community outreach throughout that process and the durations of each of these steps various project by project and more expensive projects have longer durations, some are minimal and some significant, some require much planning. there are steps we go through and things can happen during anyone of these steps that can elongate the process. i think you are familiar with many of the processes with community engagement in the planning
10:20 pm
process particularly where there are real trade offs to be in the railway like a parking loss and planning process can be long. we all know that environmental review especially if an eir is required. a design is a little bit more straight forward but getting the context into drawing on paper and can take time to resolve. construction we are getting increasingly better at estimating and addressing, identifying central problems in advance. but sometimes we do fine unforeseen conditions. we find a utility where it was not identified by the utility company so there can be delays. these are the general steps to the project. and just wanted to give a sense of why
10:21 pm
some things take longer than we might like them to. i will add and speak more later. the community outreach engagement is critical and important. from our agency we have not done as well as we needed to do in the past. our efforts do that don't make the projects go faster. we are trying to find new and better and different ways to do it. that will be part of what drives the timeline as well. one thing we have now that we have had less in the past, we have much better set of frame works that we are operating. from the biking and pedestrian strategies and sip addressing better streets policy and with vision zero we have a program called follow the paving. we have a much better planning framework where that first start of the process we are
10:22 pm
starting from a much better place because we have a framework identified and the bike network for example and we have identified the key corridors and the walk first we have identified specific locations. so this facilitates a faster entry into project delivery process. it's something that we benefit from as we've developed these strategies over the years. this is speaking a little bit more within the sf mta and other city partners. since i came to the mta and since we had the audit results we've been working to strengthen systems and processes to make our capital planning and analysis that really feeds the project delivery process much stronger. we have a series of planning documents that i
10:23 pm
think are much better to find -- defined and vetted than in the past and put a lot of processes in place to keep projects on track, to manage scope crepe or schedule or budget crepe. and are really approaching things in a more systemic way and a lot of systems that help us approach and track how we are doing and make sure the projects don't get offtrack. these are all leading to better outcomes when we get to doing the project of the deliver process. we started a funding project predevelopment phase. this is almost a lesson we learned from the city's capital planning process and geo bond process and in the old days you estimate a number, put it out for a geo
10:24 pm
bond and go for the voters and what will end up needing more funds because the project wasn't defined when we brought it to the voters. with the emergence of the capital plan we started to invest in the predevelopment and when we brought the bond to the voters such as the hospital bond we knew exactly what it would cost and we are approving with that with bond as an example that we can hold that budget and especially with the predevelopment. we are bringing that concept down with our bigger capital projects versus our smaller ones and proic a providing a little bit upfront so we can plan for and hold ourselves accountable for. that was happening to lesser and greater degrees for drifrnt projects for the agencies.
10:25 pm
we are giving the planners a little bit more time upfront, a small investment upfront that saves us down the road and allows for our capital budget. that is just one example. i mentioned the outreach and engagement. i know we've been talking to your offices and gathering feedback from your staff about the new outreach strategy that we are about to embark upon learning a lot of lessons from the past but significantly resulting in for these projects and better outreach, better two way communication with stakeholders and changing some of the mechanisms and the channels that we are using so doing different kind of formats, having meetings at different, diverse number of
10:26 pm
locations and times of day and days of week to make sure that we can capture information and then using technology whether it's social media and even used crowd sourcing for some things, data crowd sourcing. so we've heard from board members a lot on this topic and really looking to advance and step up our game in terms of outreach and engagement so we don't get bogged down later because this is something that slows us down when we end up on a controversy on a project so we are trying to clear that upfront to deliver projects more smoothly. >> director, does this include at which -- at twitter because i know they issue concerns. i don't know if you see it as a right word but
10:27 pm
cc'ed on them? >> with the crowd sourcing, we used it for example to develop some community guidance on bike share, pod locations. we do have now a very active at which -- at twitter feed and i know i have copied it on some of the ones you have with regard to help projects we've implemented our working such as the double parking on folsom. we take that and feed that back to our enforcement folks and police department to address those problems. i don't think we used at twitter but as part of this new engagement strategy we are looking at a much broader array. we go to the public meeting with a powerpoint and tell the community what we are working on. >> if you don't mind on the
10:28 pm
double parking, the last conversation we had on the last meeting, the police officers to help us on traffic enforcement and i know sf mta is committed to doing enforcement with relevance to the jurisdiction of pco's. once that came out was double parking and walking the box because the cars are technically illegally parked. if there is a commitment of when this will start and what resources we can allocate to this? >> yeah. i have and i did get that feedback both from here and from previous hearings that you had with regard to double parking. we did our start, i think it was earlier this year and late last year, focus double parking
10:29 pm
enforcement in a few different parts. i think we did it in 4-5 locations. i talked to our enforcement manager to looking at double parking through the lens of vision zero and where it's not a nuisance or traffic problem, but where it could treat a safety problem whether they are cyclist or pedestrians. i would be happy to report back to you what resources we are growing for that and what kind of outcomes we are fore seeing. and looking at working with the police department on the box to bottom. >> i would be interested in the outcome in the pilot of the 4-5 locations. we should tag areas that are blocking areas and of course when cyclist have to go out of the
10:30 pm
bike lane because of the double parking. i know you and i are getting all of those at twitter complaints which is incredibly frustrating if you want to feel safe if you are biking. >> all that said, it's great to be able to get that feedback and it's coming with photos and exact locations. it's helpful in terms of whether it's our folks or police in terms of enforcement. i will continue to do that. >> commissioner mar? >> i just want to chime in on the social media crowd sourcing and i know the mta or riders have a much better ability with different apps to understand the transportation system. but i know for at least for facebook and at twitter that they are approaching our officers with what they can do to help. i'm guessing there are different partnerships already wi