>> item number two is an ordinance amending the planning code to allow art's activities as a principally committed use as rcd to permit nighttime uses in the historic buildings and buildings that contribute to historic district to exempt nighttime to entertainment in the 200 buffer requirement and to require a preservation and maintenance plan for uses within the fullsome neighborhood district and rcd districts affirming the appropriate findings. >> thank you, mr. carroll. this is a piece of legislation -- i think this might be the last piece of legislation that then supervisor jane kim introduced and is now authored by her successor, supervisor hainey and the floor is yours. >> thank you, chair peskin. i'm asking if we will -- i want to move to continue this item to june 3rd. there was a change to it that

related to the conditional use process, which was not a part of the original legislation but was added by the planning department, so i want to have some additional time to deal with that and figure out what the right solution is. >> it was not added by the planning department but the planning commission under the historic commission concurred with and subsequently added, but is there any public comment because there is a motion or about about to be a motion to june 3rd. if you have any public comment, please come forward. wow! >> we're getting quite familiar with each other. busy day for me. we represent 1401 howard. and we would support the discussion or reconsideration of the conditional use process for

nighttime entertainment. i mean, i think the point of this legislation is to create as many flexible option and uses for historic properties in that district and to give the flexibility so that there's viability for these historic properties to be renovated or in the case of st. joseph's church to fund ongoing operations of a building which is higher than that of a standard building. and to that end, having the conditional use process for nighttime entertainment activities, it isn't quite consistent with the spirit which is to open up as much flexibility in uses allowed under the zoning code in the rcd and that would be our comment on the reconsideration of the conditional use and would support the continuance to deal with that issue, thank you. >> i will make a comment after public comment is done, that mr. zipblatt that you might want to think about in the intervening three week.

>> good afternoon, my name is amy laduke, i'm the manager for the foundation. so i'm here to say that the nonprofit organization was just recently established and inspired, really, by the beautiful church and restoration process that it went through. it is a federal landmark and it an asset to the neighborhood and the community and i think that not only as an employee but somebody who has worked in the area for some time. so we have worked with the public. we've worked with multiple community groups and non-frost organizations providing access to the site which, as you kno al know was closed for a period of time. this will allow us to continue and maintain and operate st. joseph's art society and foundation as a cultural and historical icon. >> thank you. >> thank you, any other members

for item number two. seeing none, public comment is closed. before we continue this to june 3rd, let me just say this about that, i actually would like to associate myself with staff's recommendations and with the unanimous votes of the planning and historic preservation commissions. unless this is only applicable to that one property that the two individuals testified for. insostar as thsofar as the way s written, it contributed to the historic district in the fullsome neighborhood commercial transit district, i would -- if this is site specific, and the neighborhood supports it and legislators are passing it, i am all for it. but otherwise, when you're doing nighttime entertainment, going through the process, i think this is important.

so you've got three weeks to figure that out for what it's worth. i can't talk to supervisor hainey about this because we're a majority of the committee and this is the only chance i get to share that with him. with that, he wishes to continue to this june 3rd and we will take that without objection. mr. clerk, could you read item 3 and 4. >> tto exam switchbacks on the light rate lines and for other transit lines under the jurisdiction of sfmta. agenda number 4 is a hearing on the municipal transportation agency's performance and progress meeting quarterly goals including service delivery with gaps on metro rail and improving performance and preventing collisions. >> thank you, mr. carroll. we are joined for both of these

items by supervisor marr, who i want to thank for calling these hears and i want to thank miss kershbaum from the mpa for being here and mr. ramos and staff and i want to thank miss kershbaum for sending me the slide deck we're about to see and with that, i'll turn this over to supervisor marr. >> thank you, chair. and also thank you to supervisor safaye for cosponsoring these hears. i was going to ask, i have one speaker before you do your presentation. but i wanted to make some opening remarks. i called for these hearings separately but have asked to be called together today so that we can contextualize the issue of switch-backs in the merics and goals. and also to move through this as efficiently as possible, so for

