hen our businesses suffer in the meantime. so i'm just asking for compromise for the small business community and merchants of san francisco. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker please. >> adam, cat ben jason. >> doesn't have to come up in order. >> hi. i'm cat carter, san francisco transit riders. i want to thank staff for trying to mitigate impacts on muni for a bicycle project. i do support the project. i always support pilots because we can assess in realtime what the impacts are and we have a chance to alter things if they don't work. we do have one of the slowest transit systems in the country. we can't let it get any slower which is what is happening as congestion increases, which everybody is talking about today. and i also don't think i need tell you from your earlier discussions that like parking actually

is a major leading cause of traffic. i understand that some private vehicle access is important to small business success but we need to look at short term spaces on nearby side streets and not let parking spaces impede the movements of tens of thousands of ridersn't muni route. i hope you are looking closely at transit speeds and transit ridership. i support this project as a start for improving haight street for transit riders. thank you very much. >> ben black, jason henderson,. >> my name is ben black. i live at 249 page street which is the epicentre of this conflict between the bikes and cars. i have never in my 50 years have taken a day off work to speak to a governmental organization. but i'm here to tell you that somebody is going to die at this intersection. you are sending bikes into a road

where the cars coming from franklin, cars coming down, bikes coming down at 25 miles per hour going into a meat grinder. i've picked up personally two kids bloody and beaten that have been t-boned by cars asked them if they want to have 911 and they both said no way do i want to have an ambulance. i had to drive one of them home. somebody is going to die at this intersection so i came down today to put you all on notice that this solution uphill one way is the best solution that i could possibly have asked for. it's going to save lives. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> jason henderson brian hagsman. >> good afternoon directors. my name is jason. i'm the chair of the haight valley planning committee. i live on haight street. we endorse this proposal. it's a pilot.

stockholm did a pilot for congestion pricing. it worked. so keep that in mind. this has been a very long public process. it has been over a decade actually, back with the sftca they did a study and said car traffic going to the freeway just an using page nor haight. we appreciate the current concerns of our neighbors but we would urge that you actually consider taking similar steps on haight street to protect the bus. there's a hierarchy. i gave you guys a presentation with maps and illustrations of this problem. but think of oak and fell as the cross town car or express street and we can do some transportation management. so one thing that we are asking is in addition to this pilot proposal, that the sfmta do this longer term corridor study of haight, page, oak and fell and look

to other places where they do sophisticated metering and traffic management. that's what they do in copenhagen, they manage the flow of the traffic without having to price it or what's happening now, which is doing nothing, has made this a catastrophe. i would like you to also think about equity. we in hayes valley have absorbed or are about to absorb 6,000 housing units. we are doing our part in this big multiple moving pieces of solving the regional housing crisis. but we are paying the crisis of unacceptable chronic congestion that goes late in the evening and happens on weekends. so think about all these people moving through here. thank you. >> thank you. brian, he is the last person to turn in a speaker card. if you have not turned in a speaker card, if you would please.

>> thank you. good afternoon chair and board members. i am brian. i'm walk san francisco's outreach coordinator. i'm here to share our strong support for these much-needed safety improvements on page street. when walk sf and others sported the page street -- supported the page street project, we were excited to see the garden and the city's first ever protected intersection approved because we know they will slow drivers and protect people of all ages walking and biking on page, whether they are walking to school, to either of the parks or on their way to and from work or back home. we thank the sfmta for continuing this work with the community to improve safety on page because we know that it's not working for everyone. especially those most vulnerable using the streets. people often face a amaze of freeway-bound

traffic. each year traffic injures five people just on these three blocks. if we are going to achieve vision zero we need projects like this thoughtful collaborative quickly-implemented pilot projects that test new ways of prioritizing space for people. for that reason we ask that you approve this pilot. we are excited this could be in the ground early next year already and we ask that you move with the same speed to implement the other page street neighborhood improvements that were approved more than a year ago. with construction recently noted as coming summer of 2020, we are concerned that we've heard design work is still in progress and construction might be fall 2020 at the earliest, over two years since its approval. we owe it to the neighbors who have spoken up to these change changes to the in the ground on time. >> next speaker. >> it's robin levitt, the last person.

