[roll call] director, please be advised that director chiu will be absfrenlts today's meeting. please be advised that the ringing of cell phone, pagers and other similar sound-producing electronic devices are prohibited at the meeting. any persons responsible for one going off may be asked to leave the meeting.

cell phones set on vibrate do cause microphone interference so the board respectfully asked that they be placed in the "off" position. approval of the february 5 regular meeting. >> ok. absent any questions. i don't see any. any public comment on the minutes? seeing none, public comment is closed. i'll entertain a motion on the minutes. >> motion to approve. >> there a second? all those in favor please say aye? opposed? ok. >> item five, communications. directors, i have none for you at this time. number six, new or unfinished business by board members. >> ok. if i could start off with one request to our staff as we all honor black history month, there has been some suggestion abcertainly great approval from discussion of the board members on honoring rosa parks. of course, a pioneer in civil rights who started her pioneering in transit and mr. peskin, i know you're aware of

the update for communications and if we can get an update on where we stand in the efforts to honor ms. parks. >> i would be happy to. we can bring you an update at our next meeting. we received the request that i think many of you saw last week or the week before. and so we've been developing some concepts in terms of how we'd implement it. it's something that we'd like to get the board's feedback on. >> wonderful. and because it's not agendaized today, we can't do it in detail. but i sense the will of the board that we'd very much like the hear about that as soon as you're ready to propose it. very good. i know that there is a couple of other items of new or unfinished business. i'll start with director torres. >> thank you. an update on the randall street proposal. i believe we have requested that two meetings ago. >> we did get a memo on it. it's in the e-mail. >> i know. but i'd like to hear about it publicly. >> ok.

so, i don't have anything to speak to it at this moment beyond what was in the memo. >> right. i think it is under "new and unfinished business" and what director torres is saying he'd like a chance to hear about it publicly in a meeting so he can ask questions and get further comment. am i correct? >> yes. very quickly. >> yes. so, if possible to put into our next director's report or make its own agenda item, i think that would be appropriate and it is larger than -- if i understand director torres and some of the concerns of the other board members, it is larger thaten this one pod. it's really about how we solicit public input, react to public input and plan to put in these pause. and wrather than dealing with this on a one-off basis, i suspect the idea is to have something presented to this board so we can understand staff's vision for how that would work and perhaps provide guidance on it. >> thank you. >> can i just add to that? i think it's just the process

by which the staff, how these are identified, if there is an ongoing list that exists that can be made publicly available that people can know about. the criterion that exists for evaluating and then how alternatives are considered. how those are weighed. how those are also evaluated. and then, you know, the timeframe from start to finish when people can expect from the first time they hear about it to the end that an installation will actually happen. these projects happen much quicker than our own projects so they seem to catch people upon surprise. >> very good. ok. other new or unfinished business? director brinkman. >> thank you very much. a few months ago, vice chair borden and i brought up the access of howard street during events and i've been hearing more and more about that from the public in terms of not being able to walk or bike through howard street when the events are going on and it used to feel like oracle world and sales force but there was one this last week and i heard from

a lot of people the inability to walk or bike through there hits people hard because especially for the cyclists going over. i feel like we need to try to come up with a solution for that and i'm sure we have amazing staff who can help us on that. if we can put that on our to-do list, that would be great. >> absolutely. it is something that we started looking at after the last round and ieng just last week again there was another one. we've already sent some communication over to the convention center folks that we'd like to explore different ways of doing that. >> excellent. thank you, director. >> any new or further unfinished business? seeing none, we move on to item seven which is the director of transportation's report. mr. risken. >> good afternoon. thank you, mr. chair. members of the public, board and staff. a few things. just a few brief things i want to cover. and then we'll get an update from our transit director as

per your previous request. muni metro service. the southeaster row vision action strategy that we spent some time in depth with you on, back at the workshop we did in january will be -- we are ready to release it next thursday. so, that is coming out. and i think we got some good feedback and discussion from you when we presented it. but next thursday we'll be releasing it to the general public. it was collaborative work of a lot of folks not just within the agency, but a lot of feedback and engagement from other agencies and folks outside the city. so, excited to be hitting that milestone out to chart the future of how we get to 0 by 2024. and two other project updates one with regard to the gear ri rapid project, otherwise known as phase one of the gear ri

