good morning and welcome to the san francisco county transportation authority meeting for today, tuesday, october 23rd.

our clerk is mr. alberto quintanilla. mr. quintanilla, if you could please call the role. [ roll call ] [ roll call ] we have quorum. >> thank you, mr. quintanilla. i am going to skip over the chair's report, pending the arrival of commissioner yee, who actually has a brief presentation that he would like to make under the chair's report, and ask you, mr. quintanilla, to read the executive director report item number three. >> clerk: item three, executive director's report, this is information item.

>> this month i'd like to first start by thanking several of our commissioners for joining myself, staff on the t.a., and a set of officials and planners from the san mateo c.m.a., county congestion agency, on a study tour to los angeles, where we visited the l.a. metro express lanes, heard from their staff and their policymakers regarding decision making at a similar juncture to where we are in our planning for potential managed lanes here in the bay area. that was a full-day tour. we were very appreciative of the staff for taking care of us, showing us the facility itself, transit centers, control centers, enforcement points and talking about the thorough process they undertook in their planning, particularly regarding the topic of environmental justice and equity and affordability of a potential toll facility in los angeles.

they shared with us several policy strategies that they adopted ultimately that we're looking at currently in our treasure island mobility management program, as well as potentially for san francisco lanes, should we proceed with those. i just wanted to also extend our appreciation to our staff, anna harvey and andy for setting that tour up. next i just wanted to mention at the regional level, the metropolitan transportation commission tomorrow will be considering approval for the framework of the regional housing incentive pool program. this is another attempt for the region to connect transportation dollars, transportation funding, and housing. housing decisions, which primarily happen at the local level. m.t.c. established the program a few years ago through the one bay area grant program, in order to incentivize the building and preservation of affordable housing units by local jurisdictions. in this particular program there

are about $78 million available, $30 million which are contingent upon caltrain being completed within budget, as some of that money could go to cost overruns. however, that funding will be available to reward jurisdictions who are building and preserving affordable housing. this would be for low and moderate-income leveled housing, as well as the restricted households and priority development areas or transit areas. the guidelines are set, there's been a debate at the commission over potential amendments, and we very much want to thank our commissioners, our representatives to the m.t.c., which is commissioner kim, as well as nick, for shaping the h.i.p. policy. and finally, i just wanted to turn our attention over to a presentation that our staff has prepared on an item that's on the november ballot, the proposition 6 measure to repeal the s.b. 1 gas tax. this body has taken a unanimous

opposed position on the repeal, so we wanted to take a moment to educate the public once again about how san francisco is utilizing these important transportation funds to benefit our local network, both on the railway side, as well as on the transit side, and for that i've got oscar quintanilla here to provide a presentation. >> the other mr. quintanilla, good morning. >> good morning, commissioners. as you know, in april 2017 governor brown signed into law the road repair and accountability act, also known as senate bill 1. this landmark transportation investment package is funded by a combination of gas taxes and vehicle registration fees and provides over $5 billion annually for transportation projects across california. the state gas tax was last raised in 1994, and since then has lost 40% of its value due to inflation, and with increases to

fuel efficiency and more electric vehicles, there's less revenue to repair our roads for every mile driven. this past june california voters also passed prop 69, which ensures these funds are only used for transportation improvements. i wanted to share with you this chart prepared by the metropolitan transportation commission, which shows s.b. 1, how s.b. 1 increases state funding in the bay area alone. on the left you can see pre-s.b. 1 funding levels for existing state programs, and in the red how much additional funding is available thanks to s.b. 1. state highway maintenance, which almost doubles and makes the fund available for cities and caltrans. s.b. 1 also provides operations and maintenance, and the transit

capital program, which funds transformative capital improvements to reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. to the right you'll see also that s.b. 1 creates new programs to maintain transit infrastructure and to reward jurisdictions that have self-imposed taxes and fees dedicated to transportation, like our prop k sales tax or vehicle registration fees. the amounts shown there are estimates for the annual contribution that s.b. 1 would give to the bay area. this is for fiscal year 18-19, and it's about a billion dollars. focusing on san francisco, senate bill 1 provides about $6 million annually in programs distributed by formula, so we can expect this level of funding as long as s.b. 1 revenues remain in place. in the attachments included in the executive director's report, there's a table that provides details on how the $68 million is distributed, and the latest fact sheet includes a map where