all intense and purposes, those these are two items before us, this will function as one hearing. i believe public transit must be accountable to the public and because i believe san francisco deserves answers for the ongoing issues with munis performance and reliability. for all messages i have received name in office, the most common subject is the concern of public transportation system. tens of thousands of constituents rely on muni to go to work, school, andly their lives and it's crucial that the service we provide be reliable. and i call these hearings before the 13-hour service shut-down a few weeks ago and before the problem with the lrbs were revealed and before director r ruskin is not continuing with the agency before his contract ends. so this is more urgent.

my hope is that this hearing will hope to better understand the actions they are taking to improve service. the goals we are setting and why. and how we are measuring success and how passenger experience is centered in these goals. and i hope that the results of this hearing can inform the goals we set for the next 90-day action plan. before we hear from the sfmta and miss kershbaum, i wanted to invite the executive director of the transit rider's union to make brief remarks. >> miss hiden, good afternoon. >> i'm the executive director of the transit riders. thank you for inviting me to speak on behalf of the policies discussed today. i do have a few things that i would like to say and i know this is kind of a dual hearing so i'll separate some of my remarks. first, on the topic of switchback, as an organization, you no, we are rider

represented. we understand that when done correctly, switchback can be an effective tool for managing and balancing service. so when too many buses or trains are traveling no one direction, you can switch one back to pick up stranded riders, we get that. but switchbacks are not used effectively. and they have a very real and negative impact on riders. in particular, too often switchbacks are poorly announced and communicated and riders feel lost. they feel literally stranded on a platform somewhere with an unknown amount of time for the next train. though we know they have committed to stopping switchbacks, we're hearing from riders in the bayview who don't believe switchbacks have stopped and that's because riders have lost their faint an faith and t.

it's unlikely there is a rider in this room who hasn't been impacted by a switchback. but i want to say ultimately the issue here is overall responsibility and service predictibility. as long service remains this unreliable, we're never going to be a transit first city which i think is the ultimate goal here. and then regarding the 90-day plan, overall communications about service delivery, we have seen improvement with riders in terms of communication and i want to thank director julie kershbaum to delivering these ultimates to the board. riders need consistent use of signage, clear announcements and well in advance of a switchback and that's a small disruption or

a 13-hour shutdown. we need accurate on-bus announcements. we need station agents who are all communicating the same thing so people know where go and what do when there's a little disruption or massive failure. we would leak to see this reporting in layman's terms so the everyday rider understands what you need to do to improve service. so we want to, in particular, see that muni understands what bunching and gapping means and the impact that inconsistent

service has. you lose time with family or friended or when you're padding your schedule and the service doesn't come and you're late to appointments. we're very aware the service has been particularly poor lately, especially on the light rail line and we understand there are efforts underway to fix it but muni has a long way to go to gain confidence of the riders and more public and rider-friendly efforts to address these issues are sorely needed. the last thing, we need muni to address unpredictability as if they were personally impacted by the state of service, as if it was an hour of their time everyday they were wasting trying to get from point a to point b. thank you. >> thank you, rachel. thank you so much, miss hiden. the transit rider's union is the only organization i'm aware of

focused on public transit and organizing and the work you do is so essential and i'm great approximately for you joining us today and sharing the perspective of your organization and members. i wanted to start this hearing because i believe the needs and experiences of muni passengers should frame thinking of the performance and how we measure success. and now i would like to invite julie, the director of transit for sfmta. >> before we do that, am then ii have to step out for three minutes and i'll hand it over to chair. >> thank you, i'll be brief. i want to thank you, supervisor marr, for calling this. this has been an ongoing frustration for a tremendous amount of my constituents. i know it is for all over the city. two of these lines te terminated

