commitment to mayor lee's commitment to employ youth. as one of our missions of course is you heard the statistics about the employee of people with disabilities was to actually provide some work experience for youth with disabilities. so we worked with the youth works this time around and we specifically requested that they solicit, find and match our office with a high school student or youth with any type of disability, especially a non-visible disability. so anna came to our office about two weeks ago and has been quite a treat to work with her. you will hear more about her in a few minutes when she will introduce herself. but all i want to say is that she has infused our office with the youth and vigor and kind of

inspiration that some of us old bureaucrats need sometimes. [laughter ] so i'm very happy to introduce her to you, and hope that you would find her as fun and refreshing and fun to work with as we have. so maybe anna can come up. >> good afternoon my name is anna burnec, 16 years old and a stative to e nationive to san francisco and i'm also in the autistic spectrum and diagnosised with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified or ppos, which is one of the three autistic spectrum disorders. although i live a normal life, it can make things a little more complex. for example, i

have problems with comprehending not so simple directions to places and i have to write them down. i don't really watch many reality shows or drama because i often get anxious or scared around the fighting and swearing and i have these sort of things i called "memory aches." where i can't stop thinking about a certain memory for a period of time and i have to watch something that is good for it to stop. but having it has its perks. i remember certain dates clearly if you asked me what this day was like for me five day ago in 2009, i'm able to remember that day almost toy a t and i can remember details in a picture or movie and i can be innovative comes up with more and more ideas and can be very useful skills not only for me,

but those around me as well. my career goals lie in journalism and hope to be an entertainment reporter for et. i have done photos for numerous school events and done articles in the field of entertainment, opinion and lifestyle. at the mayor's office on disability i go to meetings, take notes and write down articles on the mod's website. for the past year, i have been part of san francisco youth commission. through the commission and my subcommittee, education, health and wellness committee, i try to bring up disability rights. a resolution to encourage the board of education for their awareness has passed at the meeting monday, june 16th. i hope through this internmship i will have more of a chance to be informed of disability

rights and awareness. what i hope to learn about the disability community are what right issues have and what services are provided to accommodate my needs? i want to know about history of the americans with disabilities act and what the story behind it and hope to gain this information through my summer internship. thank you. >> thank you very much. all four of you. thank you very much. >> we'll move on to item no. 6, which is a presentation regarding transportation network company or tncs. there have been concerns raised about what this means, their increasing popularity, what it means to folks in the public. we have miss hayashi and miss toran as well. >> good afternoon and thank you so much for having me today.

i see some familiar faces that i have worked with over the years. it's good to see you again. i'm chris hayashi and today i'm deputy director of the division of taxis and accessible services for the san francisco municipal transportation agency. this is my last day on the job. i will be going into those golden pastures of retirement. [laughter ] i do continue to care about this issue very much and i was very pleased to be invited to talk to you about it today. first of all let me define in baseline concepts here. first of all what is that distinguishs a taxi cab? it's on-demand point to point transportation and it distinguishes from other four modes of transportation in san francisco. you have pedestrian, bicycle, transit, taxi, private automobile and all of those things work together and taxis is a very important compliment to those other modes.

tncs stands for "transportation network company." it of course came about because of the ability to dispatch this form of transportation on a smartphone platform and what distinguishs a tnc as opposed to a limousine or taxi, it's supposed to be in a personal vehicle. so taxis have traditionally had a monopoly over point to point transportation and it has forced to compete for business based on good public service. so that outcome has been good. we continue to do everything that we can before-and-after the tncs appeared to build the level of service of the taxi industry, including deployment by smartphone. for example,

most of our san francisco taxis are available through a fly wheel application. but with that said, even though competition is generally good, this is artificial competition. it started out by representing itself as carpools, which it was not. it started out representing itself as fares being voluntary donations, when they were not. the cpuc appropriately found that this is commercial for-hire transportation. there is no question about that. that is why we have been trying to eliminate the word "ride sharing" from the vocabulary, because it's not correct. in addition, this competition to our taxi fleet has virtually unlimited funding. this is not a real measure of which business is successful or profitable or competent? and it's also operating without bearing the costs of commonsense safety regulations

