district and particular sfmta to have a discussion and address the needs of the youth and families and many that travel long distance to get to school and also the after school program. i know that the youth commission and the advisory committee has been discussing this item and back in 2012 when they did a survey 38% of the students stated they took more than one bus to get to school, and i do represent a district that doesn't have any high schools in the district so i know many of the youth have to commute very far to get to the school of their choice or the one that they get into and while i think we have been successful with the youth commissioners and leaders ensuring free muni for youth which has been a tremendously successful program we. to make sure that the city and school district. >> >> discusses how we can best serve our youth and families. commissioner fewer. >> thank you supervisor kim.

i requested this item to be heard to get an update media relations with the san francisco unified school district but also to get an update on muni service to the students. san francisco unified school district we are constantly asking ourselves how well we're serving our students so it's natural we would inquire how the city services are doing and we educate 57,000 school children and the majority fall within the federal poverty guidelines and many are dependent on public transportation it to and from school. ails the board of education decided to reduce the bus service of yellow buses and making them more dependent on public transportation. with the increase of san francisco residents for the past four years every year and our population increased by 10,000 new residents i think it would be interesting to see how the residents have impacted muni

service if at all and what is the current service to the students particularly on city schools and how are the decisions made. we thank you for the presentation as we haven't had an update for this time. and this joint committee is the perfect place to have the conversation and i look forward to hearing and learning a lot. on behalf of the san francisco unified school district and i would like to thank you for the service and muni for service to the families and as i mentioned many are dependent on it. thank you. >> thank you commissioner fewer. i wanted acknowledge candace su and director for sfmta and recognize julie chrisbalm from the managing and

sfmta and i believe they're presenting first previous to david golden at sfusd. >> thank you. so good afternoon chair kim, supervisors, commissioners, staff and public. i am candace su the director of communications for sfmta. i am pleased to be joined with you today by julie chrisbalm from the transportation division and jason lee from information and technology group. in addition we have sue lu here from the muni program and all may which help to answer questions so thank you for having me and for allowing me to offer some opening remarks. i would like to start by contextualizing who we are at the municipal transportation agency and at

sfmta as we're known we have a diverse and wide raging set of responsibilities for the city managing transportation and the network that we serve. >> >> we have also many things in common with the san francisco unified school district in that we're a large diffuse organization with multiple stakeholders with varying needs and different expectations that we are working very hard to fulfill upon. and in part i believe both organizations are also dealing with changing expectations in the public's sphere how information comes together and how we deliver that information to our constituenies and while we have many areas within the organization that are currently working together successfully and have been doing so for years there are clear opportunities for us to do more, and we have some ideas that we will share on that towards the

ends of the presentation but i will say for now that i am very pleased that we see that there is an opportunity and have been actively figuring it out together how we can work more closely to improve our communications and our services to the constituents that we serve. so back to sfmta and what we do. we have a lot of programs that work at this time to serve students and to help them travel safely two and from school and i would like to provide some context for all of what we do including those on the pedestrian safety side starting with vision zero but also talking about our safe routes to school program, the school crossing guards program and accessible services and then i'm going to turn it over to julie from our transit operations division to really dive into the transit services component as well as free muni

for youth. i will note that just having listened to the presentation on summer schools that jobs and the program that muni has is well received and is a year round program and they allow students to get to activities year round including jobs. so just to spend a moment on vision zero. this is such an enormous part of our work at the mta and specifically on the sustainable streets side and i thought it was important to talk about this and i will say that december 2013 was a really, really bad month for traffic safety and there was a lot of tragedies that month, and deaths in the -- traffic deaths and one of those that really captured the attention and hearts of so

many of us and so many in the public space is the tragic loss of sophia lu and she was a six year old sherman elementary student who was killed in a crosswalk in the evening as an uber driver and this could have been anyone's child and it's deeply tragic and it has catalyzed us and moved everyone in the city, particularly you chair kim to do something about it and to really act, and i think that's an important moment to recognize, and through supervisor kim's work and that of many advocates and city leaders that has lead us to a new policy goal for the city, for the entire city, of zero traffic deaths by 2024. and it is a policy that nearly every