v.r.t. we scheduled a groundbreaking for last week. but the weather was not cooperative with an outdoor event. so while we didn't do the groundbreaking, the swork advancing. e -- the work is advancing. we will reschedule the groundbreaking because we do want to honor the work culminating many years of planning on the busiest bus line on the city that is going to have a pretty dramatic effect both on the safety of people on the corridor and the transit reliabilities and service of the people who ride on the 38 and the 38-r. what is happening on the ground, just to remind you, is that the first set of transit and safety treatments, which includes side running bus-only lanes, that was completed at the end of last year. what we could do without the capital project. so, with paint and some parking and traffic changes that you all authorized. i think it was last fall.

and now the utility work to replace the sewer and water systems between masonic and van ness is what has kicked off in this phase. other major upgrades including traffic signal upgrades, repaving the street, puting in new crosswalks and sidewalk extensions for both bus and pedestrian [inaudible] will follow and they're expected to continue for the next couple of years. in other words to minimize disruption, this is work that we're doing in coordination with other city agencies so as part of this project, san francisco public works will be repaving 1.5 miles of geary. the department of technology will be installing one and three quarter miles of fiberoptic conduit and this is pursuant to the dig one ordinance passed by the city numerous years ago, which is whenever we're doing major road work. we let the department of technology to know that

examples for them to join the project to get fiber in the ground and this is one good example of that happening. and as i already mentioned, the water and sewer work, we're partnering with the public use utilities choice ining replace a mile and a half of sewer and two miles of water lines and this is all happening in advance of the roadway work that will follow. lots of information on our website and people can sign up for text or e-mail updates as the project progresses, but want to let you know despites the groundbreaking postponement, that the work is, indeed, under way. and then the other project update regards the patruro yard which is at 17th and mariposa. it's more than 100 years old. it is one of our two oldest facilities and it houses 138 trolley buses, including all of our 60-foot trolley buses.

because of its age, it is in need of a complete rebuild to make it seismickically safe, but also to make it more functional for the time of service that we're asking for and it was obviously built at a time of streetcars and a very different technology, very different working requirements for staff. so, for a number of reasons it needs to be really rebuilt in other words to service today's needs and modern trolley fleet and the future electric fleet that we have and will have at muni. as part of the planning effort for the reconstruction of the yard, we're holding two public workshops to engage the community, not only about the reconstruction of the yard itself, but the fact that it is a full city block and large city block footprint. there is opportunity for us to build above -- to build above the maintenance yard. so, while we have an opportunity to rebuild the maintenance yard consistent

with the m.t.a. facility's vision back from 2012, there is an opportunity to make a better use of that site. especially in this time of scarcity of housing and other needs. as it is a very large and would be a very large construction and development project that the community engagement and process will be important. so to that end the two workshops we're holding will be this thursday and saturday. thursday is 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and saturday is 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., held at the mission arts center at 745 tree. and it will be an opportunity for us to both share kind of the needs and the importance of the facility but also start getting feedback from the community about what could be much more detail. we're excited for that to be moving forward as the yard itself has significant needs. but there is other needs in the city that we can address

through this promise as well. now i want to ask our transits director julie kirshbalm to give you an update on metro service. >> good afternoon. i'm here to really give the first of what is going to be a monthly presentation on tracking both accountability and progress on the -- on the subway performance and the transit service more generally.

