we all know it's a moving puzzle that we continue to look at it so again, thank you so much for the work that you and your staff have done on this. it's been really eye-opening to hear all the comments and everything. so i'll move to approve. >> director heinicke. >> you got a second already? >> we have a second? >> i wanted to ask some questions. first of all to the folks who came down here and shared with us their neighborhood experience, it's very moving. i've known mr. black for decades now and i've never heard him speak so passionately about a civic item. so that meant a lot to me. and those of you who took time to help your neighborhood be better and our city safer i appreciate it. it's meant a lot to all of us. so i will support this program. it seems to me this is a matter of life and death and that's an easy call. and now the next question is how do we accommodate our small business community and others with

legitimate concerns about this project. personally i would absolutely favor looking into evening matters, metering spots that aren't metered right now and speak directly to the businesses. don't assume that the city planning model will work for these businesses speak to our friend and to her other businesses there and see what is it that you need. it may be they need a couple of pickup zones because they do a lot of delivery business. okay. it may mean they need 30-minute parking. i don't know what it is. but let's found out specifically what her business and the other affected businesses need and try to manage that. finally, there's been some discussion about the length of the pilot. i would like to ask you to right now is there any serious downside to making this a nine-month or 1246 month pilot. i realize -- 12-month pilot. i realize we want to go through different life cycles, different conditions so we know that the safest

is for cyclists and others but it seems to me that nine months or 12 months starting in march gives us a good look at that. and number two, i know these things have a life cycle. while we'll remain open as they go on, if you don't set a deadline things get more permanent we don't have a point for feedback from neighbors and cyclists and merchants. so my question to you as i hear my directors talking about this, let's start with nine months. do you see a serious downside to moving this from a march to end of year pilot as to opposed to 15-year pilot -- 15 months. [laughter] >> i think we can glean a lot if we can get two evaluation periods in, which i think would be just in that but nine months i would be concerned if we went shorter than that so a nine to 12 month range is workable. >> let's start with nine. can you get two evaluation periods in in nine months?

are you comfortable with nine months? >> yes but with the caveat that we are committed and decided to come back within four months with very early findings, and it's highly like by live that we might actually want to make changes to the pilot, because some issues come up right away >> that sounds like a yes plus. so nine months with a four-month look back is okay by you all. and i'm not trying to pressure you. i want to know, this is life and death. if that's going to make cyclists or pedestrian or others less safe please tell us. but otherwise i think it's a consensus developing that we can shorten this a little bit to maybe make it work faster. >> i think what he is getting at is where we can make changes four months in, we would want time to look at those changes. >> so we could extend that at that point? i'm not trying to pressure you into an answer. i want the right answer.

>> so i think we would -- we put 15 months in here so we would have the public would understand this could go for as long as 15 months and to have the maximum flexibility to come back with a robust evaluation. we shortened it to 12 months. we have an opportunity after four months and do a apples to apples. i would be worried for it going below 12 months for those reasons. >> i support 12 months. >> i would like to move the pilot program to 12 months please. >> is there a second? >> i second >> great. >> i want to add to that to your point that we would like to have regular four months in a lookback and i want to make sure we also, right about to install it, if you've made changes based on the conversations we've had here that we report to the board.

if you are going into the ground march or february, if any changes have been made, just let us know and also what your communications and outreach plan is for the public and small business community, of all the conversation you've had to that place so we can know that from the start we can start this successfully. and then in terms of part of the lookback, part of that is really engaging with our small business community and understanding their needs and how this is affecting them and obviously haight street generally in terms of transit service and pedestrian activity and traffic. so if we can add that as part of the evaluation aspect of that. >> so moved. >> before we go to vote can i just thank supervisor vallie brown. i know she was instrumental in getting the community support and getting staff engaged on this. and she really was such a strong supporter of taking this project to the next level.

so supervisor brown, thank you so much for your help. if you could let her know how much the community appreciates that and that everybody who uses page street will remember that she was really instrumental in pushing this forward. thank you. >> is it madame chair or -- >> just a point of clarification. does the motion include the idea that's been discussed about doing some outreach in bringing back an evaluation of the haight street restriction as well? >> so procedurally my view is that's not appropriate for a resolution. we've instructed staff to do that without objection, and staff is going to do that. i think we should limit the resolution to the actual legislation. >> that's fine. >> so there's -- sorry. >> we have to vote on the amendment of 12 months before we vote on the actual -- >> the motion is to amend the item to limit the pilot to 12 months. >> all in favor. >> aye. >> any opposed?