that have been developed over centuries, because it is the human experience that when you get into a moving vehicle, which is inherently dangerous with a stranger and charged a fare, there is public interest in regulating that situation. even if it were not artificial competition, one of the things that i want everybody to make sure and understand, there is a government interest in maintaining taxi service that is not equivalent to protectionism. it is the municipal interest in making sure that people have access to on-demand, point to point transportation. that means universal accessibility, by that i mean financial universal accessibility, so those are fares that are the same fare at all times for all people and that a mile is a mile is a mile

no matter who is taking the ride or what time of day that is. that is important and it's set by a public body in the taxi industry, because it's set with the public interest of affordability and accessibility of this form of transportation. so for example, somebody on a fixed income or who cannot afford to maintain their own vehicle, they need access to this form of transportation as well and i always invoke grama and her grocery because maybe grandma could make the bus if she were not carrying all of these groceries and she has a civil right to access the transportation system. in addition, universal accessibility means geographic accessibility. taxi service is required to provide transportation from and to any place within the city. now i will be the first to admit, we could improve that level of service. but as i said, we have been working for years to try to

improve that level of service to address some of the institutional obstacles to that, and i think that we have come a long way. it also requires that this service be universally accessible to all people, not only on the basis of legally recognized categories such as race or disability, but also other characteristics. the way you dress. your sense of humor. your politics. these are important, too; that you not be denied access to a form of transportation because you express yourself in a way that most people find very unpleasant. i once attended a conference by the international association of transportation regulators, where there was a presentation by a representative of the transbay federal trade commission who wagged his

finger and said you need to learn how to not stand in the way of competition. industries change. take for example online books or music, the industry has resisted changes becauses it was going to eat into their bottom line, but at the end of the day, if it's a better way of delivering services, let the consumer make their choices. that is why it's important to remember that government doesn't care how you read a book or how you get your music,

thank you for your patience, everyone we'll resume after we get back captioning, in an effort to provide access for everyone. >> it's up. >> okay, we're back on. >> it keeps happening. >> i will try to go a little slower. it's easy to get excited and speak quickly. so again, going back to the specific issues that are created by the cpuc's decision, there is the issue of smartphone and credit card access. in addition, the business model of the tncs as currently constructed simply cannot support wheelchair accessible service. we have been managing the paratransit system for many decades now and other cities have been managing their paratransit systems. the collective understanding is that wheelchair accessible services requires a public subsidy.

you simply can't provide it through a profitability index. that is because the wheelchair accessible vehicles require more maintenance. they require more fuel. there is the cost of the additional time needed to provide transportation to people in wheelchairs, because you need to load the wheelchair in. you need to make sure it's secure. and you need to train the driver to be able to do all of those things. those features of wheelchair transportation mean that under the current business model, i do not see any mechanism for the tncs to provide that. a private individual with a wheelchair-accessible vehicle is not likely to add the wear and tear in order to make a few dollars with a vehicle that they clearly need for their own personal reasons. nor is somebody who does not already

have a wheelchair-accessible vehicle extra 20,000 required to get a wheelchair accessible vehicle and on top of that, spend the extra fuel cost and extra maintenance costs and however you add it up, it doesn't add up the a wheelchair fleet requires a subsidy. that could be addressed by a tnc by simply purchasing these wheelchair accessible vehicles, but the companies company position is that they do not provide transportation and why would they go out and buy a fleet of vehicles? they represent themselves as a form of communication between individuals and i don't see them spending any of those $17 billion of venture capital on maintaining a fleet on their

own. so the problem that presents for the taxi industry is that right now there is a battle waging between the taxi industry and the tncks and also among the tncs themselves, over driver supply. the magic of this mode is coming down to driver supply. if you don't have the drivers, you can't get the vehicles out onto the streets and the taxi industry, it's the wheelchair-accessible vehicles that suffer first, because a taxi driver, if given a choice is always going to choose a vehicle that is easier to drive; that is less mechanically prone to problems, and that doesn't cost as much to refuel and that isn't required to be in service to people who take a particularly long time to be able to service. there may be personal motivations and dedication we see that in a lot of our

wheel-chair accessible taxi drivers, but as a purely economic proposition, it just doesn't pan out. so if you don't have enough drivers, then your wheelchair-accessible fleet gets left behind in the parking lot and that is exactly what happened. in fact, conditions are such that the ramp medallions that companies have held have been given back to us and said we simply cannot afford to maintain a car that has no drivers. so take them back, i don't want them. i believe that that has already taken 25% of our wheelchair-accessible fleet off the road, easily another 25% is sitting idle on taxi lots, burning up operational costs without providing any profit to the taxi companis or drivers or any benefit to the public who needs wheelchair service.