my apologies for the paper version. i did not get the electronic version up loaded. the way we're approaching the subway as we discussed at the january 15 meeting, is focusing in two paths. the first is to reduce the daily delays. the travel time availabilitier. the congestion. it's caused by thing like having too many trains on to the subway at once, having a noncommunicating trains. but the customer impact is that they're stuck between stations or a trip that is supposed to take 15 minutes and ends uptaking 20 mince or closer to 25 minutes. abthen the second path is to reduce the number of incidents, the actual major breakdowns that we're experiencing on the subway that stops things in both directions. and on there, what we're trying to do is reduce the number of incidents, but also respond better when we have them. so in our reducing of daily

delays, we are focusing in several areas. where i think we made the most success in the last month and what i really wanted to call to your attention is steps we have taken to improve how we managed west portal. west portal, as you know, is where the k.l.m. all come in and out and it is also a source of tremendous pedestrian activity as well as bus and auto activity, all contributing to delays. what we've done over the past several weeks is we have, first of all, improved the software so that trains are now getting enough time to actually go through the intersection. we were having a software issue

where sometimes we were giving trains 30 seconds and other times we were giving them 15 seconds. it's ok. yeah. so, we were just -- we were -- the trains were time out. so, that's been fixed. but i think more importantly is we've put p.c.o.s at the intersection and we've also changed how we're managing the location with inspectors. so, the p.c.o.s are helping us manage the pedestrian activity and also some of the auto activity. sometimes autos are confused by the train signals and they don't whauns their role is, especially with the train role. and then by having the p.c.o.s there to manage the pedestrians, it gives the inspectors more confidence in expediting trains because they know that we're going to have safe movement through the intersection. and then the last thing, you'll see this photo on the lower right. [coughing] what that is, it's a local train control panel and what it allows us to do is rather than

having individually call trainsinger it allows them to control the movementses at the intersection. rather than having it come first come-first servingersinger, they can make decisions on what we need from a service perspective. so, at 5:30 at night, if we have four trains trying to get out of the subway, we can expedite them and maybe hold for a minute or two a train trying to get into the subway. so, this local control panel is something that we just got up and running. we're just now working through all of the training of our inspectors. but we think it has real potential. and then what it's allowed us to do, even in just a two-week period, we've seen a 40% reduction in the delay approaching west portal. so, in the a.m. and p.m. peak. that's what we're really trying to influence is how much time people are spending stuck

trying to get out of west portal, kind of between that forest hill and west portal area that. queue. so, these movements and all kinds of interrelated actions that we're taking with the p.c.o.s and with the inspectors, are helping to get people out of the subway more quickly. some of the other steps that we're doing, i'm really pleased to report that the hardest phase of the warriors platform -- the mission bay platform construction is completed. as you know, we did not have access to our me toronto east yard -- metro east yard for two week. that was something that we were concerned that would have an impact on rail service returning more trains than the subway. we're not able to maintain trains the way we typically do.

and we were storing trains on the surface at night. thanks to a lot of really hard work from the field managers tan people overseeing this service, we actually got through that very hardest period with very little impact to the customer, which i'm really pleased about. and as we continue through the march period, i'm confident that we're going to continue to be able to provide a really high-quality service during the construction. the third area that we're looking at to reduce delays is how we manage our terminals. embacadero being the most important one. there we have increased supervision and also trying to increase the intensity of that movement so that training are turning as quickly as they can. i didn't give that a green check because that is still a work in progress. we're still trying and different approaches to how we

communicate both with staff and trying different things. increasing staffing levels. change staffing levels. that is something that we're going to continue to progress through these 90 days and then the last area, which is also something that we have started to do a little bit of but will do more now that we have the hardest construction behind us is to use more gap trains so that when we do have a gap in service, rather than doing a switch back, for example, or letting the gap continue trying to have trains strategically placed throughout the system so they can cover the slots. the first focus will be keeping a train at the cameron beach yard. that is already preoped and ready to go out into system and that will help us close service gaps on both the m-line and the j-line. and then when 3rd street opens up again, we'll look at several locations along 3rd street and then kind of an additional

location would be in the mint yard. so, that has been our focus on reducing delays. it has been really exciting for me to see all of the different disciplines throughout the agency come together on these prab problems. as we talked about, there is really no silver bullet. it takes a lot of small changes and, for example, the twork get the p.c.o.s throughout was something that came from ron forrest, our senior operations manager in the control center. based on what he was seeing in the control center. and it has been really successful. and then what we've been trying to do is then feedback that information to the staff on the