that motion moves forward. the motion of the original item. >> so moved as amended. >> all those in favor? >> aye >> any opposition? it carries. >> well done >> thank you. >> the bad news for everyone is now i get to take back over. >> oh, come on. she was doing a good job. >> i know, i know. all right. ms. boomer, if we could return to the director's report. >> all right. so we'll go back to this report. >> thank you. >> you'll never get rid of me. [laughter] >> is she in the back? she's in the back. >> our meeting goes on. if you were here for the page street item and wish to speak to our staff member he's out there and has business cards. please feel free to do so. >> speaker card.

>> a point of clarification. are we doing the director's report? >> the report >> okay. so we are returning to item 7 which has been moved back for my personal convenience. i appreciate that directors, sorry for being tardy. it was an unavoidable work conflict. you didn't think you were going to get away from me did you? one day after a little turbulence. the floor is yours. >> okay. transit director. let's start with the turbulence. we had a three-hour service delay yesterday. it started at 8:18 a.m., and it affected our inbound service from west portal to castro station. the good news is we have not had a disruption of this scale in several months. but it did occur yesterday.

and i wanted to walk you all through the cause because it was fairly unusual. the delay was caused by an issue with our traffic accident power system. we had two circuits pge to the laguna honda substation both fail at the same time. ordinarily this would not have impacted our customers, because we have built-in redundancy to the system, and the feeders would have been back fed by the two nearby substations church and west portal. in this case when the circuits failed three of the four feeders did back field, and one did not. we then were able to fix the underlying problem over that three-hour period, we restored power

to the laguna honda station, which is how we were able to get service back up. while three hours is an unacceptable delay, it is critical that we approach power issues slow and steady, because the critical safety precautions that are needed to take in working with our substations. the reason that the back field did not work, we were able to diagnose overnight. we have a section of wire that connects the laguna honda station with the west portal station where there was water intrusion, and the wire had corroded. and so that was the cause of why the back field did not take place. we are still working with both pge and the puc to try to understand what caused the original

circuit problem. and we are continuing to investigate that. but we will proceed over the next several days to fix that water intrusion and the corroded wire. so that is what occurred. in terms of our service plan, we were able to provide continuous outbound service. it was slower than usual because we were also crossing over in-bound trains at caste row to get people in bound. most of the shuttles went all the way to van ness station although some turned at castro. we also did direct some customers at west portal to take the k line towards balboa park and take the bart line. and that's something we will promote more broadly next time as

well because even in the best circumstances, it often takes 45 minutes to get buses from one part of the city to the other to provide these shuttles. so i'm really appreciative of the field managers that were putting folks on trains at west portal and making the bart connection and with mutual aid to bart, that provides a good connection. so that being said, i think we did struggle in some ways in this instance on communication. so that is something that we are going to sharpen. we did not have good communications to our station agents. and they were really the first responders in this case. we have changed our procedures based on the feedback we got from staff. and we will now make sure that we identify a dedicated person in

the tmc to connect with each station agent, rather than expecting the floor manager, who is also managing the entire incident, to do that communication. we were fortunate that our new director was out at castro to help, along with a lot of communications and planning staff that came out to play that ambassador role. we are going to continue to make sure we are really sharp on communications in these instances. >> okay. does anyone have any questions about yesterday's incident before we move on to the -- >> i just had a question about the shuttles because we saw the pictures of people waiting. how long did it take us to clear out that backlog of people waiting for shuttles? >> i think it did vary. in some cases we were able to get three buses at a time and we could clear the entire thing in a matter of minutes. in other cases we had 20-minute gaps