run through district 11. it's been a major source of frustration and not just the switchbacks but the delays. i would like to hear from miss k er kershbaum on the availability and there's been levels of pay and how it accelerates over a certain amount of time. that has contributed to the loss in the amount of operators willing to be a part of this system and partake. i always say and i know my colleagues agree, being an operator for muni, is the toughest job in the city and county of san francisco. you're on the front lines interacting with every major constituency on a daily basis. so i see that on your slide and i think that it's not just a matter of we're short but what

is the agency doing to address that problem and how aggressively is the agencying moving to ensure we don't have an operator shortage and making that a priority. because i think that's not an acceptable excuse given the state of the overall transportation system in our city. i really appreciate rachel coming out today to speak on behalf of the transit riders. i think people interactin intery basis will tell you delay and switchbacks contribute to an overall level of frustration. i'm not quite convinced this is a problem that is happening all over the united states. i feel like some of this is at the level at which it's happening is unique in a lot of ways to san francisco. and so i'm happy that you've taken on this new role. i know you're up for the

challenge. i know you're just new to it, but these kind -- this level of frustration in a very tempered manner that you heard from miss h issueiden is not what wer from our constituents. we hear absolute exdisaster perratioexexasperatitonand peopd just factor in being late if you ride muni. particularly when it comes to lightrail. just wanted to get that on the record.

>> thank you both for your introductory remarks, and i think what they all echo is that we've had an extremely difficult six to eight-month period while mta is clearly in a period of transition, that doesn't mean we haven't let our customers down. and we do take that extremely seriously. we are struggling to put service on the street because of our operator shortage and i am going to speak to that. we are in the process of replacing the entire muni fleet and experiencing some of the growing papers that are inevitable during that process. but i think what we heard at the transportation authority board, we haven't done that with enough transparency u.s. policy mak mas

that our public would expect. we're dealing with a core system that is in need of major upgrades, not only to meet the needs of a growing city but more importantly, to meet the needs of our customers now. my approach today is not to tell you everyone is fine with me. it's clearly not. but i do want to tell you that i am personally committed to doubling our efforts, to improve the service and also that i do think that we have some important building blocks in the process ces that will help get s where we knee to go. need to go. just or the last month, we have experienced acute challenges that i wanted to make sure we addressed along with the underlying progress we're making.

both the subway delay miss hiden referred to as well as operator shortage and then, kind of some more ongoing subway reality issues. reliability issues. we had an unacceptable service impact. the subway was out for almost 13 hours. we had an overheadline break at a splice which is where two pieces of wire are connected by a bracket. that bracket was about three months old and it was defective and it did fail in service but there were also indications on that wire that the part was failing, that should have been caught as part of our routine inspections. this photo here was a photo of the actual overheadline, staff working that day. and i share it just to explain

the complexity of what it means to replace a thousand feet of overhead wire while under a tremendous amount of scrutiny. so i'm incredibly grateful to the overhead-line staff, as well as controllers that manage this delay. at the same time, that doesn't mean there are not some very important key lesson or take aways. the reason that the damage what so extensive was a little bit of bad luck. when the overhead wire broke, it got wrapped around the pantagraph of the second train. unlike the lrv4s, where they got that information, they would just stop. what happened in this instance, the front car of the trip was ts

powered and kept moving. not unlike if you were ripping an extension cord that would be tacked up in your house. what we're doing is to do a full subway assessment and not just enough to do a preventive maintenance programme but it needs to be quality. so we're reviewing not just the overheadlines but the track and switches to make sure that we have no further vulnerability to this type of an incident. we are also -- there are some enhancements that we want to make to both the communication and the service plan that i think we will be able to handle this situation better were we to be faced with it again. the mta board also sent a very strong message when i presented this information to them, just

