>> 10.2 g. >> hi. i'm not here to oppose this item i'm here to actually say that this is a memorial to the woman who passed way and this is really sad i think as a cab driver you can't help but notice the flashing lights on the road and i don't know how someone can't notice that even late at night you see the the beautiful lights flashing and of course you will look both ways and at 2 or 3 in the morning you will not see pedestrians rarely but the flashing lights are easily and it's really sad that this person could not notice a pedestrian in the crosswalk how could you not? i want to say i used to be a police officer and particularly on tuesdays the busiest day of the week here

at city hall an officer actually doing traffic control protecting pedestrians why did that disappear and i think it's very expensive to have a traffic light there and also make a lot of traffic backups but if you are not going to hire a police officer i think this is the next best thing unfortunately i think the officer should have been there on on that day when that woman crossed the crosswalk. thank you. >> second? >> second. >> all in favor say aye. >> before we do that a little break we have 3 fairly lengthy items we'll be back in ladies a board will resume our meeting. >> members of the public, please find a seat. >> we'll resume with item

number 11. >> approving various on van ness to bay street 19th avenue service improvement north terminal and the proposed parking legislation requires no further environmental review and in the interest of my throat and your time i will not read through all of the traffic . >> do you have a recommendation before we start? >> yes, there is. this, as you know, is a a project that you and the planning commission and the board of supervisors approved. at the time of your approval we told you that we would come back for the legislation of the parking and traffic changes which me need

in order to finalize the design and keep the project moving so that's what's before you today and we do have a presentation from staff. >> good. >>. >> good afternoon chairman nolan and directors. >> you have to speak from that one, sorry. >> is this better? >> yeah. >> thank you. >> i'm the project manager on the van ness and rapid transit project and i'm here to give everyone a little bit of background on the project and where we are on the legislation that's before you today. as i'm sure everyone is aware van ness avenue is a major north-south artery in san francisco and also part of state highway 101 highway 101 making it a major regional artery and it connects not only the north end of the city with

the downtown districts but also connects the golden gate bridge with the freeways leading south of the peninsula and to the bay bridge. the primary purpose of this project is to improve transit on van ness avenue as well as secondary objectives that are also very important improving pedestrian comfort and safety along the length of the corridor and all the while maintaining the through put of mixed vehicle traffic and truck traffic down the length of van ness. there's 16 thousand people that get on and off of our transit vehicles every day that doesn't count the passengers that ride golden gate transit up and down van

ness avenue people that live along the corridor are trying to get to work or medical appointments or people that live outside of the corridor that work and have business to conduct along the corridor our average bus speed van ness avenue is about 8 miles per hour and we'd really like to improve that and i'm sure the people who ride it every day would as well and this project is expected to reduce transit time between the van ness corridor which runs from mission and south van ness, van ness avenue and lombard by up to 32 percent and improve transit liability up to 50 percent and expected to increase our capacity up to 35 percent taking into account future growth along this corridor. >> the van ness brt is the

first of a number of brt projects that are being studied in san francisco we're actually in design right now and hope to begin construction in late 2015 and it will form the north-south access of bus rapid transit hub of which the geary brt right in line behind us will be the east-west access forming a new transit hub ativanness avenue between geary and o'farrell and the advantage is to bring rail like service to these corridors at a fraction of the cost it would take to actually lay rail. >> the features that go into the rapid transit some of them are fairly obvious things like the dedicated running way and dedicated platforms and

boarding for the transit vehicles and important features traffic signal priority to give our transit vehicles an edge in moving up and down the corridor and transit signal optimization for vehicle traffic so that the remaining 2 traffic lanes s will be able to move almost the same vehicles as the original 3. in addition to that other policies which we had in place the electronic fair prepayment so that that people can tag their cards on the buses speed up boarding and reduce dwell time. this slide shows a planned view of the configuration that was approved as part of the environmental report. it will be be right

side boarding so that we can use our standard trolley and motorcoaches in the corridor. the buses will run with a planted median along most of the corridor separating the 2 bus lanes when we reach a place where we have transit boarding islands that median will taper down to a textured barrier between the two lanes to keep the buses separated and make room for the transit boarding islands. >> this selection of the section that shows the fully planted median at the positions where there are no boarding islands and the buses running on either side and the area where there are boarding islands that median disappears and also one of the one of the

things that we've given up at the areas where we have boarding islands is parking on one side of the street to provide the physical space for constructing the boarding island. >> another feature of bus rapid transit is stopped consolidation the van ness avenue currently has 16 stopped consolidated down to 9 the locations of which are is shown on this slide and optimized for making transit connections on east-west routes and within a block of intersection with the east-west bus line running on it. the stops tend to be a little closer together at the north end of the corridor because it's much hill hill