the investments are located. san francisco public works is set to receive about $23 million annually for street resurfacing projects, which according to public works represent about 40% of the city's street resurfacing budget. on the map you can see some of the streets that will be repaired using s.b. 1 funds. it includes projects in the soma valley, bayview, twin peaks, among others. smcta also receives money annually for traffic operations and improving maintenance and storage facilities. we have also allocated state transportation improvement program funds for the restoration of the lightrail lines, about $2.8 million per year. in addition, regional transit operators serving san francisco receive about $30 million per year, which have allowed

b.a.r.t. to have improvements. san francisco will also benefit from about $550 million in competitive grants, which will fund new b.a.r.t., muni, caltrans vehicles, safety on jefferson street and geneva avenue, among other projects. as we have reported previously, on november 6th california voters get to weigh in on proposition 6. if prop 6 is approved, it would repeal s.b. 1 revenues, putting these funds and projects at risk. there's currently no back-up plan for the funds, if the funds go away. and then here to my right you can see a map that we put together of all the projects that are receiving state funds since s.b. 1 passed. and just -- i would like to point out the diversity of project types and locations that are benefiting from this increase in state funding for

transportation. there's more muni service in crowded lines, there's state highway paving projects, and a whole lot of local streets will be repaired or constructed. for more information, you can visit our website, sfcta.org/revenue/sb1. thank you. >> thank you. does that conclude the executive director's report? okay. is there any public comment on the executive director's report? seeing none, public comment is closed. and we will return to item number two, the chair's report, and i want to join our executive director in thanking the commissioners that went to los angeles with staff to do a study tour of the l.a. metro express lanes project. and another commissioner also did some travel recently, and

that's commissioner yee, and at this time i'd like to invite him to share his learnings from attending the international child in the city world conference. so, commissioner yee, i will turn it over to you. >> commissioner yee: thank you. thank you, chair peskin. so, i was able to attend this conference called child in the city conference, and one of the reasons why i was very curious about it was because they list cities that have been accredited to be child-friendly cities, and there were none from the united states, and i thought that was kind of weird. that maybe we could learn something from this conference, so basically the first line

would just tell you that, this is where i went. and it's actually the ninth conference of this kind. it's a national conference, which was pretty european centric, since it was in vienna, and then the themes that i sort of picked up on was, you know, when we do planning for child-friendly cities, we should have the children's voices. creating space for play was important. streets and empty lots are resources for playing environments. links and junctions can be useful. many cities throughout europe have taken up this challenge and improving their streets for pedestrians and where children can play. one of the things -- i went to a couple of workshops, or a couple of field trips, and it was interesting, because the urban

transformation of one area is so similar to what is going on in the mission bay, except that their planning of it really includes schools that were built up front, not at the end, which is what's happening in mission bay. their play area was a lot more free for kids to imagine. i don't know what we're doing with mission bay in regards to recreation areas. so -- but what i do see is some similarities about pier 70 in terms of how they are planning out their open-space area and so forth. and then the -- i want to go and say that as i walked through on one of those field trips that there were a lot of amenities

there for families, and not only did they talk about family housing there, they talk about here's the childcare, that's where that's at. and by the way, we're going to build office buildings later, and some other housing later, but what we do have is a childcare here and a school here and a family center here, so the services were already there. the other thing that i really heard a lot of is how -- how we can transform some of these spaces we have now in san francisco, and i'll go through that in a second just from illustrations, from photos and some slides that i stole from other people. and it was pretty interesting that the theme, the speakers, there were a lot of speakers,

and pretty much the themes were around this issue of play, was consistent, and one of the keynote speakers, basically looks at streets and designs and how people move and walk and bike and ride and so forth. could be in places of play to perform, to celebrate, and places to relax. the largest network of continuous public space are really the most dangerous places for kids and everyone else. can we go to the next slide? and maybe this is something that our vision zero is after also, that our traditional streets really were designed to kill people. the way it's designed. it's not to protect pedestrians. and i think that was a big

element of where we should, you know, transplant these places, where streets are so dangerous that we need to do something else to them. and, you know, the stats are factual, and when you look at more than 500 children dying each day on road crashes in cities throughout the world, each -- this is each day 500 children die, and 235 people have asthma in the cities, and 41 million children under the age of 5 are obese due to the lack of physical activity. currently, many of our streets are designed to do this, to kill. we really need to reinvent our streets. this was a strong message for me.