between buses. >> please director. >> just wondering. you mentioned mutual aid. in bart's case, they are running the train anyway, so it's pretty easy for them to take more passengers. i wondered in terms of buses i mean, there are a lot of buses that lay over in san francisco from other agencies. are any of those conceivebly if we break down the walls between the agencies are any of them better-positioned to you replacement service than your own? >> it's certainly something we can investigate. i don't think at 8:15 in the morning when this incident took place, but i think depending on the location and the scale it is a good resource to consider. >> right. >> okay. thank you. >> so thank you for the direct report on this. wire corrosion, this is not a unique piece of wire that was

corroded. are we checking all the other wires in the system right now to make sure there's no water intrusion and coerosion there? >> we will be. there are hundreds. >> but if it happens to one it could be happening to others and we haven't even entered the rainy season so it might be the time to do that. so that's number one. number two, i appreciate there was some fast-thinking on the ground and some clever station agents at west portal who directed people to take the k to the bart which is definitely going to be quicker in almost all circumstances than taking a bus downtown. the bad news is this will happen again. we run a complicated system that runs on overhead wires and there's all sorts of things that can go on. and i appreciate that you and everybody else has been working to reduce the number of instances and this is great but this will happen again, and it shouldn't be our station agents thinking on the fly. we should have a plan for what happens

when inbound service is disrupted in the morning and outbound service is disrupted in the evening, and you in your position should be able to throw a switch, whether figurative or literal, that kick that is plan into place and our agents are automatically notified. they'll have a game sheet they'll know what to tell customers. we shouldn't be reinventing this wheel every time it happens. it's going to happen again. let's learn from these situations and make the best plan we can. >> thank you. >> okay. and then i fully appreciate the suggestion of having one did i go nateed person who will tell all of the -- one designated person who will tell all of the station agents. i appreciate the report. now on to the regularly-scheduled programming. >> well, in addition to my regular 90-day report, i wanted to

cover a few other topics with you all. the muni working group that vice-chair borden has been sharing has been a pretty incredible opportunity to allow some thinking space on some strategic issues. and so as they evolve the ones that i think are really urgent i want to make sure that we are also discussing in this venue because i think they very much affect our ability to deliver service. so the first one i wanted to talk about was an update on the operator staffing shortage that continues to be the most acute issue we are facing in the service. i also wanted to talk about an area that we haven't had as much discussion on, which is supervision and some challenges that i think we are facing there and some steps that i think we need to take to enhance our supervision. i included the 90-day performance update to walk through some of the key metrics this month.

and then based on the board's feedback i also included an overview of some of our most recent ridership trends. we are looking at fy19 as a baseline discussion and then we'll incorporate that into our performance updates moving forward. this board needs no reminder, but we are currently not delivering our scheduled service, which is having both direct and indirect impacts on our ability to deliver quality service. i am proud that we've made some really key headways in solving this problem. but we still have a lot of work to do. the most effective improvements have been to increase the class size and to address the operator pipeline

issues. we were facing a situation in 2018 where we wanted to do a 60 percent class and we were getting anywhere from 15 to 30 people on the list. so through the i think really creative efforts of derek kim and the hr team, we've been able to address that issue. we now have hundreds of people that are on the list, excited to become muni operators. we also thanks to the support of our training division, we have increased the size of the classes to give you an order of magnitude we graduated 78 people new operators in 2018. and we graduated 200 in 2019. so while that is a tremendous improvement it is not enough. i'm going to talk a little bit about why it's not enough and some of the steps we are taking. i also wanted to flag that in doing

that because we did not grow the training group while they were increasing, a lot of other really important training is not happening at the pace that it needs to. things like refresher training, getting people back to work collision avoidance training, is all in some ways been put on hold to focus on our new operator training. as i said, there were many steps that addressed the operator pipeline having more frequent tests, publishing the tests in advance but i think the most successful was our partnership with oewd on the city drive program. it's been so popular that there's now going to be an advisory group because other city departments, some of the private sector even other transit agencies are interested in this program. and what it essentially does is helps

people bridge that gap between getting on our list and getting the commercial permit which allows you to enter a new class. and this program not only do they offer the free training to get the permit, they take you to the dmv. they help you navigate the bureaucracy which for people -- dmv is hard for anyone. but people who have a lot of different choices in the job market, we wanted to remove this barrier and it's been very successful. thank you, vice-chair borden as well as director brinkman, it's been great to have you at the graduations. at the most recent graduation the operator who gave a speech to his classmates shared all of the cities and countries that his classmates were from.

