and dropped to 20 and then some some of the commercial and main streets were 30. >> thank you. >> i just wanted to thank both of you for the great report i wanted to highlight that the speed limit compliance map that you gave is all over the city and i know the mta has identified the pedestrian high injury corridors and the map of the collisions due to speeding in the city tend to be concentrated south of market and supervisor christensen district but still there's a lot of injures on the west side where there's a lot of red lines in the speed limit compliance in streets that you can drive much longer distances like i'm just looking at this through golden gate park i see a lot of red lines and

maclaren park and long street probably like sunset boulevard and a few others within the west side of the sunset but i think for a citywide approach and i know our mta is looking at calming traffic hopefully limiting speed limits is a part of that strategy and one other bit of information that you gave besides the london uk study showing that over the the 20-year period reducing traffic collisions by forty percent in their efforts i think that's an important piece of data and i think you said that study found that by reducing speed limits by one miles per hour reduces the number of collisions by 5 percent. >> that is correct chair mar it was a separate study but it found looking at a number of city's experienced a reduction of 1 mile per hour in average

speed resulted in a reduction. it's not as precise as that when we looked at the case studies but it was in that ballpark so it was interesting to see experience supporting that formula. >> and to supervisor campos's question to look at state legislation so our office is working with the mta but also our city attorneys office and beginning with the state and i wanted to highlight the case study for portland oregon for automated cameras looks like they use vans that drive into your neighborhood up to 4 hours takes pictures every 2 seconds triggered when somebody is going really fast but looks like an interesting use of new

technology in school and work zones so it's not throughout the city and it's not there all the time but it could really be targeted strategically to help people be more aware of the speed limits in a targeted way could you just talk about automated enforcement cameras and just whether you you think that's a realistic change that we could make at the state possibly local level. >> right. i think certainly based on the port land experience and you point out the vans that's a good point it's very mobile can go to where the problem spot is as can an officer on a motorcycle for example, but it's a much more efficient approach for the same level of staffing the camera can be taking pictures of every speeding vehicle as compared to an officer say pulling over someone and

issuing a citation and five cars are speeding by that the camera attached to the van would pickup photographs of all of those vehicles so there's a big jump in the productivity or efficiency using the technology. >> i think it's like any technology i'm sure there's some weaknesses to it or there can be disputes like what happened with the red light cameras where some people challenged the results of it but assuming the technology is solid it's a very effective means of catching a lot of speed ers more so than an individual officer could do at one time. >> we do use those mobile -- your speed is signs in san francisco there's one on harris on between 6th and 7th and at the airport too i noticed. >> that's right. i think of

all of these things looking at combinations of them is where we see the greatest effect that's coming through and on that note where we tried to indicate costs the highest costs associated with the biggest combination and we believe that would be the most effective in terms of reducing speed and one note on that is any program like this can be implemented in many different ways it can be certain neighborhoods or zones one camera versus 10 cameras so to the extent cost is a consideration or concern, there's certainly ways of spreading it out over time. it doesn't have to be a citywide program with all of these things implemented at one time everywhere. >> >> supervisor campos. >> thank you. just a question on that sir. a city like

london, do you know if they have phased in sort of their program did they start with you know a pilot then they expanded it do you have a sense of how that worked? >> i know it's been expanded over the years and there's a process not unlike what mta does here where neighborhoods can apply for funding and have to have a certain number of neighbors agreeing so definitely increased over the years and whether it started with a one or two pilot i'm not sure we could look into that and get that information to you. >> thank you. >> appreciate it. i was going to say that from some of the information from the report looks like there was california state legislation on automated traffic enforcement is systems introduced by the committee and it was vetoes by the governor and in 2013 another one one

that was enacted so i think we have to look at what that one allows but the different legislation that's occurred in the past and why they were defeated at times and i also wanted to say there's data not just from oregon and portland but also the state of washington from 2005 looks like oregon had theirs from 1995 on automated enforcement and the washington, d.c. -- yeah, the region had it in 2001 so looks like there's other regions we could draw from, too. >> i believe new new york city has recently obtained permission from their state legislature to implement a speed enforcement program automated. i think it was fairly recent. >> thank you so much for the great report. now i'm going to

ask the co-chair of our vision zero committee can speak to be followed by tom maguire from our sustainable streets division. >> thank you. >> thank you so much supervisors for the opportunity to speak today on this important issue my name is megan, weir and i'm the director of sustainability and also co-chair the vision zero task force.