>> good afternoon. i'm an over 25-year resident of page and octavia. i live here octavia. i bicycle on page street to work every day eastbound and come home westbound page every day. i walk through the neighborhood constantly. i have a dog so i'm walking through the page octavia the laguna, page the buchanan page and on haight street all the time. i just want to tell you some of my experiences personal experiences. several years ago, probably five or six years ago when a car was blocking the crosswalk at laguna and page and i protested a passenger in the car got out and hit me and knocked me to the ground and i was taken unconscious to the hospital with a concussion. one time i was walking my dog across

page at laguna and i was in the crosswalk and a car just went right through. i had to jump on the hood of the car to keep the car from running over my dog. when i first moved into the neighborhood i used to have to clean my window sills from all the soot from the freeway. i didn't have to do that for many years, but now with the advent of uber and lyft and the traffic has increased tremendously. i'm now constantly cleaning soot off my windows again. i never had asthma in my life. now i have asthma, and someone spoke about the quality of the air in the neighborhood earlier. it's getting very bad. so these are just my personal experiences. and i think i'm very supportive of the proposed changes also important are the proposed changes to westbound page between market and octavia. so i very much support that.

and i want to thank casey and mark and all the staff. >> i'm sorry your time is up. >> and all the sfmta for all their great work. >> thank you. >> that is the last person to turn in a speaker card. >> any additional public comment on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. i would like to call staff back up to go over a few things. first off i recognize this is a page street project to people are focused on page street, but obviously everything shifts around the city. so why didn't we reach out to the merchant community or people closer to haight and some of the other neighborhood groups sooner just because i recognize this project has been on the docket for a while and people on page street and the bicycling community have been paying attention but those other people who are going on directly impacted by that other behavior, why didn't we reach out to them sooner? >> i can speak to that. as i mentioned in the presentation, this starletted as an --

started as an outgrowth. the proposals were focused on page street and didn't contain such big changes as traffic circulation adjustments. so when we imparted on this pilot effort identifying it as something we would need to do with the pilot because we can't know for certain how things would turn out this was in late summer so that's when we brought the outreach out expanded it beyond page street. we were already connected to folks there. we were thinking about folks in haight and other parts of the neighborhood so we did mailers and postings and just different means. so it was using the open house but for folks who can't come to an open house also having these office hours and other events. but we also realized there were concerns on haight street that we weren't cognizant of and weren't thinking about as deeply so we slowed down that outreach process by a month to meet with the

merchants and a self-organized group of several dozen neighbors and some of those conversations could be pretty fruitful. so that has led to some adjustments. i would also like to impress the pilot is an extension of the outreach. this isn't something we can easily model and to know how things are going to go with traffic modeling software and continue in different terms of what we should do on the street. the one thing i'm hearing is the status quo is not working. so we think the pilot is a step in the right direction and we look forward to continuing to having many more conversations with constituents to see how things might turn out and stand ready to make adjustments. >> a couple things. i want to implore us to do a better job of outreach with small business community. you are in your business, running your business, you are not going to meetings or paying attention to other things because you have to deal with people not showing up and product being delivered. there's a million things so it's hard for them to engage. when the mayor did a roundtable during

the month of may during small business week and we were the number one agency that everyone was angry about because our lack of outreach and lack of engagement so we just have to do better because again these people are running a business. they are not out there paying attention to all our signage, signs on the poles. number two, we should be thinking about whenever we do any sort of improvement, in the area of googling maps mapquest, when we make changes those applications make changes. so even naturally things get rediverted so i would love to know if we've done any outreach even for the pilot to see if any of the companies can geofence people out off haight street. because my biggest concern with this project i'm supportive of the project, is the diversion of traffic onto haight street and to the detriment of the merchants who won't have people visit

their businesses because people will be trying to get to the freeway. have we reached out to those companies to see if they'll partner with us around geofencing. >> when we make changes from the street, we are able to make changes to google and apple to if it's something that's been legislated, they are happy to incorporate it. if it's not something that is prohibited, it's open to the public, that street would be reflected on public maps. >> what mark's answer reflects is our experience of a couple years with this. we have tried to ask navigation companies and others to sort of help be partners in managing traffic, and that's not a role they are willing to play. with the exception of some successful partnerships with tncs around the chase centre we have not had success with mapping companies saying please don't send people down this street.

>> the other things i've brought up that i've talked to staff about is additional signage that says local only traffic to make sure it's clear to people going on to the freeway that it's not for them to drive on. so i know we don't do that a lot but maybe that's something we could look at doing around here. and then also look at some of the additional turn restrictions for the people who couldn't make a right off haight to octavia. can we also look at those things as well? >> we can look at that. and i think i see on the calendar item the turn restriction is a step in the right direction but we could look at further alternatives. >> the other thing related to small businesses is i ask if we can look on webster street, there are parking spots on those side streets that are not metered and perhaps we could do a metering treatment. i don't want these businesses that might need delivery or have

pickups, some of those restaurants are popular for delivery pickups, to not have people pull somewhere. so maybe the fixed spaces that are neighborhood parking on a temporary base busy would be converted to meter or short term parking so those people, i saw there are spaces along webster street where you could do this so it could help the businesses along haight street, particular in the peak hours when their coming in to patronize their businesses, have we looked at webster and how we can treat that for temporary parking just for the pilot? >> i can circulate these ideas to the occur, management team. we've been working with them on expanding parking. >> i think there's construction going on right now. so maybe we could make those during the pm peak. because ultimately, one of the reasons people go to haight street is because it has all the commercial storefronts there and unfortunately we live in an era where there's a lot of delivery