how unacceptable this was and both the chair and myself bear that responsibility. and they asked us to take a step further in two way. the director used an example of an astronaut going up into space and said astronauts are not nervous to go up into space because they know there's been a group doing contingency plan for every possible thing they could do wrong and they had a tight plan for that. we will be continuing to do that type of contingency planning. and then what our chair asked us was to do an inventory of where we have these types of vulnerabilities and rather than waiting to go wrong, to fix them, fix them proactively. it won't happen overnight. some of this requires, for example, eliminating the splices in the subway will require

longer shutdown periods to run longer stretches of wire. but we will come out stronger and we're very committed to doing that. i also wanted to take just a few moments to give you updates on our lrv-4 design issues. i know we did discuss these issues at length. as we roll out any vehicle of this complexity, we're certainly going to face design challenges. i think what's most concerning is both the quantity and then what i heard strong and clearly was how we were communicating on them. we do experience routine issues as we put a new train in service. i think an example most recently of an issue that was identified and essentially closed is with the cameras on the trains. we have cameras instead of

mirrors on all of our vehicles. i think that they're a big benefit because unlike a mirror, they won't get knocked out of order. you could be looking on both ends of the train and you can get an enhanced viewpoint and the mirrors can't hurt or nick anyone. based on feedback, we replaced the monitors to be visible for two cars and eventually three-car trains. but after two years in service, we were having some cameras that you couldn't see the monitors because they were covered with droplets of water. and when we went in and looked at that, you know, this wasn't our first rainy season. weave ha.initially we were surp. what we found that the gasket sealing the cameras, after two

years of wear on our washers, it was getting beat up and we needed to put in a stronger gasquegasgasquet to keep it sea. all of the fleet is fixed. when everyone works, that's the process that we -- the reason we have trains in service is to that we can identify those types of challenges and rather than having our head in the sand to go ahead and identify improvements.

on the single-panel end door, we were experiencing the doors not sensitive enough. and we went through and what we determined is that there were two issue. s. one is that the door itself did not meet san francisco's examinations. we have braided doors that are easily a catch and hold and so people were assuming that same type of behaviour for these newer trains. we also had an issue and i think it was captured most acutely by me on television when i was trying to demonstrate this enhanced door, that the door was testing and meeting all of the tests, but not meeting the spirit of the test. closing on somebody's hand, instead of opening back up.

the angle of the sensitive edge was put out of place which meant if you tested it head-on, it was working but if you had your hand at any angle, it had the potential to close. so we are enhancing the testing. we're going beyond the industry standard and really testing all of the different angel angles ta person's hand could come in contact with the door and we're adding two additional sensitive edge. if you look at a diagram, the original sensitive edge is just that yellow strip. we are adding two additional edges. one is on the door itself and then the second is on the outside of the car body. so collectively, the three sensors will work redundantly to open as needed.

the second issue we faced was that we had a sheer bolt break in service when the trip was trs making the turn at the terminal. we have a number of redundant systems to prevent that but we did need to understand why those sheer bolts broke and we avoided three possible areas. one, we looked the the metalurgy and design itself. we were testing to the

manufacturer's spec. was there a turn or bend when we first designed the train? they're built spell for our curve and turns and even in our yards but we remapped the entire system to make sure there wasn't something more than we expected. everything was an in-spec. so what we were able to identify was that there's actually a a design flaw in the cupler itse itself. this works very much like a doorstop. if you go to open your door, just a stopper that prevents the door from smashing against the wall and this is what that does for the cupler. it allows it to swing not so

hard that it's smashing. there was very little margin of error so where the sheer bolts broke, instead of allowing this to swing open within it was getting only halfway so all of the pressure of the turn was backing up on to the cupler and then that is what caused the sheer beats t bolts to break. the n-stop itself was hitting this metal plate and force was pushing back. we also had a number of

instances where the n-stop was swinging out, but it was doing some scraping while it was ad added. that's what that red circle is for and a much less scale of damage and so we have the two incident trains, plus one additional train with the s sher bolt and 25 additional bolts that will need to be replaced because of the scraping. so we will be resigning the coupler so there is a cop constt bolt to swing. in all of these cases, when they brought design solutions to us, we reviewed them not only with our own engineering team, but we brought it in an outside expert, somebody who could come in with a fresh set of eyes to look at