and the list was amazing. there were at least 20 different countries. there were cities all over san francisco and all over california and all over the united states. so i continue to be really proud of the talent that we are attracting and also it was exciting to see them recognize their own diversity and how special it is. so we currently have an operator shortage of about 230 people that varies on a day-to-day basis with attendance and other trends but it is very significant. with a heavy reliance on overtime, we are still missing three to four percent of the service hours every day. in addition we estimate particularly this year because we are planning a lot of promotions, that

our just break even number is 200. we have about a hundred bus operators on leave on a annual basis. most of it is retirement. we do see about a ten percent washout rate in the first year of driving. we also expect 50 to 60 bus operators to promote as we are in desperate need of both more trainers and more supervisors. and then about 40 to 50 bus operators will complete our rail program whether that's cable car historics or lrv. and that's both to accommodate retirement on the rail side as well as our growing service. what what we plan to do to address this is to increase the pace of our hiring. we are currently starting a class of between 55 and 60 students every eight weeks.

we are going to go to starting a new class every five weeks of 40 to 45 students. we will be beginning that in february. we will not be doing a class in december. the main reason for that is so that we can complete all of the training needed for the operator general sign-up. but we were able to do a full class in october. when i last briefed you we were looking at a reduced class size for october. so we did a full class in october in lieu of doing a december class. we also have a new training classification. this has been critical to our ability to attract quality trainers into the program. and we expect to hire before the end of the year 25 new trainers off of that list.

but it's going to take about six months for them to become fully qualified independent trainers. so in the meantime in order to be able to start the more frequent classes in february, we are reaching out across the agency to folks that have previously been in the training department have the skills, have the certifications, and ask them to do a six six-month tour almost in the training group to help us through this strategic time period. so with that we anticipate that we will be able to significantly reduce the current backlog by the end of 2020 that we should go from about 230 operators short to about 150. we anticipate that with the continued hiring, we should be at 100 percent

without reliance on overtime by the summer of 2021. and so as we prepare and think about things like the budget, i do think that there is very much a desire and a need to consider service increases particularly in some of our communities where we have equity gaps as well as where we have crowding. but as we review proposals we will not be recommending any service increases until the second fiscal year because we think it's really important to get 100 percent healthy before we burden the agency with additional service. this red line here shows the current trajectory if we were to just continue the 60 percent classes every two months. and it shows it keeps us in a steady state. a steady state is not good enough,

which is why we are going to the more frequent classes. would you like me to continue or take -- okay. very good. so with that sort of strategic issue discussed, the next thing that we really need to be able to be set up for success is to take a hard look at the supervision and how we are managing our service. this chart here shows the opportunity within our operations group. something that incoming director tumlin has been talking about is does every position in the agency have a pathway to the director's office. in our operation side, that is very much true. people start at operators become supervisors. they have an opportunity to work in the control centre and then they become floor and field managers

we can overseeing the overall operations. from there, they can proceed to the senior operations manager level and then to my previous job of the chief transportation officer and then the director. so that's the good news is that we have -- it's very wonderful and very well utilized ladder of opportunity. but i also flag it here in this context so you understand that all of these positions are in competition. so as we promote more supervisors create more trainers, create the positions, that further increases our need for more operators. even the last two years, we have made some significant improvements in how we manage the service. and you all have heard me talk about much of that.

the radio i think is the biggest impact. not only does it mean that we can talk to our operators at all points in the system and we don't have to have spots it also allows us to have service management tools that we never had before. we also, over the last two-years increased the expectations and the size of our floor manager staff, which is managing the transportation management centre. we also created a new position called a field manager. and just to be very frank, i would not have taken this job if that position did not exist. prior to having field managers, when we had an incident like yesterday the entire transit management staff would stop what they were doing and turn to instant management. and that would be true whether the incident was at 3 in the morning or whether like yesterday it was at 8:18 a.m. and there was nobody out there that