ground so that they know what they're doing is working. in terms of reducing the big incidents, there what we've been focusing on is the vehicles and the infrastructure. on the vehicles, we have used the m.m.e. shutdown to move forward our kind of two most critical campaigns right now. the first is adjusting the couplers because as we talked about last time a lot of our issues with doors and steps and propulsion are actually related to how the two cars turn around. so, we've now done 46 cars total and we're working our way as quick as we can through the full fleet. but we use the time of the m.m.e. shutdown where we had about 30 trains that were at m.m.e. for that two-week period and all of those couplers were adjusted. so we're using the time we have

as strategically as we can. on the infrastructure side, we have also put in our order to proactively replace the switch motors. unfortunately, as we talked about, the switches are old. it is a part that was not being manufactured. we had to actually resurrect the manufacturing of that part. so, that is going to be about a six-month lead time. but the good news is that we have it in the process and it will be ready and it is a pro-active campaign. when the switch motors come here, we'll swap them out. and then the other kind of two areas is quickening our response time. so, we have shifted staff now. we have signal staff at church and devoss and at embarcadero. it is a trade-off because it means that there's other parts of the system, particularly like on the outter avenues and the peak period that they area

not as quickly able to access. but the subway, because it impacts the lines with the right place to put those resource and we also moved a rail maintenance as sort of a strategic way to respond quickly to incidents. and then the last area we're working on is the customer information. so improving the quality of our audio announcements and also getting to the new radios which will allow us to have preset customer information into the trains. we have really been pushing for the controllers and the operators to make announcements in the trains. but until we're on the new audio, that is sort of hit or miss on how good the sound quality is. so i'm really excited that we hit a major milestone this weekend where we got the

digital information up and running in all of the new trains. that is something that we have really been working hard at. and so within the next month or so, we'll see the audio cut over and that is going to, again, really improve our ability to make good announcements into the trains when we haven't since. again, the goal being to reduce the number of incidents we have overall, but to communicate more proactively when we're having them. since the last meeting, we have been working really hard to try to develop what we think are the best metrics to track our progress in the subway. these don't replace the last targets we had with the 90-day

plan and are continuing to look at for the overall system. but they complement it by taking a deep dive into the subway. and just in developing these metrics, we've learned a tremendous amount about the service. that is helping us shape what are going to be the future interventions. it has been a really good opportunity to take a step back from responding to each emergency and actually develop new and different ways of looking at the subway than we have in the past. the metric that i am -- i was the most excited about it because it tells us the most. although i think we have a lot of work to get it to where it needs to be is subway delay. we have a real technology wizard, dan howard, who went through our atcs data and looked at the travel time of every single train.

and what we did was he created categories and broke the subway down into categories. for every time the train is stopped at a platform for more than 30 seconds which we consider kind of the typical what you need to get people on and off, he captured the delay. and anytime a train was between stations, not move, a he captured that as delay and broke it out by locations so now we can see in a very precise way, when we do an intervention on west portal, we can look the next day and see did that intervention work? what we've done is captured the overall minutes of delay, whether caused by congestion or caused by an incident and our goal would be over the next 90-day period to reduce that delay in the peak periods by 10%. and so what i like about this metric so much is that it

captures not just the big incidents, but also the day-to-day congestion that customers are experiencing on the line. the second thing we looked at and we talked about this at the january meeting was the total number of delays that lasted more than 20 minutes. that is more important for the extreme situations. so, if we can't get those big delays down, people will start to long for other ways to travel. it is naornlt we have not these big delays. the third thing is how long it was taking to travel in the subwayment and interestingly enough and i'll share in a chart the actual kind of average or median travel time is not changing very much. it's very stable. what is changing is the variability. so, it's averaging to, you know, about 17 minutes to go from

west portal to embarcadero but the customer experience is varying quite a bit. so for that we're recommending a target not to change the overall average travel time but to change the variability. to tighten the distribution. and then the last thing is the embarcadero turn-around times because it is such an overall indicator of the health of the subway. this is the chart that is showing total subway delay. the green line is the p.m. peak and the blue line is the a.m. peak. you can see in general the a.m. peak is more stable than the p.m. peak, in part because we're having more problems sending stuff out than sending stuff in. you can see that dip in the middle there. that is during the twin peak