the solutions to make sure we weren't missing something. it's always important when you fine something like this to make sure there's not other things that you didn't also eliminate because you have this kind of obvious thing to point to which is why we went through those other analyses. they will also be renewed by the lrv for safety certification committee, as well as staff from our the cpuc which is our regulator. while i'm hopeful that this change can be implemented relativity quic quickly, we have parts on hand and a good path forward, i am not committing to it until late june, because i want to make sure that we go through all of the review steps that with need to. >> i apologize, but i had to step out, so this impacts about half of the 50 that you've taken title to, taken receipt of?

the coupler, it's more like 30%. we have about 104 couplers and identified 25 to 30 with damage. but the couplers can be replaced without a service impact because we have a maintenance float of couplers and we'll put on a fresh one, send the odd one outo be repaired. >> these are all under warranty? >> yes, and these will all be repaired as part of the contract. >> i had a question on the lrb vehicles, too. i know -- and kind of connecting it to the topic of the hearing, which is on the performance goals. we're well aware of that, these new lrbs were intended to

address service delivery and improve service on the streetcar lines but given the different problems that have come up with the door and the couplers and the brakes, as well, it can't be called a success, especially given that we had to vote on the transportation authority to postpone funding to expedite more vehicles of the new vehicles. so i understand that you're under completing pressures to move quickly and expa expap expe but there's an issue of ensuring proper safety and design review so clearly, something didn't go right in balancing those needs with the lrv vehicles. so i guess my question is, how

will these competing goals be reconciled going forward and how will these issues be rectified and how can we as elected representatives move forward with confidence that something like this won't happen again. >> i think i would stat by stary lending my own personal viewpoint that i think this will be a fantastic train. i really do. i wouldn't be up here if i didn't. in terms of competing priorities, we always put safety at the top. i believe this is a safe train, it continues to be a safe train. do things like running single car trains while we're working through design issues. i think this is prudent but i

think we'll get there. i think the fact that we've been able to work through some of these technical issues as quickly as we have also speaks to the commitment. they put a ton of engineering resources towards understanding and addressing these concerns, really at their own expense. so i do stand by what i said at the hearing. we certainly wouldn't have wanted you to take an action that day when we had this type of information unknown. but when we put the brada train and the seaman's train next to each other, it is a clear winner what is the train of the future for san francisco. i think the difference between the two are that the issues that

we were facing and in early roll-out of the brada were never resolved. things like having too complicated of a door design and kind of a high failure rate, those were issues that we had initially. they're being compounded now by the fact this is an extremely old train with parts obsolescence. where we want to keep these trains running another five or ten years, i'm not sure that option would be available to us.

this is a mixed fleet which we'll continue to be in. >> so we are moving forward with a design that would add what we call additional track breaks and making the seaman's breaking more than the brada breaking but that's a lead-time item and not a safety item but will continue to affect the vehicle availability for the next six to nine month. >> what about the issue of mirrors versus cameras and monitors? i talked about that while you were out. just as a typical example of how

in a new train, we expect. there were cameras that had droplets of water and we were surprised because it wasn't our first rainy season with this train but what we determined was that the gasket that was protecting and sealing the camera wasn't strong enough to undergo the wear and tear of our washer, of our train washer. so we have replaced 90% of the gaskets with an improved design and we'll get the other 10% done before kind of we're back spot rainy season. into

the rainy season. i brought up the camera where i think they're benefiting from staff feedback. the initial trains also had a smaller monitor size. and based on feedback from our trainers and from our operators, we replaced them in all of the trains to be a larger size and also with additional shading for glare. both the traditional mirrors, as well as cameras are not immune to the light change that happens when you exit the subway but i think the cameras have some advantage that we could put that shading in and also, because unlike the mirrors, the keeps allow you to scan both side of the taken. strain.there's a camera that shs back and there's a camera that shoots forward. it can't get knocked out of alignment if you bump something. it can't clip anything as it goes by. i think my next slide, it shows

an example of the brada mirrors and you can see how far outside of the vehicle they point, which is something that we don't have with the new trains. >> and the monitor size went from what to what?