>> approximately a quarter of patients seen each day in our trauma center have been injured as pedestrians in vehicle collisions. we are looking to international best practices with respect to creating the safety transportation system for all of the people that use it and we need speed management tools in our toolkit to reach this goal. i'm really inspired by this report and our police department to address this issue. people people make mistakes and there's a critical limit beyond which survival and recovery in an injury is not possible so it's critical the speed limit is not exceeded and

people can survive and through our work on vision zero we've identified what we're calling our vision zero high injury network i brought copies of it today. . it really expands our pedestrian and cyclist network and accounts for 12 percent of our city streets so 125 miles we're over 70 percent of people severely injured or killed on that network and this is where sfmta and other agencies are targeting safety improvements for vision zero and i wanted to highlight today also the correlation between that high injury network and our metropolitan network where

we have where. >> so through this work we're really addressing equity issues in san francisco as well. the report sites that approximately 20 percent of injury collisions in san francisco and it's important to note the report over all provides strong evidence that any increase in vehicle speed is associated with increased risk of injury and death. as driving speeds increase peripheral vision decreases and the distance it takes to come to a full stop increases. conversely decreases

in vehicle speeds on our streets even small ones can contribute to significant reductions in injury and death. we also know that san francisco's population is aging and with recent estimates of at least 15 thousand more seniors in san francisco by by 2020 and by 2030 over half of the population is projected to be over the age of 45. while the report articulates the cost of each alternative policy

scenario it also summarizes the cost of preventible injuries on the streets of san francisco and notably pedestrian and cyclist collisions tend to be higher when hit by a car i wanted to end i was recently at a presentation at the national transportation research board on pedestrian safety in poland which has adopted vision zero and a chart was shared showing a clear downward trend and trend. we're committed to achieving the same downward trend. thank you.

>> thank you. i just wanted to thank you and your staff and one of the former staff dr. ritchie batia and i'm glad that we have this report and a tremendous vision zero process that you are leading as well. colleagues, any questions? thank you so much megan-weir from the department of public health. >> . >> i have commander ann mattox from the police department. thank you also to the police department for being an early vision zero adopt er as well. >> great. i did provide the data that i could and i think you had a question about 2013 data? our data collection

methods weren't really accurate before april of 2013 so the numbers are a little bit off. again, i'm 2 weeks into this new position i'm very excited to work with all of the advocates i've met a few in the audience already working with the mta towards the goal of vision zero by 2024 we're here today to answer any questions you have specifically related to enforcement. other than that again i'm new i'm new to the position and i don't know what else i can offer today. i'm looking forward to working thank you for taking on the task that commander holly has been working on for years but i look forward to working with you. i know the report mentions that the police department is planning to increase the number of officers in the traffic enforcement unit by 25 percent and i'm just

wondering that's over 2 years i believe -- is that a part of the broader strategy with vision zero? >> as you know we're low in staffing and we're in the third year of a 6-year hiring program we're hiring approximately 150 each year and the goal is to staff stations first and a special operations are second and as we staff up the stations we'll be able to staff up the traffic company the muni division and also the tactical company as well again all of the special operations which are supplementary police resources take a back seat to a patrol at the station level so we'll be committing more resources absolutely. >> and infrom infrom the richmond district station we've seen a tremendous increase in

traffic enforcement in our district but i know each district is different and different priorities but it's been a pleasure to work with him and i know that's probably a district by district decision on how much to focus on traffic calming enforcement. >> as a city as a department we're focusing on the top five collision factors which i think you enumerated already and some districts are more spread out like yours and lends itself well so again we're focusing on the five are we getting them in every district at that number? not yet. >> very good. thank you so much. >> my pleasure. >> so now we have a joint part of this hearing is our representatives from the mta to

discuss traffic calming and also on arterial streets that accompany speed limit discussions and i wanted to reintroduce our head of safer streets mr. tom maguire and ricardo, aleja as well. >> thank you. i'm tom maguire i oversee the sustainable streets division at the mt a. perhaps the most important part of our mission is the achievement of vision zero. i'm really excited to see the board of supervisors following on its historic commitment to vision zero we of course share and i thought your comment

supervisor mar that the culture of speeding on the streets is appreciated and we'd like to use initiatives like vision zero to replace that culture of speeding with a culture of safety and also i want to thank you for your research and i took a few take aways from that and speed really matters it matters for reducing the the severity of crashes and the importance of combining enforcement education and engineering together which is the vision zero approach but combining those 3 together to achieve a safety outcome and of course the importance of automated safety enforcement and that's a tool that maybe as we embark