and the design that's to improve conditions for everyone, and then the speaker goes on to talk about little changes can have actually big impact. built environments build connections as a philosophical premise. transformed everyday spaces as places to learn and take risks. one of these talked about, and this other keynote speaker, tim gill, really started -- and it was really interesting how he started his presentation and what he called a "roaming radius" for somebody my age, the roaming radius is very different from the rest of my colleagues here, who are a little bit younger or a lot younger, and their roaming radius becomes smaller. and then by the time my grandkids are around, the roaming radius becomes zero,

basically. when i was growing up, by age 11 my roaming radius, meaning no supervision, i'm on my own, was the whole city. basically, i went on my own, whether i walked a mile somewhere or took the bus somewhere. my parents never knew where i was, and, you know, when your generation was growing up, it's probably more like, oh, you can go down the block or two, and that's it. and at this point it's like when i watch my grandkids, even when they grow up, no, you're not going anywhere, you know, i'm supervising you. and kids learn and play, and everybody raised their hand when they said what was the most pleasant place that you remember when you were growing up, and everybody said it was outdoors, and when there wasn't any supervision. almost every single person at the conference said the same thing. so, the other keynote speaker

talks about this is -- in san francisco we talk a lot about housing, and rightfully so, and the services, we talk a lot about also in regards to dcyf and more currently we talked about prop c in june and providing more services for early education. and one of the things we don't talk a lot about is this thing in red, the public realm. what role does that play in family-friendly neighborhoods. so that's when the message was clearly something for us to think about when we move forward with comprehensive plans for children and families in san francisco. so i think all these things were probably best shown -- i'm

showing you three or four slides that really was a theme for all the speakers in terms of its planning, how do you plan, how do you become intentional about these things, and why. so by creating livable and playable public space, it's about ready to claim on, slide off. in other words, it really makes children want to do physical activities. next. and then links and junctions can be useful. in other words, rather than just looking at playgrounds all the time, as a place for where you end up being what you play and do physical activities, you really -- we need to look at what they were looking at, you know, where do people go from point "a" to point "b," and how did they get there. and if you look at it, most of

us said, we'll walk from one place or another at some point and kids walk from one place to another, so let's look at those links and where we end up and how we activate those spaces. next. and the principles of child-friendly rhythm is the same idea of, you know, how do you look for these elements and stimulate play, inspiring to cross over and do things like that. next. and at the end of the day, you do what we call the experimental phase, in which, you know, basically our local government, us, in this room, becomes the leader and really want to push for these things. and just don't talk about it. actually follow up with execution. next. and so these are some of the elements that i took from these

different presentations, where it's so simple. i mean, kids don't need much. next. and this is along a sidewalk, and, again, these things will -- these -- just adding a little thing along the pathways will encourage children to actually do more exercise. they jump around, they climb on things. next. and then just putting one of these things in there. kids are constantly on that, just spinning around. this is right on the street. next. and one of the things that we have to be careful with is the usage of playground structures. it's good, it tells children that it's a place to play, but these are one-use only types of equipment, and so i think the message here is not to fall into that trap of just thinking that

you put a play structure that only does one thing and that's good enough. next. even when you look at this slide here, this stairway itself, the little round balls are things that kids will sit on, climb on, jump off of. next. and stairways are a great activation for playing. next. and i know we have these in parks, playgrounds now, climbing walls, the newer renovated ones have this, but this is right along some wall on the street, and it's something to think about, you know, especially on walls of public space, we could actually do these type of things and encourage more activity. next. this is a weird slide, where it's some open space. it could be some empty lot, and all they did was if you look in the bottom of the slide, it shows haystacks.

next. and they just created structures with these haystacks, and some of the haystacks were actually there so that kids could actually move them around and build their own thing with their imagination. and it wasn't a very permanent structure. eventually, this haystack burnt down. i don't know what, the speaker didn't say, was this intentionally burnt or was it accidentally burnt down, but it was burnt down, so maybe that was a hint that they should create another structure. next. and the streets were really important in terms of these elements that we're talking about. you know, how do we capture the streets? and we have this as something -- close down the streets on sundays or something. so we have similar things, but they actually close down the streets a lot more, and some of the streets are permanently closed down.