and the likes. if we can figure out a way to provide some spaces that are currently all the time spaces to make them shorter-term spaces. i also mentioned to staff, and i haven't talked to the merchants about this, about whether or not we should look at extending meter hours to 8:00 p.m. and the reason i was thinking this, because if you make the parking available at 6:00 then all of a sudden all the neighborhood people park in the spots and then those businesses don't actually get people who are turning over coming to their business. so that's something again i'm not proposing that without talking to the business, the merchants but i think we should talk to the merchants about whether it makes sense to extend along haight street the meter hours for especially if we are taking away the parking from 3 to 6 so people can turn over at least until 8:00 at night so those are a few other things. also the bike lane going westbound and why it couldn't be curb side, i think it is better to have

curb side bike lanes and safer, and i personally don't like to ride on bike lanes that are not curb side. so can you talk about that especially for the uphill orientation? >> sure. with the westbound uphill bike lane the traffic volume would be considerably lower, it would be very low. so i say constitutes a neighbor way. a neighbor way can take many different forms. generally it's a shared street with low traffic volumes and low speeds. so for the block of page from octavia to laguna and up to webster the only way to get onto that would be the right turn from octavia onto page. so we think the traffic volumes are going to be -- they are already quite low in the westbound direction and they are going to be much lower that sharing that space is quite acceptable. >> okay. then finally back to the small businesses because i want to make sure we have information around the circulation for the pilot so people know trying to access the businesses

how to get there but we provide materials to this small business owners figure out how we help work with the oewz to help promote supporting this community. i do want to watch this really closely and see how things are going, especially how soon do we think we'll be in the street with the pilot? >> depending on the available maybe february march >> if we can realtime and pull sales tax numbers just working with the merchant community. it's a really tough time in small business for a variety of reasons, and anything we can do to be supportive and also make sure their customers know how to reach their businesses particularly during the peak hours when they are no longer able to park there it's going to be critical. i wish that we could accommodate the request. but i also believe our muni cannot accommodate the request in terms of the problems we have making the time frames that we are trying to make today that we are going

to have real challenges without having that be taken away during the peak hours. so i understand that. but i just want to emphasize whatever we can do to be in partnership with our small business community because the people live here because of that. that makes our city unique. we need to do everything to support them, at the same time getting people across town the way that we need to. so with that, i will let other people talk. [laughter] >> management team. who makes the decisions on this project? you or our acting director? when you say management team you say we'll take it to the management team. >> the curb management. >> who are these people? >> they work on parking >> they have the power to say no 3 to 6? >> this is the team that generally looks at neighborhood parking issues loading >> who makes the final decision? you do? >> ultimately you all make the final decision and i make the decision about what items to bring to you.

the curb management team, they have expertise in parking. >> right now you are opposed to moving the 3 to 6? >> we think keeping the curb clear from 3 to 6 is important to keep the 20,000 riders moving >> no matter how much business they lose? what happens if there's a tremendous impact on small businesses? will then you change it? >> i think we are open to almost any parameters or reporting back restrictions you want to put on this pilot. if you want to report back in three to month months. >> the length of the pilot is a year? >> 15 months >> in 15 months you'll determine how many small businesses went out of business because of that three to six? >> we can report back on -- >> on everything? >> we can report back on any issue less than 15 months >> the witnesses i enjoy hearing from, is it christy from the

bicycle -- you've had a proposal that had a lot of nods from the audience. do you recall what that was? >> could you step up to the microphone, please >> thank you madame chair. >> it was a traffic diverter at haight and octavia similar to page where we would be cutting off freeway access on haight. so folks can equally get to businesses because there would be no freeway congestion but also the buses would be able to run better because they wouldn't be dealing with that congestion as well. >> we could certainly look at that. we want to make sure that it has the same amount for page street. we don't want to surprise people with a rule like that. >> she'll come to you with a line. [laughter] >> other directors? >> first of all i wanted to applaud the staff, which probably doesn't happen enough in your lifetime for

pursuing a pilot, per se. i think one of the gentlemen who testified said no one wants to be part of a traffic experiment. and he may be right. but i think in my view we need to be experimenting more, not less in san francisco. and when you experiment it means you have to acknowledge when you fail and not try to hold on and pull off a success at the last minute. two points i wanted to pursue. one of them, quite a few people talked about the length of the pilot. and 15 months does strike me as pretty long. it's starting to feel permanent. frankly, i think after a couple of months you are going to know whether we've got a boy or a girl here. so i would suggest something and maybe i should just ask you a question, why didn't you consider something maybe half that long? don't you think you learn enough in that period of time? >> i think things take a while to adjust to especially big changes like this could take several months. i'll reiterate we are looking to come