shutdown. we had less trains in the service so there was less delay. but also fewer trains created and less delay and congestion. i believe that that reduction is not just caused by the reduction in trains but also by how much better the system operated with fewer trains in the subway. this next chart shows, by month, the number of incidents that we're having. we looked at two metrix. one is delays that were 10 to 20 minutes and then the second was delays over 20 minutes. in both cases, trying to reduce

the number of significant subway delays that we're experiencing in the system. this third chart here showss the subway travel time. the gap in the middle for the k.l.m. was during twin peaks because we weren't running twin peak service. but as you can see, it is relatively stable. if we're just looking at the median travel time but these next charts here show the distribution. the j and the n have relatively tight distributions. although this long tail is

related to the major incidents i was talking about. so, when things get totally stopped. i think the more challenging distribution is what we're seeing here on the k.l. m. and this is what the customers are experiencing day in and day out. >> guess which one of these they remember. >> exactly. tightening this up is the primary focus of our program. this last chart here is the

subway through-put. i know it is -- i'm asking you guys to maybe be more statisticians than you typically are. but the middle line here shows the average time it takes to turn around a train in the a.m. and p.m. peak, whether you're going to the near pocket to far pocket. what we need is for as much of these bars to be below that red line as possible. in order for the subway to really work reliably, we need the majority of trips to turn in less than five minutes. when they take more than five minutes, we start to break the schedule, which then creates the congestion that is contributing to the chart we just saw, which shows this big stretch of travel time. so -- >> can i interrepresent you to make sure i understand this? am i reading this to say that it takes from the time it

leaves, let's say it's an l or m slipping around from embarcadero, by the time it leaves the south sigh of the tracks to the time it returns to the onboarding platform on the north side of the tracks is roughly five to six minutes? >> yes. but we actually include it from the time it arrives. so, it includes the transfer of operators. but, yes. >> but on a trip from the other numbers averaging 17 minutes of service time. so depending on how you do the math, somewhere between one quarter and one-third of a trim of one of these trains actually spent spinning around behind the station. >> yes. >> and maybe follow-up on that. what is the cause? i don't really understand why. people see the trains and see that they're not going out. >> yeah. >> what is that cause? >> there are a number of factors. just the movement itself

takings takes three and a half to four minutes depending on the near pocket or far pocket. >> when you say "pocket," there's two turn-around -- >> thank you for clarifying. yes. >> curves behind the embarcadero station. if you are not going onward to the ballpark, you see those two spurs by which the turn can turn around. that's what you're referring to as pockets. >> yes. thank you. so in order to turn the trains as quickly as possible, we try to have somebody at the front of the train and the back of the train. so, the time it takes to get those folks on the train, the time it takes to pull the train in and then to wait until there is a slot or a break in the congestion because we also have trains coming into the portal and then to land back on the embarcadero platform and sometimes it is small things that are human nature. i go to relieve you while you

use the restroom and i ask how are your kids? how's your family? that may not seem like it is going to be harmful to the overall health of the subway. but can actually lead to a lot of delay. sometimes -- once it is in the pocket, the controller up in central, not quickly enough getting it out of the pocket because of other things that they're doing to manage the subway. so, there is a lot of different intervention points. but the boots on the ground and really trying to adopt more of like a nascar pit type urgency is what i think is going to really take to start turning trains more quickly. >> just a question. is it a more manual ?ros what you describe sounds more manual than technical. >> it's both. the trains themselves, when they're moving, are in

automatic. but we do have staff at the front and the back of the train in case there is any sort of intrusion into the track and we need for safety the ability to stop the train. >> ok. if you want to continue, i apologize for interrupting. i will have more questions later. fair warning. [laughter] >> absolutely. again, while this is maybe not the best public metric for our understanding of the overall health of the subway, this is a key lead indicator. and our goal is as much as possible to have as much of these blar charts below this red line. so, you can see that it is definitely taking less time to go into the near pock tote the far pocket, which would make sense. again, that p.m. peak really showing up as much more

variable than the a.m. so in addition to covering where i think we've made a lot of progress, both in the vehicle maintenance side as well as in expediting trains out of the subway, i did also want to make sure that we talked through the major delays that we've experienced in the -- for the most part in the subway. although one was on the surface over the last month. the one that had the biggest impact to service was the one the day of the last board meeting which was the broken switch at castro. that issue was a mechanical issue, which is shown in this photo here.