next. and sometimes all it takes are a bunch of boxes, where kids are going to use their imagination, what to do, so anybody that has kids around this age, this is what -- and it's real cheap to do this. next. and this is something that we could do in san francisco, because it's not in front of somebody's house, just going and, i think, between district 7 and 11, we have several of these bridges that we could actually look at and see how we could paint them. and make it so when you're walking through there, they are actually doing something else. next. again, really simple elements, you know, just along the streets. next. and here's a street, again, that demonstrates, you know, streets are designed to kill. here's a school, and then when you look at it, they transform this just simply by painting a

little bit here and there, and narrowing the streets so that cars aren't moving as quickly. and that's how they transform that. okay, next. i want to close this by saying that the way we have it now throughout san francisco is that streets are, when you look at the pyramid of how it works, streets are really for the longest time designed for cars. and then there's a transformation of maybe cars and motorcycles and so forth, and at some point we think about your public transportation, and now we're thinking about bike lanes. and at some point, and at the bottom of the thought process are people. pedestrians. next. and what we want to do, what i'd like us to do in san francisco,

is flip that whole chart around, where we think about people first when we design streets, and vehicles last. so, i think -- is there anything else? i don't think so. so that's my presentation. we have a challenge. vienna, which is smaller than san francisco, made the challenge, their goal, to look at some of these streets and these possibilities, and they wanted to do 400 of these transformations by the year 2025. if we could do 400 in vienna, which is smaller than san francisco, with less resources, i'm going to probably come up with some kind of challenge for san francisco that we should be able to do 500 of these by the year 2025, and hopefully, i'll be coming up with some resolution that hopefully all of you will be supporting to say

let's do this. thank you very much. that was what i learned. >> thank you for that presentation, commissioner yee. are there any questions -- any public comment on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed, and mr. quintanilla, if you could please go to the consent agenda. >> clerk: items 4 to 8, compromise a consent agenda, 5 through 8 are being considered for final approval. the remaining items are considered routine, staff is not planning to present on these items, but is prepared to present if desired. if a member objects, a item can be removed and considered separately. >> commissioner peskin: all right, any public comment on the minutes of october 16, 2018? seeing none, public comment is closed. is there a motion to move the consent agenda made by commissioner yee, seconded by commissioner kim? colleagues on that item, a roll call, please. >> clerk:

[ roll call ] we have final approval. >> commissioner peskin: all right, next item, please. >> clerk: item 9, update on cordon pricing and incentive-based congestion management strategies. >> thank you, commissioners, for your interest in this item. so, as cohen is pulling up our powerpoint, let me just start by saying congestion has been an issue in downtown san francisco for a very long time. and we've tried a lot of different ways of dealing with it. today i'm going to talk about the background and rationale for one of the tools in our

congestion management tool box, pricing. and what we have done about it so far here in san francisco and what we might think about. so, i'll start, if you go to the next, with what this tool is, and why we might think about using it. then i'll describe our first serious look at it about a decade ago. i'll finish with some information about related efforts here in san francisco, as well as what we're seeing around the country, and the world, and what could come next in san francisco. before we talk about what congestion pricing is, i'm going to take a moment to talk about some of the basics of congestion management. so congestion happens very simply when there are too many vehicles trying to use the same place at the same time. you can try and manage that by changing supply or by changing demand. for decades, transportation

officials tried to add supply, making more space for more cars. we had double-decker freeways, free parking, wider roads, and that didn't work so well. so in the past few decades we've done better, especially here in san francisco, we have b.a.r.t., muni metro, red lanes, bike lanes. all of those are helping, and we need to do many more of them. that transit-first approach has helped us get to and exceed our original goal of 50% sustainable trips in the city. but it's not enough. the city's goal is now 80% sustainable trips, a goal we need to reach both for climate reasons, as well as for congestion reasons, and to get there, particularly considering the growth we have had and will continue to have, the changes from t.n.c.s and other changes on the horizon, we have to make better use of the space that we have. so there is a tool that we haven't used yet for moving