the rear mirrors on the brada cars was a big problem because it was a safety issue, not only because of clearances, but we've had people get hurt on platforms when they would stand in the wrong place, the yellow zones. the car would come and they would get hit by those mirrors and that was a big issue during review. >> thank you. >> the last kind of recent challenge and this falls a little bit into what i'll talk about in performance, is that the april 26th incident aside

the subway needs to get more reliable. and it has been a big focus of mine since i've taken on this role with a lot of support and good ideas from both our maintenance and operation staff who are really getting in and solving some very nuts and bolts problems that are rolling up in larger issues. but we are experiencing kind of two types of issues. was that pun intended, nuts and bolts? [ laughter ] >> no, it's not. >> two kinds of issues, one is a major incident happens. we lose the subway. it's a delay of 20 minutes.

it's trains getting stuck between stations because there's a brada that's broken town or there's too many trains bunched up together. those kinds of daily experiences, i think, are kind of a key thing and what we're focused on addressing. as i said at the beginning of my remarks, though, i do think that we have some very strong foundations in place. once we can address core issues like having enough operators to deliver the schedule, i think they'll going to start paying off.

and we are turned the ship in operator hiring which i'll speak to in a minute.

it's to take concrete actions. it's my intent to power staff to solve the problems. my experience is that people that are closest to the work. it's part of the reason i'm leaning today, because three much closethey'reclose to the d. in addition, the 90-day plan is premised that you don't know if you're getting better if you're not measuring it. so we're tracking closely our performance, setting what i believe are incremental achievable goals and continuing to move that target as we make enhancements. for the most recent 90-day plan, we had a number of initiatives,

which i laid out, and then staff developed action items that responded to the initiatives. it included things like enhancing the subway performance, reducing the service, improving staff engagement and morale that is of particular importance at this moment and time. we lost complete access to one of our major railyards and we were turning more trains around and i'm very proud that by making that kind of deliberate

process, we not only didn't see a big decline in kind of our overall service but we did see some incremental process, even if that tough time. >> the first class doesn't graduate until may 30th. and in part, because some of that service delivery is related to some of the other goals like gaps. so the first target that i

wanted to talk about is service delivery. i want to be clear here that my goal is to deliver 100% of the service and i mean, that is what we need for the system to be successful. when we're not delivering 100% of the service, instead of staff managing small nuances and shifts and traffic patterns, we're just struggling day-to-day to make sure that we don't have big gaps out in the system. but we're not going to change overnight, which is why we set this incremental goal of 96%. as this chart shows, we are hitting that goal on the lrv side and the reason for that is, for the lrv side, we control the pipeline. we train people who are currently bus operators to become real operators. a rail division has prestige, as well as more financial

resources, so it's a desirable division and that's something we achieved in the last 90-day plan this fall, where we got all of our lrv operator familiar with the trains and started to deliver all of the service. but we are not meeting the goals on the bus side and what that means is hundreds of trips a day are not being delivered, which is extremely problematic and something foundational to our work. we did make a tremendous amount of progress in the area and by looking at an overall change and if this were ten years ago, once every 15 months we would post a listing for operators and people would wait month, sometimes years to become an operator. it was a desirable job.

we look at every step in the process where we were losing potential candidates. so the first thing is we're creating a list every two months. we are publicizing the lists in advance so that some of our nonprofit partners can promote that list as part of their work. with defendant communities. our intents is to go to a continuous operator list to apply it any time but that will take a little bit longer. but this acknowledges the job market that we're in.