city agency at this point as adopted. the premise is pretty simple. the premise is that traffic deaths are preventible. they're not accidents which means we can do something about them, and i think what's important about the goal it's big but also motivating so it's driving the city to work together in new and different ways, and we believe that's very achievable and we would like to thank supervisor kim for putting that forward and really championing this work. just a little bit about what is happening. you hear about the three e's and some are listed here and education, enforcement and engineering. there is an evaluation component with the partners at public health. there is a policy component to changing laws and engagement and advocacy, and sfmta has some key roles in this particularly around the engineering and the

education sphere. again not diving into too many details so i will just move on into the safe -- >> actually i am sorry to interrupt you. we did a hearing last month just sprg on safe routes to school and the capital plan so i think you can skip over the next three slides. >> okay. i am happy to do that. i wanted to acknowledge that you heard that and contextualize the information and the 25 schools participating in the safe routes to school programs as well as where they are across the city. okay. and then also our traffic guard program. so moving along i just want to mention we have a program that you may not be aware of with the accessible services program and access sfusd. this is more of a jobs program and participation program that we run through this group, and there is a coffee cart job program that

encourages students to get some experience, real world experience, by selling and maintaining a coffee cart at our offices and it gives them a chance to have a role. some of these students also have the opportunity to be like mystery shoppers that go on the system to report how we're doing in terms of accessible services and report back to us and there's also a reward component to that because they give rewards to operators doing a good job so it's self reinforcing program and we have participation in the mac committee and overall i wanted to set some context and say there are many areas we're working together and often when there is a direct connection at the level -- at the school level where there is interest on the school side and a program that correspondos our side we do very well with lots of opportunity again to do more. i had one

other slide i wanted to share which is data related. you might have seen this in the last presentation but it's important to put forward to put it in context on the transit side and data how children are getting to school so both by grade level as well as by mode and you can see in the top boxes there is a fair number of younger children into middle school walking to school and living within close enough distance to do that. as they get older and transition into the upper middle grades and high school there is more of a shift into public transit, and still a fair amount of students who are driving, more than 50% in this case and this comes from data that is trend data it comes out of a contracted relationship with uc berkeley that does the survey every year so we get a

chance to see a wide range of data and we partnered with the school district to float a youth survey that is served to older kids and through that you could see the data in the bottom two bullets that sfusd high schoolers, 46% are riding muni to school and 63% from school so more -- there are more high school students who are using muni to get home and we can imagine why, parents at work and the like, and so commissioner fewer you mentioned that the mta provides some important services for students, but in turn it's important for the transportation system as a whole to have our students choosing a sustainable mode of transportation, be it walking or taking muni for the transportation system to work so we recognize that as well and we think both free muni for youth

and all of the programs we can encourage the youth of sustainable forms of transportation is very important to the city as a whole so i will stop there and i would like to turn it over to julie to talk you through the next section. >> thank you ms. su. >> good afternoon. the muni has a really long history of serving transportation needs of children and schools, and when we go out and we do focus groups with students one of the things that i hear more than anything is that for middle school and high school students the bus is independence and that is something in a suburban community you doafnt have. students and young people are using it across the city and we want to encourage that and grow. we have really robust options for our transit students. the

system as a whole is designed so that almost all destinations are within a quarter mile of the a transit stop so it's nor more than a five minute walk and 30% transfers is on par with what we see in the system, so we have a system that's a grid so you may have to transfer one time, but with that we're able to get almost anywhere in the city without owning a car. we also provide supplemental service after school to better serve student needs and also so the pulse of a school letting out doesn't overwhelm the rest of the system and i will talk about that. we are excited we provided free muni for low and moderate income youth and this is an exciting time in the system because we're increasing service and part because of the increased demand and more

people moving here and more people using transit and you will see increased demand. this is a map of the schools and the city shown in black as well as the transit system so you can see the dense network of service that we have and every school within a five minute walk. this colorful map shows all of the student boarding activity we have been reporting through free muni for youth and as they tag on with the clipper card we know if they're using the system and the routes that jump out are the 38 and richmond and visitacion valley and chinatown,let 29 sunset and serves schools across some of the outer neighborhoods including the sunset, all the way over to the bay view, 14 mission, 49 up van ness and down the line so we do have a set of routes that we watch very closely for school activity and