cars, although we have used it a lot for parked cars. we haven't used it for moving cars, but we have used it for parked cars. as you see, that meter up on the screen there. we've used parking meters for a pretty long time to manage parking demand, and recently in san francisco we started changing the rates on them to respond to demand. we don't do that -- so we do that for the public space where parked cars sit, but we don't do it for the public space where moving cars move. so we could charge a fee for driving into a congested area or a cordon, as we call it, and that's what congestion pricing is. as with parking, the best practice is to combine the price with providing incentives and investing in alternatives, as well as discounts or subsidies to cushion the impact on those most in need, and when done

right, the goal of all of this is to manage congestion. now, it also raises revenues when you charge a price, you raise revenues that you can reinvest to manage and should reinvest to manage congestion and improve safety and advance equity, all of those are part of good congestion pricing. so, while congestion is in part an evidence of a strong economy, it's also hurting downtown san francisco. these are some photos on screen of rush hour gridlock from ten years ago. they just don't look that different from what we see on the streets today. maybe slightly different models of the cars and a few other differences. now, at the time we were in the top five regions for congestion in the united states. now i'm afraid we're worse. we're now top five in the world, we're actually number five, l.a. is number one. so drivers here lose 79 hours

per year in traffic. 79 hours is two full work weeks, and that makes it pretty hard for working parents to make dinner with their loved ones, to do homework with their kids, see friends. an hour lost is simply an hour lost. an hour lost in traffic. you just don't get that back. that's billions of dollars in lost productivity. it hurts people's health, and it's part of the reason that transportation is our number one cause of greenhouse gas emissions. now, this congestion, if you'll go back to that previous slide, occurs in the same places that are the core of our transit network. you can see the places that light up are the financial district in the soma and areas in downtown san francisco. so, we need to do something different. so, in 2010 we did a mobility access and pricing study, and it included a lot of community engagement to shape a wide range of alternatives.

we ran them through detailed technical analyses to see if we could identify a feasible option to implement pricing to manage congestion in downtown san francisco. so, that engagement included four rounds of public workshops, meetings with over 40 stakeholder groups. we had four different focus groups with different types of businesses and several different advisory committees, we had public opinion polls, online outreach, on-street surveys to ask customers how they would respond, and two main themes came through in that feedback. equity and economic competitiveness. on equity, the biggest question was whether public transit would be able to handle the load if there was a congestion pricing in place. and some were also concerned about what the impact of the cost would be on low-income drivers. but we also did an opinion poll and asked bay area voters who could be affected by congestion

pricing, and asked them how they would feel about looking at it, about studying congestion pricing, and these are the results segmented by income. it's notable that the agree was over 65% or more across the board, and interestingly, and something i think was surprising to some people at the time, the support was higher and stronger among low and middle-income voters than among high-income voters. i'll get back to that in a moment about why that might not be surprising. we also heard from business interests about their concerns. they agreed congestion is a problem hurting san francisco businesses, and their big concern was that the charge would cause businesses or shoppers to take their businesses or spending elsewhere. they encouraged us to look at other tools to manage congestion, such as more

aggressive parking pricing. so informed by all of this community engagement we looked at several design factors, such as how much, when, and where to charge a fee, dozens of geographies of the cordon and fees and discount policies should be to cushion impacts on our most vulnerable neighbors. finally, we considered how to spend revenues and understand the impacts and benefits. i'm not going to go into those study results in detail, but here's a few notable points from them. so the first was, who drives in northeast san francisco? who drives in that corner of the city? who would have to decide whether to pay the fee or change how they commute? the myth at the time was that most drivers are from out of town. the reality is that that only represents about a quarter of the drivers. the other three-quarter of driving trips are by san francisco residents living both within the cordon and across the rest of the city. we also looked at who travels

how by income. and as you can see, high-income people make most of their trips by car. it's true even of middle-income people, as well. low-income families, however, do more of their trips on transit or walking and biking than they make in cars. and, in fact, of the people traveling in the northeast cordon during the peak, only 6% were drivers with a household income under $50,000 a year. so that red oval down in the lower left corner there might help explain poll results i mentioned earlier. low-income voters know the current system isn't fair. they can see that it might be more fair to charge a fee to drivers who are, after all, mostly higher income, and then use those proceeds to make the whole system work better. so, here's what we came up with after all that feedback. talk about the design first and

then the results. the recommendation was to charge $3 to each vehicle driving during peak hours across a cordon bounded by laguna and 18th street. and it included a few ways to cushion the effect on the most impacted people, such as a $6 cap per cay and 50% discounts for many different groups. the predicted performance was also pretty impressive. people would save 17,000 hours that they previously wasted in congestion. that's a time savings valued at $370 million. there would also be 55,000 fewer vehicle trips in the city, saving another $30,000 on vehicle operating costs. lower g.h.g. emissions and other pollution, fewer crashes, and transit services can move 20% to 25% faster, allowing some muni service to be more frequent and more reliable at no extra costs.

