tv [untitled] December 12, 2014 1:30pm-2:01pm PST
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country with the lowest rates of pedestrian and all traffic injuries and fatalities and thorough analysis we might need to take a better look at certain intersections and determine if the the traffic signal is the best solution and cut through traffic might be you know it might not be haight street where we see the pedestrian injuries increase but maybe on the streets where there's more cut through traffic happening because now a signal is there that facilitates -- and they are not getting pedestrian improvements because this is focussed just on haight street and the last couple of things i want to highlight an e-mail was sent to the board highlighting that
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a lot of the improvements are not up to the plan requirements so i hope that when we do make improvements on this street that they are up to our existing best practices. >> next speaker please. >> good afternoon everyone. i'm dave prinze i've been on haight street for for 17 years 5 days a week for for 17 years i'm pretty familiar with the street. it's not an issue on haight street maybe when there's a could not gas there's a dong there's a congregation of street people with dogs but i'm mostly opposed to the bulbs not so much the lights the bulbs are problematic it's a narrow street as it is and it seems unnecessary to me and it's going to remove parking spaces.
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how many parking spaces are going to be removed and if they are removed what's the impact? from my calculations at least 20 percent of the parking spaces are going to be moved at both ends and that's going to create congestion and creates a domino effect if cars have to drive around looking for spaces i'd advocate against the bulbs they are not necessary. you say the buses need a bulb -- there's no traffic it's a dead end so no traffic coming. the bus stop there is perfectly adequate to serve the needs of what they are trying to do to increase our travel time that that shouldn't be an issue. you are taking away our loading zones and we need our loading zones we have about fifty deliveries a week and hundreds of customers bringing in
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products as well take away our loading zones and people will double park ups and fedex now how is the bus getting by? whoever has planned this hasn't informed us giving us a chance to respond and communicate with them in a in a way that we can do this together in a way that makes sense. so just to come here and tell us you are going to take away our loading zones and we've been providing money and taxes for the city is not fair. >> thank you. >> good afternoon. >> hi i'm joe gold mark i've dave's partner i just want to give you a little more of a picture of that end of haight street you have whole foods on one side you have ameba on the other and right beside us is a
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mac donald's and we all have driveways coming and going the proposal is for a bulb out right in front of our our store and right in front of whole foods and buses backed up way behind it and nobody is going to be able to get out of out of the driveways for starters and cause congestion constantly stopping and going with exhaust and the lights -- if there's no bus there the lights themselves is going to cause congestion because there's going to be cars lined up just to get through the lights. it's un warranted and unneeded there's a nice bus stop right in front of mac donald's now right in front of our store with the bulb out that's going to create this
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unbelievable congestion not to mention what dave mentioned with our deliveries. we have a couple of hundred people a week come to sell us stuff we're like a trading post at amebia we buy and sell used product. they can't double park and they can't park because the parking spots are being taken away it's a disaster for us that's all i'm saying. thank you. >> next speaker please. >> hi my name is tim park er. i'm concerned that the traffic bulb outs in particular will cause a a traffic nightmare up there. there are many merchant s on haight street that have
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supplies delivered all day long. i get my supplies delivered by big trucks and if you make it so that nobody can pass a bus, how are the supplies supposed to to be delivered? i think it will actually slow down the buses which is what you are trying to improve so that's my main concern. just need to be able to do business on haight street. thank you. >> >> thank you thank you sir. >> next speaker please? >> >> hi. i own the haight ashbury music center for the last for the last 34 years i work 7 days a week i still do and i just heard about what's going on last night and i work on this street so somehow this
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thing just bypassed everybody and came to your desk and we get big trucks with pallets and stuff delivered we already lost 2 or 3 parking spaces and our loading zones to the one next door to us. there's too many tourists a bunch of people lie on the street they have dogs and camp out and nothing is being done about it and all of a sudden you are taking bus stops away we don't have enough parking so people have to rely on bus on bus to patron ize our businesses so taking those bus stops away and putting them every 4 blocks it will make it harder for people to shop with us they will go go to the malls or something so consider on behalf of the merchants who
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actually pay taxes and they have already a hard enough time with the internet and everything else you know we need to bring the public to have access for them to come to to our stores. >> thank you. >> next speaker please. >> yes, sir? >> good afternoon i own a property and also two businesses for almost 30 years we need a practical solution to haight street i'm not sure if statistical for example anywhere else in san francisco would apply to us. board member lee you had a practical idea the minute you saw this slide you saw there's a way to approach this we we need to get together with the communities listen to what works for us. i have stores