ier and we didn't want to make it onerous for people trying to walk to a rapid transit station. >> so we're taking the 2 center lanes of van ness to be dedicated running ways rebuilding the median and bus transit stations. we're taking this opportunity as well to replace and rebilled as as i considerable amount of city infrastructure and pedestrian lighting all the traffic signals will be new and we're reconfiguring the entire street to make it not only more transit friendly but more pedestrian friendly and to make it a better streetscape over all. the vehicles that will be operating on the van ness brt are taken from the from the 47

and 49 49 lines essentially those two bus lines will continue to run their regular routes in mixed route and will enter the exclusive bus lanes provided by this project and from 40-foot motorcoaches to 60-foot motorcoaches to increase the over all carrying capacity of the system. >> when we go into operation, the expectation is to run the the 47 and 49 lines with 7 and a half minute head ways so typical wait time between somewhere 3 and a half and 4 minutes not counting the golden gate transit buses which will continue to run at their current rates. the system is being designed so that if there is a demand, we can increase or decrease the head ways to 6

minutes each. the primary parking and traffic changes that we're making is we're taking out most of the left turns along van ness avenue except at lombard north bound and there's a number of reasons for this and the primary one is well i'd say the primary one is a safety reason is we can't have people making left turns in front of the buses as they run up and down van ness avenue. the secondary one is almost as important the shortening of the signal time to speed up the north-south traffic. in addition to that, as i mentioned earlier, there are a number of places where we are moving parking to accommodate the transit boarding

platforms and restoring parking in places where we're taking out existing bus stops as well so we've made every effort to minimize the parking changes that are being caused on the project and the crossing distance and increase pedestrian visibility and this with the new signals and pedestrian countdown timers should go a long way to improving pedestrian safety on the corridor. >> as part of this process, we went beyond it's befitting a project of this importance we sent out 22 22 thousand mailers prior to our public meeting to businesses and residents along the length of the corridor and we met with the staff of every member of

the board of supervisors whose district touches van ness avenue and convened a citizen's advisory committee and our 7th meeting is this week and we've met with a number of businesses concerned with relocation of their white zones or loss of white zones to work out accommodations with them so we realize that a project of this magnitude is going to have a significant impact and we've made every effort to make people aware of what's happening and to work together to minimize any problems it might cause and if you have any questions, i'd be happy to answer them. >> before we hear from the public questions or comments? >> the turns on like bush or pine because those are two

major one way streets people turn on and i know that those have been taken away? >> yes. >> have people looked if it was possible to retain those just because one way highly trafficked corridors and people people doing circumventing to get there. >> as it turns out, the broadway currently takes more left hand turns than all the other intersections put together, so if we're going to maximize the travel time for the buses and for north-south traffic a number of left turns have to be given up and broadway had to be retained so the decision was made to modify that scene of that

intersection to take the extra capacity expected and we're adding a second controlled left turn to broadway i know there are safety concerns at that scene of the at that intersection and there there will no longer be uncontrolled left turns at broadway. we added a second turn lane there to deal with the extra capacity. >> thank you. interesting. one question on page 4 we note that there's 16 thousand daily passenger boardings within the passenger limit but i also notice golden gate transit using those lanes do we have any sense of -- i'd imagine with golden gate transit it takes that number of people who aren't necessarily getting

on the bus but are travelling through so we're impacting so many people in a positive way on those buses. >> i don't have any numbers at hand right now for golden gate transit but i can say the 47, 49 lines which will benefit over all from this project not just in the corridor but the project will help speed up service and improve reliability along those lines and between 35 and 40 thousand passengers a day so it will have -- this project is a regional project as as caltrans continues to remind us when we meet with them. >> okay. thank you. >> just very quickly, i want to build off of the comments i see that in your presentation here

you talked about how it's going to improve pedestrian safety along the corridor, i'm wondering if you folks spent anytime looking at how much safer it will be for people in cars to actually have more controls for making left turns as opposed to uncontrolled left turns that might lead to a collision. >> that's a good point and we have been working very closely with caltrans to make sure that we don't do anything to worsen the safety situation for vehicles so far they have been very satisfied with the changes we've been making. but that's a good point. we can definitely look into that. >> i know that there's this company -- ups a great company they have this policy of not making left you are not left turns and part of it is the

safety with eliminating left turns and it's good to control them and sometimes folks have issues with driving a little bit further but in the grand scheme of things if we're looking at making our city's safer so looking at making it safer even for drivers so i'd like to hear about that. >> thank you so much for for the outreach efforts and i was wondering what the plan was by including seniors and the disabled so i was wondering what your plan was. >> so we're making every effort to meet or exceed ada requirements i've presented to the mta committee before and i've been working closely with

both kevin jackson and carl johnson from the mayor's office and light house for the blind to see if we can come up with some new and innovative ways of identifying for the people who are visually impaired that they are actually at an scene of at an scene of at an intersection with a brt stop. >> thanks. >> i want to thank you for that presentation. i think it's a great project. my concern is also with the businesses that are in that corridor you know, in terms of the white zones and yellow zones will they get their deliveries we don't want people double parked to slow down traffic have we looked at how we're going to address that? >> it has has been brought up and as we get closer to construction -- the first time it will begin to seriously