there would also be some money generated from it to make some additional improvements. maps estimated the recommended design would have generated between $60 and $80 million a year in net revenue. that's after paying to operate the system. for scale, that's close to what we get from prop k now, and that was in 2010 dollars, so the numbers presumably would be higher if we did the study again now. so, we'd also expect some significant health and safety benefits. less driving and less pollution mean fewer crashes and more people walking and biking. all of that makes people healthier overall. and the health department did a health impact assessment that predicted pricing would save about eight lives per year. and finally, we looked at the impacts on business. which were broadly neutral. there was expected a minimal impact on employment and neutral to positives on retail sales.

with congestion pricing, you get fewer drivers, but more foot traffic, and surveys found that foot traffic, people arriving on transit or walk or bike might buy less per trip, but they shop a lot more often. so after maps, we finished the study and what happened? this board voted 8-3 to take the next steps with pricing, but we didn't end up doing so. the recession and some other opportunities intervened. so i'll spend a couple moments talking about other efforts san francisco has done on pricing and incentives. so, m.t.a. did s.f. park using pricing to more effectively manage on-street parking, and it's been quite successful. we also studied more aggressive pricing for offstreet parking as the business community suggested and found that it would be only

half as effective as congestion pricing for moving vehicles. for treasure island, it's another place with very limited auto capacity, and we're planning there a comprehensive package of pricing incentives, investments, and alternatives, plus programs to mitigate impacts. we're learning from treasure island in ways we could apply downtown. we also experimented with incentives with the b.a.r.t.s perk programs, and they work. small cash rewards got 10% of peak riders going through the tube during peak hours to shift their commute times. and then we've also, as was mentioned earlier, been studying the potential for pricing on express lanes and the lombard. so while we didn't start implementing pricing, san francisco has put it into our plans and policies. it's been in each of our long-range transportations adopted since then, each of our

climate action plans, and each of the submissions that you've approved for recent regional transportation plans, plus some other plans you can see on the slide. in fact, one of these described congestion pricing as the most effective t.d.m. strategy transportation demand strategy, the city could pursue. so, we're not the only place that is thinking about this. there's several other cities that have or are considering congestion pricing. the ones who have done it report some significant success with congestion, reliability, health impacts, environmental benefits, and just better functioning of the urban realm, making the spaces that commissioner yee was talking about. and people like it. in fact, in stockholm they actually turned the system on for six months and then they turned it off and asked voters, which do you like better? do you want the city with congestion pricing, or do you want it without, and voters said with, andstock home still has

congestion pricing. so up and down the west coast, several cities are doing their own studies now. all of them are recognizing equity is a major concern and are committed to addressing it, and we've been having interesting conversations with folks about the work that they are doing. so, what's next is really up to you folks at this point. we don't have an active study under way. we've had informal conversations, but we don't have an active study. we get questions about it all the time. and so if you want us to move forward, here's some things that we think we would do. we think we would refresh the map study with current data, include information about new technology that's different since a decade ago, integrate incentives and pricing, not just a toll, and reconsider the geography and some other key factors that we studied a decade ago. i think there are three key tests that congestion pricing or really any pricing effort in san

francisco would need to meet before it could move forward. effectiveness, equity, and economy. the effectiveness is the question will it work. we'd have to work very closely with our partners at m.t.a. to figure out what they would need, both on transit and the streets. the equity question is, is it fair? we would do an equity analysis to see whether pricing would provide net benefits to low-income travelers. and the economy test is, is it going to help san francisco's economy? so, if a congestion pricing passed those three tests and others that you set out, the maps study did lay out several steps we would need to take that are listed on the slide. on legislation, we know that senators weiner and bloom plan to sponsor a bill again next year to allow a few city pilot

projects, and that legislation may also include additional requirements that we will keep close tabs on. all of these steps would allow you to consider whether we want to keep going or stop. the question now is whether you want to put together on active study to get started. and with that, i'm happy to take questions. >> commissioner peskin: questions from commissioners? commissioner kim. >> commissioner kim: thank you, and by the way, it's always great to see this work continue and i'm sad this won't be here when this gets implemented, but glad to see we're working on a parallel pathway at the state level with state senator weiner on ensuring that we can actually have the ability to legally do some type of mobility management and having had that opportunity to visit london and see how mobility management works in that city and other cities around the world, i really strongly support this. and i hope that this commission is able to move forward on it. i thought the polling was very interesting and the surveys.