currently taxis provide half of paratransit trips and i have been impressed by the group and i'm sure you are familiar with annette and kate and others and their really good work over the years and we have a very efficient public-private partnership, whereby we provide paratransit system through taxi drivers, the taxi drivers get the business and the customers get the service and we don't have to subsidize it to the same extent. some people have said in the course of the cpuc discussions -- other jurisdictions paratransit system is contracted out and you have contracted vehicles. yes, we could do that, but that really feels like a step backwards, because that is where we came from in order to become more efficient and cost-effective and if we wanted to go back to that model, it would cost the public and the city of san francisco about $2

million a year to provide the same taxi service on the sf access platform. so to me, that is equivalent to a $2 million subsidy to venture capital technology firms that refuse to provide this service, and cannot provide the service. so somehow the taxpayers of san francisco are supposed to make up for that. i think that -- i think that would be a tragic policy move. there is also environmental consequences. the vehicles are not subject to any clean air goals. and while you can say while most of them are priuses or whatever, that may or may not be true . we have no way of knowing that or anything else about the business operations and consider that we have estimated again without any way of knowing, because these are private businesss with no oversight, that there is

probably 10,000 of these vehicles on our streets now. and we're creeping up on nearly 2,000 taxis, about 1700 taxis right now. and clearly there is some unmet demand out there, but to simply flood our vehicles with -- to flood our streets with 10,000 new vehicles seems dangerous for people, pedestrians and bicycles. it seems illogical in terms of our clean air goal and it's extremely problematic in terms of the values that the sfmta is supposed to be protecting in terms of reducing congestion and reducing emissions and makes the streets safer and getting private vehicles off the roads. not only are we not getting private vehicles off the roads, but we seem to be flooding the roads with vehicles. by the way i mentioned earlier, that the only distinction of a tnc as a permit class, it's

supposed to be a personal vehicle, but since these very well-funded companies are competing amongst themselves for market share, they are offering to their drivers the ability to finance vehicles. so essentially, we'll buy you a vehicle and you can go out and drive it was our personal vehicle. these are not personal vehicles. we're familiar with cases that they are borrowed from friends and families and traded on craigslist, but there is not a definition in the cpuc decision about what a personal vehicle means? so can you borrow a vehicle from your brother? can you get one on craigslist and pay somebody $100 a shift to drive that around? it's extremely problematic and that also points up the driver screening issues. there were ads on craigslist and i couldn't tell you if they are still there today saying that hey, you can borrow my app.

here is the car, here is the phone, and you can drive for me and all of a sudden you get to a position you have no idea who is driving. we also seem to be creating a culture where it is okay for anybody to drive around and pick people up. and it's okay for people to get into old vehicle and we saw that -- one of my investigators came back from a field enforcement just this last weekend. a gentleman, who happens to be a sex-offender driving around and some girls were trying to find a form of for-hire transportation and he pulled over and they got in the car and fortunately we caught him. it's clearly dangerous. anyway, to get back to the disability issues. the puc's decision does require -- the puc decision came down

in september of last year. and then it said we'll revisit all of this a year from now. so this is a very interesting time. we're now heading down the stretch into the one-year check-in to see what this thing has done to us? the first thing that they are supposed to have done is a timeline for modifying the app to allow passengers to indicate their access needs. that means two things. no. 1, that you are allowed to indicate whether you need a wheelchair and to indicate whether or not you have a service animal. first of all, you can indicate that you need a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, but you are going to be there for a week waiting for one to show up, because there aren't any out there. if you are required to indicate that you have a service animal, that is just a setup for discrimination. the cpuc's decision assumes that only certain vehicles can accommodate a service animal,