this is the switch rod right here. and this bolt was loose which caused the switch to not fully move from one side to the other. it was a mechanical issue. similar to a mechanical issue that we had about six weeks back. we believe that the solution is to change how we're installing the bolts so that instead of installing them face-down, we install them face-up, like what's shown in this photo here so that you can see visually if this bolt is loose or not. when it is upside down like it's shown in this photo, it is hard to see without actually getting under way this very kind of shallow bracket. if it's connected or not. but it also comes down to oversight on our preventive maintenance program because

this is a mechanical issue that should have been caught during an inspection. so, that is the other thing that we've done is taken a look particularly at our track preventive maintenance program and increased the amount of management oversight so that q.a. issues like this are addressed. the second issue that we had was a vehicle breakdown on the service at 22nd avenue. it was not particularly unusual mechanical issue. but the reason that i'm flagging it is the delay lasted longer than it should have. and part of it was that we needed to be able to tow the vehicleful and while we trained everybody on how you connect an lev-4 vehicle to a braida vehicle, there were still some hesitancy in the field. so we had a broken braida t nearest vehicle that could have

towed it out of there was the lrv-4, but there was hesitancy on staff's part to make that connection. so that is something that we've been drilling in the yard and practicing more so that when we face that situation again, we can get that delay out as quickly as possible. the third issue was basically from about july 31st to february 3, we had an intermittent problem where the axle counter at church and debose was creating some challenges. here intermittent problems, unfortunately, are our hardest ones to diagnose. it ended up being a mode up that needed to be replaced. but unfortunately until we were able to replicate this problem with the signal crew there, we weren't able to fix it. so, that is a one-off, fairly unusual, but it did create three or four days of unstable service.

and then the last area that we had since this presentation was sent out on february 14 in the middle of the day, we did experience an extremely rare situation where the train control system, which is controlled by three computers all providing backup support to the others all failed at the same time. which essentially stops all the trains in the subway, which is the critical safety response, which it did. and then requires us to communicate with every train to get the vehicles starting up again. we've been partnering with talus, who is the designer of our train control system on that one and it ended up being a very unusual software glitch so we'll avoid the problem immediately by not doing that movement and talus is in the

process of developing a software development for that fix. so overall, we're currently in a 90-day stretch from january 15 to april 15. we're working in six critical areas. the subway performance being, i think, our most intense focus. we really felt that it was the most urgent both on the direction of this board but also on the customer experience. we're also continuing to focus very hard on safety. we had a lot of success in the last 90-day plan to reduce side swipes and want to don't build on that. the same is true with the rapid network. that was an area where we achieved our goal of reducing gaps in service so we want to continue to do that. the mission bay platform has to

be a strategic action area for us because it is so complex and does require so much of our resources to manage. the fifth area is the customer information. and then misinforms and staff engagement and morale. as i said in the beginning of presentation, i'm thrilled that our hardest portion of the construction is done. on sunday, we did regain access to m.m.e. the agency-wide collaboration has really been what's made this project a success. and a major lesson learned from twin peaks that we wanted to do more to track comments and feedback in realtime so we could react and respond so we have been getting weekly reports on customer complaints. the first week we received 65

complaints and that. dropped down in the second week to about 29. so, a 50% reduction. some of the topics, the two topics we heard the most about were construction noise, which we're work on with particular sites and also with the contractor. and then in the first week we also heard about 11 complaints related to signage and customer information. but i'm very heartened that those droped to three in the following months -- following week. in part because we instituted and started doing signage audits and some of the early kinks with the signage we were able to work out. and then the last areas we have been managing the t-line bus gaps both with inspectors ton the ground and also using tools from the transportation management center. in general, complaints on the t-line buses have been relatively low.