it is a huge turnaround from where this was in 2010, when the discussion first began. it was actually a very controversial topic when i was running for office, and it's great to see there's a lot more support for it now. i wanted to ask a little bit more about the map of the northeast cordon, and i know that there was a lot of controversy in particular putting in some part of fisherman's wharf and chinatown. i was curious why this cordon goes so far north. >> so, my understanding from that, and i wasn't actually here at the time, so i'll defer to tilly if she has more to add, but my understanding was in looking at the cordon, there's attention, you don't want to make it so big, people do lots of driving around inside it, but you also don't want to make it so small that you end up having

the edge effect, by the diversion of people driving around the edge of the cordon to avoid having to pay the toll. and then another issue was the one that we call legibility, how easy is it for people to understand? and the bay is a really easy barrier for people to understand. they understand that, okay, that's a sensible place to put the edge. that said, i think it's unclear whether now that would be the geography that we would decide on. i think we would end up having to look at it. >> commissioner peskin: you want to add to that? >> that's a great answer. i would just add to the addition of the legibility and the diversions around, there's just a provision of transit within the zone, so there needed to be enough transit to provide a reasonable option for folks, and we thought that the northeast quadrant being the most heavily sort of supplied transit zone could support that, especially

with central subway coming in. >> commissioner kim: and one of the reasons why, at least in london this was so successful, is because on day one of the mobility management, they vastly increased and invested in service, public transit service, throughout the city. and so i think that before we move forward with the stick, we have to have the carrots in place and guaranteed for residents, and particularly for my colleagues that represent the outer rim of san francisco, they will be curious as to how, you know, curious as to how strong and healthy the alternatives that we'll be providing will be, and so have we started thinking about how we could roll that out and how to invest in service before the revenue comes in? >> so, i think that's a good and important question, and one that we would have to address in this process. we would work very closely with

m.t.a. to figure out what kinds of changes they would be able to implement and how those changes would occur both before pricing was turned on while we still have the traffic we have, as well as how they would then transition to operate after pricing went into effect and made the buses be able to move faster, which in turn could mean that the same driver and the same bus could actually serve -- do more routes per day. so those are some changes that we would have to make. i would say one thing about london's experience that's notable is that the most significant increases that london saw in the ridership, they saw many people move away from driving, and many of those people moved to riding the bus or bicycling, because those were the two big increases they saw. london has a terrific subway,

it's world renowned subway system, most amazing in the world. the subway system saw a little bit of an increase, but buses and biking saw the big increases, and that was in part because it was just a much more comfortable and rapid experience to ride a bus once there was less congestion, and it was much more comfortable to ride a bike with less congestion, as well. they also made some significant increases, investments, in their equivalence of our red lanes and bike lanes, as well, and that made some significant difference. anything to add to that? >> just a quick add to that would be even in the case of managed lanes here in the bay area, there's a recognition that, for example, if san mateo were to introduce express lanes, they would want an influx of new bus service at the same time. and so the state has funded a portion of that already, and the idea would be to conceptualize a pricing program, a mobility

management program here, that would absolutely include day one transit service, most likely express bus services as well as the bicycling and pedestrian projects that jeff mentioned. and in the case of new york, there was a time when the federal government was active in federal grants in this area, and they were offered about $300 million of new bus services and capital improvements at the time. that money did not happen, because that project did not happen. and, in fact, that funding went to los angeles to do the buses for the los angeles express lanes that we just toured. >> commissioner kim: is there -- sfmta has seen an influx of revenue that it really hasn't had historically over the last couple of years, and have we been able to demonstrate how much improvement we've seen in our service with the influx of revenue? i only ask this question because i think there's still continuing to be some doubt that revenue is the only reason why our transit isn't as strong as it could be.

it's kind of a two-part question. one, how do we spend revenue before it comes forward. [ please stand by ]