back to the board in four months to share what we have already seen. but looking at things as they progress throughout the season and throughout the year, as kids are in and out of school. >> if you did have half that long, if you are getting it up in the spring, you could have a -- summer and fall evaluation. >> it need not stay as it is for the entirety. >> part of it is a matter for the public. when they see 15 months they sort of lock in on that and it feels like they are stuck with it for 15 months. if it were shorter, i don't think they would feel that way. they might still want it to be shorter still, but i think they would have some assurance that hey, i was promised it's only this long. so that's something maybe for my colleagues to consider. because i would certainly support a motion that reduced the length of the pilot. the second is the question of operations.

and here i've got a question maybe just out of ignorance. when we do something like this what is our operating strategy? do we have more enforcement out there? it seems to me that when we get a power point out like this for a project, it auto to have a slide on operations, not only what changes are we going to make to the physical arrangement of the facility but how are we going to operate it, because as you say it is a difference, and it's going to take people a while to react. so what's the operating strategy for this and similar pilots? >> yeah. so we have limited enforcement resources but we budgeted to do two months of enforcement when this goes into effect, and we are looking for support of the police department. this would be the police department this would be signs so people alerted to the recon figuration

of the street before they go into effect. >> that's good. thank you. >> other speakers? >> not everybody agrees that we heard from, but one thing we heard that was fairly universal was nobody wants traffic on their street which is validating of the transit zero emission. i do wonder about that because we've laid out this clear hierarchy that this is supposed to be the bike street and haight street is supposed to be the transit street and we are encouraging drivers on oak and fell, why we didn't do the restriction that was recommended of restricting turns from haight onto octavia as part of this and how quickly we could make that a mitigation for a lot of the concerns we've heard about increased traffic on haight. because i don't think that's our vision either. i think we are sympathetic to those concerns. >> that hierarchy makes sense to a lot of us. it was proproposed to do something

on haight street is it more of a proposal or a direct to staff. it's something that came out of our outreach in the past few months so i don't know what that would look like. the project proposed to you came out of several years of outreach and we had that commitment to folks we have been working with to bring something forward and test it. but that doesn't mean the agency could look into things on haight street or other neighborhood streets in the future. >> do you think when you bring us midterm evaluation whether it's three months four months, whatever you are talking about when observing the data. can we come back with the data on whether the changes are materializing and with that study what that right-turn restriction would look like? >> certainly we can come back and report on haight street and have some ideas >> okay, great. >> i like going near the end. all my smart fellow directors have made all the points and i can say yes.

i support torres and eaken's proposal to continue to study haight street, not only for parking management but to get rid of the freeway-bound traffic on haight street. because we do unfortunately we create winner and loser streets. and right now people are concerned rightly that haight is going to become more of a loser street with more car traffic which also can help address the business issue. we can't deliver more customers to these businesses via automobile. we can deliver it via fantastic transit and walking and biking conditions and evening parking meters. thank you very much vice-chair borden. let's reach out to the business community and see if they would support extending the meters to eight or even ten if the businesses are open that late for restaurants and night businesses. i think those are great things. one clarification. we had somebody who was talking about being a bike commuter but having his house kind of cut off by

the prohibited turns. bicycle can make these prohibited turns correct? are there going to be turns prohibited for cars and okay for bicycles? >> everything before you today you would be able to maneuver through with a bicycle. that's the intent. there could be some left turn restrictions due to sightlines the crest of the hill the intersection at the top of the hill. so those would be in effect for any vehicle in the way you would navigate that as a bike rider is maybe a two-stage turn. >> we call that a european left where we go through the intersection. i think that's great. and i can't say enough how important this is to page street. i ride that a lot as well. and it can be a little hairy when you are going down that bike lane and the cars are cueing up to go to the freeway and if someone decides they don't want to be in the cue and they make a u turn and there you are on your bike it's a little frightening. and also it's going to free up the traffic flow on oak street,

because there are going to be fewer cars, there are going to be no cars going on page onto octavia. it's going to free up the flow from oak. if we do the same thing on haight street, it's going to free up the flow even more. for the commenter who lives on buchanan and is worried about the cars or current situation where cars come down buchanan and go left on her manman when we get done with better market street that's going to go away because cars aren't going to be able to go all the way down market to van ness is my understanding. >> you would not be able to access van ness. but herman is one of those streets we want to look at. it could be right for traffic coming. >> so again every time we make a change as everybody pointed out there's that ripple effect where we have to continue to look out but just because what is in front of us deals mostly with page street and somewhat with haight street,

that doesn't mean we are done. 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