reduced -- reducing the service again continues to be a high priority, both rolling over from the last plan into this plan. we have made a lot of positive momentum on the rail side, particularly with l.r.v.s, delivering on most weekdays 100% of the service and for the last two months exceeding our prop-e goals. we continue to not be delivering enough of the bus, both the trolley or the motor coach service so we're really focused on trying to have as big a class as we can for march. and have been partnering with the mayor's office of economic development to increase the

class sizes as much as possible. so we'll continue to focus on this. our biggest challenge is attracting people to the job. but everything that has happened over the last couple of months, i think, has promoted it as a positive job opportunity and we're going to continue to do that. i wanted to conclude with our overall targets. for the most part, they rolled over from our last plan. we added in the subway delay. reducing the subway delay by 10%. so, that in addition to the kind of more micro dive that we're taking into the subway, we'll also carry that one over as a good kind of target of the overall health of the system. continuing to look at reducesing collision, increasing the service delivery

and then reducing gaps in service on our frequent lines and enhancing on-time performance on our less frequent routes. so thank you. and thank you for bearing with me on the overhead. i'm striebl answer any questions you may have. >> thank you very much. do you have further items on your report or was this it? >> i just had one other brief thing i neglected to mention. >> ok. we'll come back to that in a moment and then do public comment on the report all at once. so, directors, are there questions or comments for ms. kirshbalm? >> thank you for the thoughtful presentation and for the follow-up on a request. as i look at these targets and the metrix, not this page but earlier in the presentation, i just have a kind of question about balancing -- i guess balancing what's achievable with kind of what the right ambition is and similar to

vision zero, he talked about hitting that goal. i have a kind of big picture question about shouldn't the target for delay be zero, right? and even -- i want to be, again, cogny izant of all the realitis that you helped review in helpful detail. but there is something important of setting that as the goal that we want to have zero delay and i wanted to understand 10%, again, seems probably harder than it seems. but how does that 10% put us on a trajectory to hit zero delay eventually and have you map out what that trajectory looks like, given all the challenges that you discuss? i think there is something important about saying that our goal is eventually no delay and some of these things like that there would be four major delays each month, understanding the current of six so we're taking that to fours and that might be a big move. it seems like the goal eventually should be zero so i wanted to hear your thought on that. >> absolutely.

thank you for coming back to this. i should have clarified that these are intended to be 90-day goals and not where i think we want to get to the system long-term. i am relatively new to this metric of total delays so i'm not comfortable yet making a recommendation on what our ultimately goal should be. i will say we had 15,000 minutes of delay in just the peak periods. so i think --i'm not sure that i think getting to zero is realistic or maybe the customer expectation of a healthy subway. but it certainly needs to be a lot less. than what we have. i will say that i feel differently about the major incidents. there i do think that the goal should be zero. i don't think that -- i think a healthy subway system does not

have -- has a major breakdown, is an anomaly and that is something that we do want to be striving towards. >> ok. >> just a follow-up with that. do you know what other -- like within the industry standard, what the benchmark is around the delays? like obviously we'd love it to be 0. but is there some sort of standard that we know of? >> i'm not aware of another system that is taking this deep of a dive into their subway metrics. i do know when we looked at our on-time performance goal relative to the industry that we were measuring and evaluating our service in a kind of stricker or tougher way than is the industry standard. i'd have to do a little more research on the subway-specific metrix. >> great. a few more questions. one is that, you know, you talk about some of the new software that we have coming on board and i wondered, one of my

concerns -- and we will talk later about software for the essential subways. but how -- are we confident that the integration of the new work that we're doing is going to integrate well with some of the patchwork that we have from the old system and how we're going to test or be able to test those things in advance of running the potential subway when we can. >> if you want, i can try to respond to that. first of all, the central subway system, while ultimately will be the same control system that we have in the subway, it doesn't have a direct [inaudible] to it because the central subway crosses under the subway. it doesn't cross the existing subway so they don't have to interact directly. so, the central subway software will skip all the older generations that underlie the existing main subway system. what we've been doing in the last number of years in terms