could really speak for the transit director with her full authority to make decisions in really complex situations. with this field manager position, we are really blessed to have people out there running the system who understand all the complexities. i go to bed at night knowing that there's nothing that they cannot handle. and then the last thing is that we did create the consolidated transportation management centre. but despite those investments we are facing some pretty significant challenges. the first is that we do not have sufficient staffing to realize the benefits of the technology. and the best way i can describe this is i think this thinking was the technology was going to do it for us. and what we are finding is that the technology has incredible potential but it needs bodies to react

to the information. so what happened when we moved to the transportation management center and the new radio, we were running a call centre. an emergency or incident would come in the controllers would industrial on a piece of paper the key concern, they would dispatch somebody to respond to it. our goal was to go from a call center to a service management center. but a few things happened. the first thing is the call volumes increased. this is very good news. it means it is now easier with the technology for our operatorses to reach the control sent center and to be able to ask for help and support. the second thing is the time for call increased. we now have the ability to track all this information digitally. but the digital information takes more time to enter than just scribbling on a piece of paper. but our staffing levels for various

reasons remained relatively flat. so we've taken the same number of people. they are now managing more calls and more time per call. and then we've said why aren't you line managing? they are not line managing because they have no bandwidth to do so. the second challenge is that managing this operator shortage has a lot of consequences but one of the consequence is that our supervision staff is spending a lot of their time balancing service filling runs begging people to come to work, trying to schedule overtime. that all impacts our ability to do more sophisticated line management training. the third challenge is that in creating a new controller position and this field manager position, we as i said, we are competing with ourselves. so we have not seen the transit supervisor

classification grow. we also have a very high percentage of that staff that is eligible for retirement. this chart shows that both the age breakdown and the retirement eligibility. so retirement eligibility kicks in when you have -- when you are 50 years old and you have 20 years of experience. most people at the end are not retiring until they hit that 62-year mark. but as you can see, within our transit supervisor classification, we have over 15 percent of our staff that are fully eligible to retire tomorrow and a huge percentage that are approaching retirement. and then the last thing is it's hard to be a transit supervisor. one day you're an operator the next day you are managing operators.

and while we have some training, it's not enough. it's not enough to give transit supervisors new transit supervisors the skills they need to be really successful in that role. so what we are doing is, and i truly believe in investing in super supervision, coupled with solving the operator shortage, will be the most impactful thing that we can do to improve our service reliability, enhance our customer experience and also better support our operators who by far have the hardest job at our agency. the first thing we'll be doing is over this current fiscal year, we will be filling in existing vacancies and redirecting some vacancies to hire 50 new supervisors. that will help us with a lot of backfilling of needs and gaps. we will also be requesting an additional

50 positions in the fy21 budget as a way to focus on our core strategic goals. we are also working hard to continue to build a service-oriented work culture to make sure that thinking about the customer experience is the first thing in the minds of our supervisors. and part of this we believe, will come from consolidating the training function. so to make sure that we have a single group that is responsible not just for new operator training, but for training our operations workforce to be successful in their role. and then the last piece is providing enhanced training to our supervisors both on the line management tools, which they've been getting in pieces throughout and we're able to spare them from the call centre functions but also on things like mentoring, safety compliance and some of the other key roles that

they play. now shifting to the 90 days plan. these are our core targets from the last 90-day plan. when i come back, we will be increasing some of these targets, because as we have success we want to make sure we are continuing to move the line. we have seen a reduction in preventable collisions. that's true investments like making the rear of the vehicles more visible, giving operators more guidance onto how pull in and out of stops when blocked by cars and double parkers. we have also had some good success focusing on our infrequent routes where the schedule adherence is so important. and part of that has been through direct conversations with our operators on the work they do and

really helping them to understand how important the leaving the terminal is on time for our customers. we have increased service delivery. we were at 96 percent in october. we are closer to 97 percent right now. we have not seen -- we've seen a little bit of a drop in our headway adherence on our frequent routes. some of this is because we have shifted over and are focusing increased service on our equity routes. so we'll show you that we are tracking both of those. we did have six subway delays this month. i'll go through the details. two of them were unavoidable. it was an earthquake and bart disruption but it still had an impact on our customers. in october we got close to meeting our lrv4 goal. we targeted 40 a day.