we increase the service during school times so in the morning as well as from about the two to four period in the afternoon. as i mentioned we do have about 27 routes that are shown on the map below and match some of the routes we talked about so the green line for example is the 28 which is a heavily used school route. the purple is the 38. these are buses that start empty at school at the end of the day, and what that allows is for students just to leave the building and get on the bus and they do the regular school route. we are not -- because we receive federal transit administration funds we're not able to just have school only routes or routes that just have students on them but by adding the extra routes into the

schedule they full up with students and they continue to do the regular routes. we're always evaluating and responding to requests where we theed this and i think within the last six weeks add one on folsom and 20 20th at john o'connell and two schools came together so there was increased demand for service so we added a bus there, and the folks in the muni transit assistance program they help facilitate getting students on the vehicles. they meet with principals and they often ride the buses when students are most vulnerable, so that's been a really successful program as well. we tried for that program as much as possible that hire people that come from the low income neighborhoods that students are riding from so there is a relationship and it's a known face and known

commodity, so that's something that has worked very well and is a resource to principals throughout the city. this map here shows the free muni for youth activity by zip code. you can see over 26,000 students have enrolled in the program since its inception of march 2013. we extended the eligibility to include 18 year olds as well as 19-22 year olds that are enrolled in sfusd education services. the program costs over two years in the order of $8 million. our next challenge will be to find a stable long-term funding source for this program, but it is heavily used throughout the city in particular in the southeast quadrant as well as the north

of market. we are also always trying to learn more about how students use the system. we did the transit effectiveness project which is a systems study in 2007 and 2008. i had the opportunity to do focus groups with students and really talk to them. we partnered with the youth commission so we had student facilitators so we trained the students and they had a dialogue and that was really interesting and we learned a lot about some of the challenges and opportunities of riding muni. we also were able to secure quite a bit of real estate on the 2013 youth vote survey to try to get a better noting what perceptions were on the system and how they were traveling. in know jt students in the school -- in general students gave muni high marks in terms of the on time performance, in terms of safety.

some of the things that caught our attention when we ask them -- well, how many are planning ride as adults? and less than 50% answer yes and i think that is short term and being enamored with the automobile. we learn when kids develop habits young and ride transit young they carry it throughout their life. i am also excited to report on what i think is a really positive upward trajectory for the overall muni system but particularly affects students that have to make more than one transfer or traveling a long distance to get to a school. about six months ago we hit a pretty low point in terms of service delivery. we didn't have enough operators and we were missing about 5% of the service everyday. that doesn't sound very much but it's 500

trips so 500 buses that were supposed to show up that didn't. if you're somebody that takes the 12 folsom to school that means if one trip is missing you might had to wait 30 minutes for the next vehicle. we had an intenseir operator hiring program under way and graduating about 40 to 45 each month and exceeding our goal of 99% of the scheduled service and improving our on time performance also. we're also reducing the amount of vehicle break downs that we have and that can be tough. if you're trying to get to school and the bus breaks down it's almost like the dog ate my homework and so we are seeing by focusing on key components that were breaking down and actually replacing them through capital investments we're seeing a really positive trends in the

vehicle break downs and introducing new buses to the system and we had 112 purchased and more to come and with the goal in the next years to completely replace the bus fleet. the reason i was flagging this service because one of the results of this mixed service you end up with more vehicles crowded than otherwise so during the a.m. peak when kids are trying to get to school and we had 9% of trips full and it's hard to get on the bus. you may or may not be passed up but it's an unpleasant experience and as the green bars increase you see the numbers drop so far fewer full buses and we expect that trajectory to continue to

improve because we are adding service to many of our school routes. we have a 10% service increase planned and a lot of the heavy school routes are the first to receive more service. in january we increase service on the 44. that was where we went out and talk to students at hillcrest elementary on silver and between seven and 750 they were having two buses pass them because they couldn't get on, so we increased service on that route. on april 25 we're going to be increasing service on some of our heaviest ridership routes and touch about 30% of the bus customers or 165,000 a day and outer mission and visitacion valley and the chinatown area and along mission, the 28 line which