of upgrading the train control system is kind of moving away from those underlying patches and older equipment and we're just in the final stages actually right now in the next month or so to finally do the new cut over of the new system that will take a lot of that old patchwork and the risk associated with it out of the system. it is the case, as with any software, there are issues and bugs. the testing that we undertake for the software is pretty rigorous. there's factory testing and then there is field testing before we put it in revenue service. the example that julie gave of certain train move, essentially knocking out the computer system one that, you know, ideally should have been caught. but that was not. but the -- generally speaking, the testing for the software is

very rigorous and we've been getting better at it. the risks that we have in the existing subway, many of which will not be present in the central subway. so they're somewhat different animals in that regard. but i think we've been getting a lot smarter on our technology systems. we eave been putting a lot of them into place and in some cases laying over verial technology and in some cases it's not so new by the time it is implemented. there's been a number of lessons learned in the last five or six years that are positioning us much better to finish the existing one and to do the next such as the central subway. >> related to that, do we have technology that you talked about the broken switch on the castro. do we have anything that allows us to see anything like that in our system that -- you know, a red dot that just says

something is loose in some area that we can identify the focus on. does our technology allow us to do that. are we looking at technology that would? >> think it is absolutely the date of the practice to have as much self-diagnosing equipment as possible. certainly that was the tremendous change between like our old traffic signals and newer traffic signals. there are somes a pexes of our infrastructure on the train system that is self-diagnosing. but in that particular instance, it was a merry christmas cal issue and did not have a self-diagnosing option. >> and related to that. i know that -- bart always talks about how their hours of being close reasonable doubt critical for the work that they do in their tracks. what kind of off hour track work review work do we do? because i don't ever hear about it and it would be interesting to know, other than when we have those big promise.

>> every night between the hours of 1:30 and 3:30 or 4:00, we're in the subway typically doing preventive mainl than on things like switches and overheads and track. but one of the things that we'll be trying in this 90 days is how can we extend that window? for example, starting at 11:00 p.m., our subway traffic goes down quite a bit. so we're going to experiment with not using one of the pockets or the pullouts that i was describing so that we have extra time to do maintenance on it. so we're looking for ways that don't have customer impacts but can stretch that time because we want as much time as possible to do preventive maintenance so we don't have the sametime problems. is, that s a great. -- >> that's great. another thing you were talking about the customer information and we're getting better. i get those alerts from the

city whenever it is like don't go to geary and parker because there's been an explosion. or there's an accident. is there any way that we can plug into that system to alert people about delays with trains and give them information of other buses -- you know, these five buss are still going on market street to downtown or whatever. do we have the ability? because the system is really effective. granded if we're having issues every day, it is an overwhelming number of text messages that people are going to be getting. but hopefully if we get close to zero, that would be a way we can alert people about major transit disruptions. >> we could talk to the department of emergency management system in terms whaof criteria they use. and their aminability to incorporating ours. we have our own notification

processes that people can sign up for e-mail, text, twitter. so, there's a lot that we have. whether or not the most significant of precipitation-related challenges can float through that d.e.m. system is something we can explore. >> it seems to be it has a broader subscription network and people seem to pay attention to those. i'm not saying we shouldn't. i'm a big fan of you want people to come where you are, the most likely place to go is where people already are. and sometimes when you're on the train, you'll get a text message but you can't get on to your twitter account, for example. i think. let me see if there is anything else. [please stand by] [please stand by]

>> so i got this question when we met two weeks ago and to sus sane -- sustain that level of physical presentation will be a challenge but to the extend we can't find another way to achieve the same goal it's our intent to leave them out there. >> okay. >> we're hoping through technology or signage or signalling to find a way to fake ma efficiency happen without having to have a body present. to the extent it's effective and we have no other way of achieving that effectiveness i think we'll need to keep them there. >> great