our goal is to have 48 of the new cars out on a daily basis. this shows the collision trend. but for a spike in july, we have been steadily declining. so we will be reducing this target for a second time as part of the current 90-day plan. this shows the service delivery. as you can see, it is starting to scale up. we did have a class graduate in november, which is also providing relief and we will have another class graduate in january. for the major delays, in addition to the earthquake and to the bart incident, we did have three delays that were related to vehicles and to foreshadow my next item, they are an area of

vulnerability for us. and while on a whole, we are seeing as good if not better miles between breakdowns than we've seen with this fleet it's still too high. and then the last one and we are going to come in january with a presentation on what we are recommending for the new train control system, but we did have a hardware failure. the reason that a train control failure currently is such an extended delay, it took us 40 minutes is because we had to reestablish communications with every train in the subway. and that is unfortunately one of the design flaws or antiquated design aspects of our current automatic train control system. and it's something that the new system as we continue to pursue it will not experience.

travel time's back. and for the most part, pretty flat. but we did see an uptick on the klm. so what we are doing is revisiting all the investments that we made at west portal to make sure that they are holding strong and that we are proactively managing the intersection and doing everything we can to reduce delays between forest hill and west portal. >> but do you think that uptick is correlated to the west portal change or in spite of it? >> i believe in spite of it >> right. okay. the trains are running better than the air-conditioning in this building is what you are saying? [laughter] >> not just because i'm on the hot seat. this shows our continuing positive

trend in vehicle availability. we are predicting to have 164 trains ready for service tomorrow which is absolutely the highest number that i've seen in my tenure at the agency. so we are excited about this. we are excited to be putting more trains in service and for the service to be available to our customers. >> any three cars in that mix tomorrow? >> not tomorrow. but soon. >> very good. but not soon enough. as we look to our next 90-day plan, which will wrap up at the end of january, we are focusing in five strategic areas. safety and service reliability will continue to follow on key actions outlined by my managers. but we will not have any new initiatives for the subway. our focus will be entirely on developing a two-year plan with

incremental improvements to the subway. it will include things like activating the west portal cross over, initiating a three-car shuttle replacing the remaining switches, switch machines in the subway. and it will map everything out for this board for feedback. >> that sounds like christmas morning to me. [laughter] >> we don't want to send the message that -- we think it's very important to communicate to our customers and to you all as policy makers that while we are place -- replacing the train control system is a critical path item, there are a lot of things that we can do in the short term to improve the customer experience in the subway. so while that will allow us to have a robust service going into the future it does not mean that we are sitting on our hands for the next five to seven years waiting

for that investment to materialize. rail maintenances is our fourth area. and the last strategic area is to really take a focused look at employee-generated service improvements and make sure that we are doing a big push to implement all the great suggestions that we get from operators and other staff along with route things like putting posts where we have double parking, trimming problematic trees and strengthening the feedback loop so the people that know that -- that have made the suggestion know their suggestion was followed up on. there's been strong feedback we've gotten from our partners and something we are invested in making happen. and then the last thing i wanted to conclude with is a ridership update. we did see a slight drop in ridership

in fiscal year '19, although i still think that there's some exciting positive trends. and i would put a strong emphasis on slight. nationally, systems are seeing a lot of ridership loss, particularly because of things like tncs and other choices. we've been able to hold our own. but getting some of these investments that we've been talking about on the ground is going to be critical to growing ridership which i'm optimistic that we will begin to do. ridership on the rapid bus on our smaller connector routes that take people from the hilltops into the core system and express routes, we did see increase this fiscal year. cable car observed the largest decline in ridership especially on the weekend. so that's something that we need to take a hard look at. you will see if you are following

the graph a shift from trolly coach to motor coach. that's not a ridership drop. that's because of the motorizations we have underway to support the construction project. so that's just a shift that's not a drop. taking a deeper dive into the various service categories we have more granular data on the bus system, because we do have automatic passenger counters on the majority of our fleet. the hundred or so that don't have it will get automatic passenger counters on the midlife overhauls. what's pretty cool about the automatic bus counter is that tmc can track them in realtime. so we know how crowded all the vehicles are. so if we have to make a decision about turning back one bus or another, they can choose the bus that has the least customer