on a conversation about what the right speed limit is here in in san francisco we should think about how automated speed enforcement and why does speed matter? because it's the most important cause of fatal injury crashes in san francisco and that's found in the research presented earlier today it was found in the research that my colleagues have done and have been working on for years and as the commander said it's focusing on the five and we're focussed on reducing those dangerous high speeds. >> how do speed limits fit into that picture? it's an important tool that helps pair with engineering and education

and enforcement to effect drivers behavior. we have in addition to the broad vision zero policy we have a number of specific programs within mta which our city traffic engineer is going to talk about. we have a program similar to the ones that were described in new york city and the uk about creating home zones where we take residential areas with low traffic volume with speeding problems and reengineer the streets so that the streets are appropriate for residential neighborhood. changing the speed limit in california in anyway is a complicated process. we need to be

mindful of the overlapping legal issues that will result from looking to lower the speed limit. we also need to consider that there is a policy context at the statewide level not every city has made the commitment that san francisco has made and there are certainly there are legislators that have different views on the matter speed limits touch not just only the traffic safety issues but the effectiveness of communication how we expect drivers to behave on the streets, to the public and those are important issues we need to engage. doesn't mean we shouldn't try to lower the speed limit but be realistic about what a challenge it will be we also know the senate transportation committee i believe they currently have a policy that they are not interested in considering measures to lower

speed limits without engineering traffic studies so none of those are constraints that that can't be overcome but will require the city and county to maybe lead the state on this issue and require us to work with our colleagues from the legislative side and from within the administration in sacramento to make everyone aware of again the importance why speed matters so much in preventing fatalities and injuries on our streets and in places like san francisco that have taken on big challenges like vision zero to get the tools we need to get that job done. there's a couple of different options i think we want to think about as we start to talk about speed limit policy and the first of course as was described before the default background speed limit

for the entire city and one option is to allow the city to lower those limit and see another option would be to allow a targeted lowering in areas where traffic calming devices home zones and other programs like that have been introduced and that might be appropriate in the tenderloin and south of market where we have a densely could concentrated severe crash problem and there's been some great research by the controller's office about the effectiveness of automated safety enforcement and reinforcing the speed limits and safing lives near schools and senior centers. we look

forward to a time when san francisco -- >> you said 136 different cities? >> yes cities and municipalities yes. so all of those comments are just to say that again speed matters. we know that speed is probably the most important driving behavior that we need to get under control but it needs to to to be pursued in both policy context at the state level and also needs to be paired with the education and enforcement efforts that we're working on with everyone in the city family to move forward. so before i turn it over to ricardo, i would just put in a

plug and hope that you will find a way to help us make that case in sacramento about automated safety enforcement this year and to begin to lay the ground work for some changes to the speed limit over the course of the session. thank you. >> good afternoon supervisors. i'm the city traffic engineer with the sfmta and i'd like to commend the legislative analyst 's office for for the report they made a complicated subject very understandable. and i think the board putting attention on this will help us as well as the public to understand some of the -- these

are the cross town through streets that are used to connect neighborhoods and the city with the regional transportation network. san francisco doesn't have a lot of through freeways so a lot of the local traffic gets mixed with the through traffic on these arterials these are streets that can carry 10 to 10 to fifty thousand vehicles a day so they are pretty important streets in terms of volume and also in terms of of the role they play in the system. the arterials in san francisco unfortunately have the characteristics that they are travelling often through very dense commercial areas and dense residential areas there's not this sort of segregations you see in some cities where an arterial will be a major street that doesn't have

fronting businesses or residential. a lot of activity so we have to be conscious of that the arterials in san francisco vary widely from being wide streets to very wide streets to being streets that are more in out of the way areas and we all agree movement of these thousands of vehicles a a day has to be done in a safe matter and how to achieve that and we don't want to do things to arterials that would encourage people to use other streets so if we effect arterial traffic. speeding can

also vary depending on the time of day so even talking about streets being congested during the day there may be times when they are relatively empty ier and that's a situation where you may have speeding at night on weekends or during the middle of the day. as megan and others have talked about the city now has a map where we've concentrated the highest injury streets and if you look at this map and compare with the arterial map you will see a big overlap and that's a function of the fact it's more likely for people to get into collisions on these major streets by the fact they are carrying so much traffic and

have a lot of bicycle and pedestrian activity so there's a large overlap and over all injury maps and the arterial network in the city and unsafe speed i'd like to emphasize if you are speeding you are more likely to run a red light or be unable to yield to a pedestrian or lose control of your vehicle in a situation where somebody else is trying to turn and so forth so speeding is not just by itself it's probably behind a secondary or third factor behind most collisions when you are going slower you can react to unanticipated things in a better fashion and there's also the fact that all of these collisions can be can be non injury or fatal and