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on valencia and noe they are lt noe they are totally different than haight street haight street has homeless problems we're talking about cutting traffic we should put put this into test. jay walking, u-turns these are real real issues we deal with we need a practical solution walk the street and as you suggested board member lee we need to put this into practice to see if it works or not and i'm asking you one to one one to one participant with the planning and thank you for your time and make a decision that's good for everyone. >> hello. i'm from hayes
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valley neighborhood association i want to draw your attention to a letter that the association wrote to the staff on this project july july 9th and you should have gotten a copy of that as well as here's a letter from one of my neighbors who couldn't attend. we generally support efforts to speed up muni and we applaud staff for all their hard work on this neighborhood association. you may know it spear headed an effort to make improvements between octavia and gough however we have a lot of concerns and are opposed to a signal ization specifically at laguna and haight the letter we wrote to you outlines the reasons for that first of all it's about pedestrian safety and convenience right now
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pedestrian when they want to cross that intersection, there's a stop sign there, they look at the driver make sure they stop and then they go. if there's a signal it impedes pedestrian movement and we're a pedestrian oriented neighborhood. all the hardware and unsightly hardware will change the character of that intersection from a neighborhood intersection to a car oriented intersection as someone already pointed out there's a lot of through traffic on laguna. the signals will speed up that traffic and there's no need for it. right now there's a proposal for a bus only lane. there will be there will be one from buchanan to laguna and the buses won't be held up by a stop sign so for these reasons and others we oppose the signal at laguna and
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haight thank you. >> thank you. last two speakers mr. chairman. >> good afternoon directors howard stras ner one this thing started off with the discussion saying oh if you have signals you can speed up traffic and morphed around and everything is going to slow down traffic you have a hard job here. i think that the bus bulbs will move some paragraph off and traffic off and the signals they have countdown signals even for the short crossings. a lot of people are beginning to understand these things. it's not like new new york city. the other thing -- taking out people don't like bus bulbs -- a position last
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month no parking on the opposing side you mentioned taking out a parking place and that affords a lot of safety for pedestrian for pedestrians because you don't have to look all the way out to see the cars you can stand there and cars can see you and the pedestrian can see the car so that's really a lot so if you don't want bulbs. people are concerned that people will speed on the streets crossing haight so if you have bulbs there then you have shorter walks for pedestrian that's one way around it. this is really up in the air. good luck. thank you. >> [laughter]. >> last speaker herbert weiner. >> mr. weiner?
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>> herb ert weiner this has been a long meeting and i really shouldn't complain because i spend just as much time waiting for the bus. anyway one problem with bulb outs they are very expensive they are 3 hundred $300,000 a pop couldn't we spend that money on having more coaches? i really think so i think this would solve the problem of speed and transportation because it's a question of convenience. i think that this idea of removing parking spaces is going to create more traffic congestion i don't like the idea of businesses having their economic livelihood destroyed by these bulb outs i think that's cat that's categorically unfair and the
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nuvo rich coming in trying to create a new san francisco and trying to erase the old one on the grounds of beautifying the city and frankly as a native satisfy satisfy i as a as a native san franciscan i don't like this idea. i . i don't live in the haight ashbury but i care about what's happening to the rest of the city and i do sometimes take the bus the bus to the city. thank you. >> okay we got one more speaker. good afternoon. >> good afternoon. legislative aid to supervisor london breed. this section is entirely within district five and i want to thank your staff shaun kennedy for all the outreach
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they have done in the community as well as alexis smith in planning i think they have done a model job doing outreach to the community and they really deserve a a a commend ation ation for that. >> we received an e-mail and i want to read this into the record so your commission can bear in mind the service bus stations in the future. my name is raj and it's come to my attention that the board is considering installing -- the
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upper haight retail district has ongoing challenging with quality of life and drug dealing and blight. i would like to give you some perspective of issues we continue to have with the existing bus shelters on masonic and haight street we have individuals on masonic who drink at the shelters and my officers have to focus on because the shelter becomes un useable for riders. deal ers stand at the shelter. >> this is a 2-minute limit here. what is supervisor breeds advice to us this afternoon.