but that is not true as we train all of our new taxi drivers. it's also to have a timeline for modifying the app and the tnc websites to make the apps and websites meet access standards. fine. a timeline for modifying the app to allow passengers to indicate this they are accompanied by a service animal, which we just discussed is inherently discriminatory. including a plan to provide incentives to individuals with accessible vehicles to become tnc drivers -- that is what we discussed. it's not realistic, unless uber itself is going to buy the wheelchair-accessible vehicles and put people into them, it's simply not realistic to expect that you are going to have a number of private individuals with wheelchair-accessible vehicles adequate to meet the demand of customers in wheelchairs.

and then finally, a plan to ensure that drivers' review of customers will not be used in a discriminatory manner and this means that the five-star rating that tnc drivers are allowed to make of customers cannot be used in a discriminatory manner. how on earth is that going to be enforced? if you give somebody two star because they took too long to get into the car? how is anybody going to find out what the basis for that low-rating was? if that customer gets enough low ratings, they are never going to get transportation again. that is why i said, also, if you make a bad joke and the driver says well, i really don't like this person, and i will give you a low rating. these are the things that are accumulate and result in the fact this human being can no longer access this form of transportation. can they still get a taxi? only if we make sure there is a taxi industry that is viable in

the city. and then finally, they were required to provide driver training, but there were no specifics as to what that training would require. what are the solutions to this? we think that -- i think that our agency thinks that it's important to get some level of local control over tncks, especially over tnc numbers, because we have a very small city. a large proportion of the real estate in this city is the public roadway. we have to manage it for pedestrians and bicycles and parking and congestion and transportation planning and all of those things, and we can't maintain control over that roadway unless -- if it's completely flooded with private vehicles. the cpuc itself, it seems stretched too thin over this regulatory subject-matter, it's regulates everything from large utilities to trains to moving

vans. and there was a recent audit of the cpuc that confirms that perhaps they are stretched too thin and there would be more effective oversight and monitoring done at a local level and i think that is conditions on the ground are going to be in a congested city in high demand for transportation, like san francisco as opposed to, say, fresno, where the conditions are extremely different. you have larger geographical spaces. you have more private vehicles and less reliance on public transportation and that is why i think local control is a theme that perhaps we should be sounding as this issue continues to develop. so with that, i've concluded my own presentation. perhaps i could invite kate toran up to follow-up with some

more detail. >> thank you, chris. i don't know how much more detail i could give at this moment, but that was really comprehensive. i'm kate toran the paratransit manager at sfmta and i did want to talk briefly about the impacts on our paratransit program of the tncs. as chris discussed our ramp taxi program is critical to us and our passengers who use wheelchairs and over the last year, year and a half, we have seen the service levels plummet because of all the problems chris mentioned. let me just give you some numbers here february, 2013, there were over 1200 ramp taxi trips provided in the month. february, 20 14 we had 550. so

we have really seen a decrease and on the sfmta's side, what we have been doing is trying to improve our incentive program to make the ramp taxi driver whole and make it an economically viable option. so what we have done, we have improved our incentive program. we have had incentives in our ramp taxi program for a number of years, but since we have really good data with our debit card program, that is a swipe card and we get all kinds of origin and destination data and we found we could give a per trip incentive. so what we did, and we shifted from our old system of averages and looking at how many wheelchair trips on averages? average was provided in the month. we went to a per trip incentive rate. so for our paratransit ramp taxi drivers, who

transport people using wheelchairs and they do a debit card swipe, there is a $10 per trip incentive on that. on top of that, there is a $10 credit on the cost of medallion down payment. in addition, we are providing free ramp taxi training classes, and we had it from -- i believe march until the end of june and we have extended it to the end of july. we also noted that there are challenges in the outlying neighborhoods for people to get taxi pickups. so we have an incentive for every two paratransit wheelchair pickups, the ramp traxi driver gets a free, go to the head of the line pass at the airport. this has a tremendous economic value for our drivers, who can get in and out of the airport fast and they will do the two pickups. that has been working well.