impacts. so we did see a 3 percent increase year over year on our rapid bus and an he know bigger increase if you are looking between '17 and '19. we did see a slight drop on our local buses as well as our grid bus routes. those are our long routes. they come relatively frequently. and they are i think by far having the hardest time compete ing with the other choices because they don't come very often and then they get stuck in traffic. this slide show cases some of our rapid investments. as i said looking back to 2017, we have seen a 14 percent increase in ridership with the largest gains being on the 28r and 5r. we did year over year see a slight decrease on bayshore geary and mission corridors but when you

look over a two-year trajectory it's about a five percent increase. soy continue to feel we are making investments in our service whether it's through frequency or travel time improvements, that customers are reacting to that in a really favorable way. not counted in our ridership because of the kind of strict national reporting requirements is our special events ridership. i do want to flag that in addition to the 223 million people that we carried on our regular service we also carried hundreds of thousands of people on our special events service. for example, we are carrying 35 to 40 percent of the gate at almost all chase concerts and basketball games, which is having i think an incredible benefit to making sure that we are not seeing a lot of congestion in the area, the

hospital access is maintained and that we are getting people places in a sustainable way. so that's i think, while not folded into the full number, it is i think an important piece of our overall ridership story. so thank you for indulging me the time. i wanted to make sure we covered a lot of these topics. i'm happy to answer any questions that you have. >> is there any public comment on this portion? >> one >> one. please. >> some questions. one is this report going to be reviewed by the muni task force? this is in essence, this is a presentation by a member of the management to the board to the public.

but it's an internal document. it's an internal presentation. i would like to see it subjected to review by the task force which ms. borden is co-chairman of. two i noticed that as far as the service delivery goes buses are behind schedule, like the clement runs at 26 minutes when it should run at 20 minutes. and i think that it's very uneven as far as the service goes. and three as far as the internal culture of mta it's a real problem of bullying that goes on. workplace bullying. and i would like to see this addressed. because work-based bullying translates into poor service delivery. it affects productivity of an agency. and that's been proven by research.

so we really need to address that and i know instances where bullying goes on. it's not a secret anymore. so this agency really has to start addressing it. and basically, i think what has to be examined is the command communication control structure and the operating systems. this really has to be subjected to review, because i think a lot of this problem has been externalize ed, and the service routes, bus stop consolidation the rest of it, when the problem always starts at home. thank you. >> thank you very much. one more public comment on this item. welcome back. >> thank you. i don't know what agenda item this is, but i'd like to get those charts. but my question is regarding hiring

of new employees santa cruz sends out daily notices saying there's no service over the highway 17 from santa cruz to san jose employee shortage. valley transportation authority basically had a slug of retirees you read their minutes people with 38 years, 30 years all retiring. and now that you got a daily e-mail from vta saying well, expect expect no service on these lines. so with the low employment, unemployment, i'm reading the charts, and we've got all these expectations of hiring. and i'm saying, you know, you got problems in the south bay and other transit agencies how do we expect

to overcome that to be able to meet these goals of increasing our employment opportunities for the training. so i just want to put on the radar screen there's other transit agencies that are experiencing service delays. and they are putting it out there every day saying these are the three lines or whatever that are not providing adequate service. thank you. >> thank you, mr. mason. all right. any more public comment on this? okay. is there anyone else who wants to speak on this item? seeing none, this will be our last public speaker on this item. >> actually, i have a question about my public comment. i was coming here to talk about the lrv seating but that has not been discussed yet. >> next item. >> it will be. >> but i have an appointment to go to. >> i promise you it will be the next one. >> so how long will it take because i have an appointment to get to? could i just give my testimony now? because i have to go. i have an appointment. >> it's the next item.

we are going to call it as soon as public comment for this item is concluded. >> this one? okay. because i'm going to have to get to another appointment. >> we understand. >> if you would like to put it in writing, you can absolutely submit it. >> in case there's not time. okay. >> very good. thank you. directors, any questions or comments? director heminger. >> i'll be brief. first i wanted to ask about the retirees. a hundred per year. is there any way within the city's retirement system that we can offer these folks some incentive to stick around for a couple? even under your best case it's a couple years before we are back to a hundred. >> i wanted to clarify. it's not a hundred retirements. because some of them are people leaving prior to retirement. but it is the majority, in the order of 70. we do offer people that are retiring