raise its head when we start the actual construction is we're going to have to work closely with police and parking and traffic to make sure that we have very stringent enforcement along van ness avenue the expectation is if we crack down early, we can prevent that behavior from developing. >> i just want to add i think the underlying part of the question how are mitigating concerns about existing white and yellow zones the shorter answer we've been working up and down the corridor to find work arounds and preserve them wherever we could. >> we've been working with the businesses and in a number of cases relocated white zones around the corner and in other locations at least one

restaurant we've -- we tweaked the transition on some on some of the landscaping to help preserve their white zones because it was a matter of a couple of feet so we made sure we could preserve their white zone in front of of the restaurant. we heard back from two hotels and this one restaurant we met with representatives from all 3 businesses and basically went through our plans to see what kind of impact we were having and how we could minimize it. >> fine. thank you. >> he >> members of the public? >> all right. >> good afternoon mr. mccoy.

>> thank you. my name is glen mccoy a mccoy a 28-year resident of san francisco and for all of that time i've worked in the civic center neighborhood having never owned a car in san francisco i'm also a long time and regular user of public transit folks thank you for the opportunity to offer comment on the proposed van ness bus rapid transit plan over all we think the plan is a great improvement for our neighborhood we applaud the foresight and care you are putting into it but on behalf of the ballet and i believe other art associations in the center we'd like to call attention to one serious concern about the stop at grove street given city

hall the access to bill graham auditorium and of course the opera house and davis city hall i think it would be hard to find an scene of an intersection on van ness with more pedestrian traffic so we'd ask that you take a closer look at that for all of our organizations a significant portion of our audience is senior citizens. we're very concerned about making access less convenient for them and a growing number are disabled citizens so we would ask that while we support the project, that you take a close look at at the elimination of that particular location. >> thank you sir. >> next speaker please? >> good afternoon. >> good afternoon. i'm rustle

kelvin kelvin the chief marketing director of the san francisco similar of the san of the san francisco symphon y. we have a significant number of senior citizens that are patrons as you know at the hall we seat over 27 hundred patrons and we conducted a survey over the summer where up to 15 percent take mass transit specifically the bus lines and those are locals and obviously tourists also and again a significant number are senior citizens and that stop is right on the corner and unfortunately a negative impact on us so if you could reconsider that stop.

thank you. >> good afternoon mr. smith. >> i'm a member of the san francisco transit rider's union and i'd like to show you this plan looks like a smart adaptation to changes that are going on in the city and elsewhere. i think that carrying more people and fewer vehicles and making it easier to live without a car will address our high cost of living and it will address the changes of younger people driving less and wanting to live without cars . it will basically make the city more livable and it will help the agonizing trips that some people have to take from market street to north beach or bay or however far north it goes

. my brother lives in the in the upper haight and he used to go to school around around pier 39 and he said it was agonizing and this would do a lot to improve it. i don't know i don't know what else to say. i'm in favor of this. i'd like to see it happen. >> thank you. next speaker please? >> i thank you directors. i'm ruth naught the director of education at the san francisco opera. . regarding the grove street stop being eliminated not only because many of our patrons are older but we're

making extra efforts in partnerships with schools and families to have more people coming that way as well so we appreciate you considering that as a possibility. thank you. >> thank you. >> next speaker please? >> my name is michael smith and i'm a long time transportation professional. i've tried to use data and information to improve the health of their transit systems and unfortunately the current system is not so healthy it's arteries clogged on van ness. it's not working for anybody even though it's the main transportation corridor and we really need to make improvements that are cost effective but go a long ways and these improvements are exactly that. the types of improvement we're looking for is traffic lanes that are dedicated to traffic turn restriction and see and such

and these will make a huge difference the things we can not have is a did a dumbing down of the system so that it doesn't work for anybody. we know that more than 10 thousand people use this corridor every day so i ask you to make as many improvements to this proposal as possible and not to detract from it in in anyway way the passengers of san francisco need you. thank you. >> next speaker please. >> good afternoon. >> good afternoon and thank you. my name is alice, majy i'll keep this short and sweet we love brt we want to see it throughout the entire city. this timeline we want to move it as close as possible so let's stop the delays and make

it happen. more people on transit means more people moving through this city and i frankly don't care how many parking spaces we have to sacrifice. thank you. [laughter]. >> okay thank you. next speaker please. >> good afternoon mr. anderson. >> thank you for having me again. i live at 77 van ness here to represent the homeowners association for the building at the corner of van ness and fell. i applaud brt people in brt people in the building -- our building is situated to where it faces van ness. i can tell you our building -- we have no idea that --