serves schools through both the marina and richmond and the sunset, the 29 sunset and the 38 geary, so that's something we're really exciting about. we're also as i said ordering new buses which will give more 60-foot articulated buses to put on the 30 stockton route and have a bus every two and a half minutes but it's a small bus and if we can get the 60-foot buses out there that will help tremendously with crowding. in addition to the service increases we are working on things to make the service safer and more reliable and give transit more priority in our streets. we are really blessed that the voters just passed prop a and prop b which will invest 500 million into the infrastructure for pedestrian safety and transit reliability part of which is 40-miles of

muni investments and more dedicated transit lanes, bus bulbs so the bus doesn't need to pull in and out of traffic and more room toit wa. new signals and things like that and work that i am really proud of that is still a work in process is that last may the mta board adopted a muni service equity policy which essentially says that we're going to be looking at six low income neighborhoods annually but right now we're going through and collecting a lot of data, going out and talking to customers and residents, and trying to understand what are the biggest transit challenges facing these neighborhoods and then we're going to link the new investments to both our capital and operating budget so we're in the process now of establishing the baseline and then next january we will be bringing the

mta board recommendations that then would feed into the budget process so many of the neighborhood issues where for example low income students are trying to get across the city are issues that we're targeting in the equity strategy and we're finding that the issue vary by neighborhood. in chinatown for example the biggest issue is crowding. there's pretty frequent access, easy to get places whereas in the bay viewt challenge is reliability and connectivity because it's further out. >> [inaudible] >> okay before that i had a clarifying question. when you were sharing the data about number of crowded buses how do you defined crowded and how did you collect that data? >> we have automatic passenger counters, about 30% of the buses and circulate in the system so we get rich data this counter

is essentially two laser beams. if you break this one first you're getting on and the next one you're getting off and not whether you pay or not but tracking everyone that gets on and off the bus and gives datsa how many are boarding and which stops and crowding and we defined crowding on the buses based on a square footage per passenger so we assume all of the seats are full and there are some standees but it's not packed to the gills situation, so on a 60-foot bus for example we can serve a bus if it has 90 or 100 people on it is full and for a 40-foot bus it's full if there is about 60 people on it so it's a combination of seating and standees. >> sorry for 60-foot bus how many seats?

>> there's about 60. >> about 60 so you're talking about all of the seats are taken and 50% more are standing on the bus? >> yes. >> actually i am surprised and impressed there is that way to capture that data i didn't realize we had that technology and capturing people entering and exiting off of muni and helpful and interesting how you define crowding. very helpful. commissioner fewer. >> yes thank you. so i also have a clarifying question. on the sfusd use of the transportation system -- the sort of stats that you have here do you know the actual number of students that you're serving? >> yeah, we know using -- the best data that we have is the students using the free muni for youth because they're tag on

and off everyday and we have about 29,000 boarding a day. we have additional student customers on top of that that do not meet the low and moderate income -- >> sure. >> it should give a order of magnitude. >> excuse me. this was done by the uc berkeley school of public health so i wanted to know if there is a number -- it says percentages but we don't have numbers of students that were surveyed, or is this -- >> we would be happy -- >> [inaudible] students so i am wondering about the sampling and how large it is. >> we are happy to follow up on that. >> and i have the same question for the 2013 survey on student perceptions of muni, and was this all grades? is it just high schools i guess and how many students participated, the actual number so what does it

really represent? i think that would be helpful too and also were the surveys done in multiple languages or only in english so if you can get that information that would be great too. >> absolutely. the youth vote survey is not a transportation specific survey. it's a survey done by dcyf. >> right. >> and i believe they do have -- >> coleman started it. >> i believe it's multilingual and get a robust sample size but we're happy to follow up. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. i just had a couple of follow up questions. when we were doing research around this issue we came across the transit website and they had a page just listing the bus lines serving schools in alameda county and i am curious if we have something similar along this line. it seemed like a great resource for students and families to learn which bus lines kind of connect to which