that have a good attendance and safety record an opportunity to come back, what we call prop f. it allows you to take your retirement benefits but then also be paid the hourly wage for your work. we are only allowed to use you for 1,000 hours a year but it still really help helps. so we have been able to attract some talent to stay that way but it hasn't been particularly fruitful. >> i'm familiar with retired annuitantss but is there an incentive we could explore within the retirement structure that would permit that? >> vice-chair gordon and i could bring that up on friday because we'll have the director of hr for the city there to help answer questions >> yeah, because you go through a tremendous amount of work to get people trained and recruited and

all that stuff, and as was pointed out by the last bit of testimony we have, we are competing against two dozen transit operators around the region. so i think i'll limit myself to that one comment. >> thank you. great presentation. the collision reduction program it's good to remind ourselves things that we do in other items help toward that. i know the upcoming lane reduction on california street that's being considered, a lot of those lane reductions we've done are to help the buses prevent those avoidable collisions, correct? >> that is so true. for example a key focus of the mission street project was to go from four very narrow lanes to three wider lanes. we went from having two to four collisions just in that segment a week to much less frequent in the

order of one or two a month. >> all right. so it's a good thing to remind ourselves that other actions we take help you reach those goals. you pointed out that i think you said 50 percent of our operators have fire years of service or less. and you reminded or asked the operators who were there that mentoring and the buddy system really helps because helping those operators with less experience by giving them access to the wisdom of the operators who have been there a long time are really good. in terms of the hiring one of the things we can do is the employer of choice, so we can do things like the lane reduction that makes it safer for the operators to drive the bus. anything we can do to make us a better system to drive for helps us keep those employees. so let's all remember that as we talk about parking removal that tight turn intersections, things like that, make it less stressful to be an operator and help them stay on the job. so thank you again. you are doing a great job. we really appreciate it. >> thank you.

>> anyone else? all right. a few things, if i may. first of all i'm very excited to hear about the west portal crossover finally being activated. you know there's a pet project of mine, and i'm happy to hear that. i think we clearly see our customers speaking that rapid service is what they are being attracted to so not to take you back to your job like three jobs ago when we were doing a transit effectiveness project. we can't ignore that fact, that this is something where our ridership is going up. i realize there's a lot of moving parts to that including service and equity. but i think as we look at routes even existing routes, there may be room to expand rapid service. finally, several meetings ago i asked you and your staff to look at the notion of turning the j church back aboveground and not having the j church enter the tunnel for purposes of reducing

tunnel congestion and probably increasing the amount of train servicing the surface spots on the line. i've heard some positive reaction to that. can you tell us where we are in your planning and reaction to that request and where it is? >> yeah. we are looking at a j church that doesn't go into the subway during daytime service hours essentially from the beginning of the morning till kind of the end of the pm peak. we need to do a lot of public outreach to hear what folks have to say about that. but we've gotten some initial positive feedback in particular from supervisor's office. and one of the benefits that he's been talking about with his stakeholders is a more reliable j. >> right. >> so if we could reinvest some of the service that we are now spending delayed at the portal and

delayed at getting into the subway and run a more frequent and more reliable service then the impact of having to transfer becomes less. we also think that that work is linked to the west portal crossover because part of asking folks to transfer is that you need to make sure they have space in a vehicle. so having a three-car frequent shuttle in the subway we think is key to that too. so it's very preliminary. we need to have more community discussions. we -- we think it has the potential to not only improve service for our j line customers but to address the subway congestion address delays on the n line as it goes into the subway. so we will be asking some folks potentially to transfer that are not currently transferring. but we think we can do it in a thoughtful way. and then the biggest focus that sean

kennedy and his team are looking at now is what, if any enhancements we need to make at church on market for accessibility and to be able to manage the hundreds of people that get lost at its busiest point. so we are at an early discussion and design review stage. >> okay. well, i'm thrilled to hear that. one thought i had on that management is what if it's raining? is there something to keep people dry as they make that small but important trip. we've talked about the choke points in the system at van ness west portal. this is something that will affect all three of those right? because if we are crossing trains at west portal, that's fewer training going into the circle. if we are not putting a train into the system at van ness, that relieves that congestion a