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>> i think you have a difficult decision in front of you based on all of the feedback today i wish i could be more helpful on that we've been involved in a lot of the outreach process and heard from people on both sides of the issue and public safety with respect to the bulb outs and size and homeless population and everything else i wish i could give you a better more definitive answer than that but i think that's why you guys make the big bucks -- [laughter] and so as we move forward and consider the installation of surface bus stops that's definitely a concern for her and a concern for the captain that we'd want you to take into consideration. >> could we have mr. kennedy come back and we have a few
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more clarifying questions. >> there's a lot that we went through and since director heinicke is not here i'll remind them that we that we set policy and we have to make really difficult decisions and i think we're at a really difficult decision points we're getting a lot of public feedback on the one hand we have an insatiable appetite we need to move as many people as we can safely and comfortable ly as we can and i think this project is going to go a long way to doing that. can we just address a few of these things? i really want to talk about the the issue the merchants brought up. do you think we'll be able to address the loading zone issues? >> yes. so we've been able to
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identify any loading zone that we are i guess it's going to be replaced so within the same block on haight street there will be loading zones for whatever we take away. >> for the place making group i think the merchant group is engaged in i know i've seen this do our changes preclude the work? >> yeah so working with alexis as well as some as some of the merchants this work is ongoing i mentioned we still have a lot of work to do on the place making but we're just trying to move into detail design on the curb work and that's kwha that's what this legislation is about. none of the proposals that we've come up with would not allow for any of the place making and we'll support much
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of it in relation to the kind of public space they want to make some of those improvements with. >> i'm glad to hear that again the appetite on haight street for changing the the street and making it a more comfortable place to be is pretty high so i'm glad to hear that it's going to help them and not harm them. the livable city letter brought up the idea of the bulb out extending around the corner to the cross street -- it looks like it's not necessarily in this? >> a couple of places we proposed including masonic but many of the cross streets the street was too narrow to make those turns and include the bulbs but we are going to go
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back in the process of going back and reviewing that based on his letter and seeing where during the detailed design phase where we could add those additional bulbs on the side street and obviously if we don't have daylighting at those locations might involve additional parking removal needs so we would return to the board at that time for those additional parking spots. >> and i know the parking removal comes up obviously all the time when we're working on projects i have a high level of confidence in our ability to manage parking so there is availability and remind me i don't remember -- is haight street part of the sf park pilot area? it's not so we haven't optimized parking yet at some point we'll have the opportunity to do correct mr. reiskin? i don't have any other specific questions i'm looking forward to hearing from
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my fellow board members but from what i've heard i do intend to support this project. >> there's clearly a lot of disagreement within the community all different sectors of the community whether it's the light at laguna and haight or bulb outs or public safety and i feel like there seems to be a disconnect in the outreach i know there's been great outreach to a certain extent but doesn't seem like there's a best agreement around some of the solutions and i do i do know i remember the whole foods and i know that whole corridor is challenging and garages and other i things don't quite add up for me so i'm just having a hard time because i feel like i mean there could be some more work done to maybe look at where the bulb outs are and
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commissioner lee taking out parking spaces in some of the those places and i'd rather we spend the time you know doing that as opposed to rushing forward because i mean, it is of concern for the merchants and people in the communities and i think it's not like one group said we're opposed there's a the there's a lot of people who had issues today. >> i just have a tag along question to that comment which is that do you think that kind of sending this back and having a few more weeks to work with some of the folks that brought up these concerns would be productive or do you feel that staff has evaluated the things have been raised and vetted all these ideas thoroughly. >> i'm going to tell you obviously a statement that haight street is obviously very challenging and there are a
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million interests and a million you know varying ideas on what should happen and everyone has their own take on it obviously as you have heard today. the only way we're going to if to effectuate is to make some of these smaller improvements that aggregate up to a larger improvement for the whole corridor and get a safer and more reliable transit system that's whale that's what i will say and i realize and recognize there's a lot of disagreements and varying ideas on what should happen but you know this is the staff recommendation at this time and we think this is you know how we're going to get to a more reliable transit system and that's where the trade-offs have to be. >> i was just wonder wondering to the public safety concern
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that supervisor breed brought up. >> i do want to say today's legislation has nothing to do with shelters and the place where shelters will happen or not happen or where they will go or not go if there's seating or no seating that's a different process more like 6 to 12 months down the road from now but directly involved and plan to work with the merchant groups that we've setup with the working groups we set to to identify where we're not going to have shelters and not going to have them so today's legislation has nothing to do with shelters. >> director ramos? >> i just wanted to get a clarification -- based on your response are you saying that the meetings with the community has gone as far as as far as
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it can go and there's no other compromise now? >> there's always more discussions we can have and more things we can do. the majority of those changes i think are kind of on the public realm side of things and we can work out like i said during the next 6 to 12 months like shelters and exact locations of loading zones identify where they put them and work with the merchants to be sure those are acceptable and we can continue to talk through and with them about and that wouldn't even be something we can legislate today we can go back and do a shorter bulb length so i just feel like those additional conversations can continue to happen regardless if we put this legislation off or not. >> okay because my concern becomes and i know you are diligent about what you do but
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when you say okay we've identified the yellow zones are going to move to another spot if the merchants are saying wait a minute i'm losing those yellow zones so now wait a minute -- >> i think the disconnect obviously awareness of the project you know we've had like i said we've been doing meetings in and on and off for for 4 years on the corridor and all of those projects going to street ^ fares to street fares and talking to the merchant can see association and this is going to happen everybody you know, how many people -- there's always more outreach that that can be done and people are always surprised at the last minute and that's something if you feel uncomfortable with put off legislation and i'll come back you know a couple of meetings from
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