we're passed a point where someone will apply and then eight months later still be veil. available. there's a lot of places where people work and we needed to tighten the timeline between when people started applying for the process and when we had them in the job. the second thing is that there are a lot of requirements to make it through our process. you have to pass a medical exam. you have to pass a drug test. you have to kind of navigate kind of bit of bureaucracy. you have to have a class b permit. you don't have to have a license. we'll friday that, but you do have to have a permit. that was shrinking our people. this was a good job path for people and developing a

city-drive programme. but they've been flexible with us to modify that programme in essentially real-time. they're offering a free class-b permit course for anyone on our new operator list. in our most recent class, we had 25 plus people take advantage of that programme. so we are already seeing dividends. our first class of 60 operators, i think it may ended up being 57 in the door started in march and will graduate at the end of may. we, at the beginning of may started another class of 60 and then in july, we'll be starting a third class. so there's still a lot of work to do. i estimate that it will take about six to eight classes at that scale to really truly solve and sustain the problem. but we're going to see immediate

dividends with these first two classes joining the workforce. >> i just had a quick question. what's the number of fde positions that remain unfiled? >> we have about 200 vacancies on the bus side. >> and what's your projection of when that number could get down to zero, time-frame wise? >> i'm hopeful that within the next nine to 12 months, but i think that we will see improvements in service delivery even before that, because we are still relying on operator overtime and some other strategies to kind of close a portion of that gap. the second thing we look at is a metric of how reliable the service is.

as rachel related, this is hard to capture. the customer impact of not having reliable service means that you're adding time to your trip. so if some days it takes you 20 minutes and another day it takes you 40 minutes and you need to get to the doctor on time, you're planning tor 40 minutes. and that time is real and it's something that people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis. the other thing that people experience, and i think something we can capture more directly is, if i show up and i'm waiting for a train or bus, does that train or bus show up? and we measure that by how often is a customer experiencing a gap in service or a vehicle that's not showing up. so if i expect a bus to come every ten minutes, i am waiting more man 15 peninsula 15 minuted call that a gap. on our rapid network where we've made tremendous investments in larger vehicles, transit priority improvement, protected

right-of-way, we are able to manage those gaps really effectively and as you can see in this chart, less than 12% of our trips are experiencing more than a five-minute gap. on the subway side, on the rail side, our interim goal is 20% and while there were some period in the 90-day plan that we were hoerinhovering at that 20% marke didn't hit our target because that was 21% in april. we also look for our less frequent routes. rather than looking at kind of gaps in service, we are also looking at headway adherence. (please stand by).

>> we did dedicate a controller into the line management. we were able to move a very important project was to improve the downtown third street transit lane forward through m.t.a. board approval. there is an example of why it is important to iterate, and we have a red lane on third street, and a lot of times it is stuff with cars, especially if there's a baseball game or any other sort of congestion. and the cause of that is there

are a lot of people trying to turn right and they're getting into the transit lane. we will be moving the transit lane over one lane so that it can flow more freely, and that feedback came from some of our operators and inspectors who are out on the line, particularly managing it through those ballpark days. in the last thing we did is we optimize some of our signal priority on mission street, so we have a complex system in, but we are always trying to learn and make sure that we are rolling it out in the most effective way possible. the next metric we looked at was subway delay. this is really the first time that we have used this metric and to your point, it maybe is in the most user-friendly, but what it does capture is every minute that a train is stuck in the subway between stations, and every time it is at a platform

for more than 30 seconds, which is the low end of what it takes to board. so captures the big incidents, but it also captures the day-to-day congestion. for example, customers that are stuck between forest hill and west portal, trying to exit the subway. we set a goal here to reduce delay by 10%. we did meet that goal. we met it primarily by focusing on our transition points. for example, by putting parking control officers at west portal and being more proactive about how we are prioritizing trains getting out of the subway. we saw an immediate reduction in the amount of time people were spending between -- stuck between stations. embarcadero is