we had bunch of questions at the end of the presentation. they should serve to guide the conversation as we head into tomorrow. i will briefly turn it over next slide and slide after that to brent jones and then sean kennedy. >> good evening or good afternoon. one of the biggest things as pandemic taught us is how to be able to pivot and be flexible. one of the things that we discovered is, our previous way of line management which was

heavily scheduled-based did not allow for flexibility as far as our customers expectations for when their vehicle would arrive. we elected to go the route of headway management. this allowed us to really manage and adjust to on the fly bunching and gapping on any given line. also, puts us into greater contact with our operators in that the data terminal that's connect to our system allows the operators to actually visibly when the vehicle is stopped, look and see where they're at on the line, where their leader is and follower is at. it allows the t.m.c. to send messages to the vehicles if we need to rerout in the case of an incident and give us a turn by turn display on that m.d.t. for

the operators to follow. it also allows them to receive text messages. speaking of our operators, we're really looking at ways how to better interact with our operators. some of the previous comments about how there's a disconnect and some people like they're not being heard. we've heard them and we're taking steps to improve how we communicate and connect with them. one of those things is improving and upgrading our operator portal. we can give them general information or specific information to that operator and also receive their feedback. another item that we're doing is working on revamping and updating our miscellaneous

forms. these forms historically been used by operators and other staff to provide their division manager information about issues that's going on with them or issues going on on their line. we would follow that up. it did not have a viable tracking system. we're going to digitize it and include a tracking system that allows us to give operators feedback on some of their issues in a more timely manner.

lot of people confuse accountability a culture of blame. accountability is setting reasonable goals and expectations and train on them and get our employees feedback on what's working and what's not working and get that buy-in so we can work as a team in order to achieve these goals. we do our service by accessing their ability and their expertise in their given area. one of the best ways for us to

support our operators who are our customers. let me reiterate, they are our customers. the only reason why we're all here is to support their efforts. how we support them is by giving them the support in the field and at the management level and in the control center environment to system in their delivery of the day-to-day service. some of the prime employees who do that are street inspectors. street inspectors are transit supervisors who are in the field. others work at dispatchers and some work as controllers in the control center.

our field units operate at a fixed unit. when we get back to service relief, our relief points. we also have roving units. they execute corridor management, they do a lot of the p.s.r. investigation and follow-up that we'll receive from 311 and from other sources. they play a role in not only managing the day-to-day service but expediting delivery and resolving service delays that affect the customer experience. most importantly, they play a support role for the operators. we found that just placing an inspector at a location where we've had a high incident of

collisions or security incidents or issues with the actual service delivery on time performance, has bumped up our service, improvement 8% 12% we had 16th and mission where we had five collisions in the span of less than two months by simply redirecting and placing an inspector this that area. even though he did not necessarily engage fully with all of our operators like peeking to operators everyday. we saw that just the collisions and people making illegal turns in front of our vehicles, went down to zero. our field units are invaluable

and they are the linchpin of our service strategy. currently, we enough to triage our day-to-day operations. what i mean by that is, we'll never have enough people to cover all of our terminals, all of our key points everyday. what we can do is utilize our data that we get from the cab, work with the field manager and assign to the people that need the support the most. we're able to do that but the downside, there's not a lot of consistency as far as when we move to one another, another area falls. we're in the constant cycle of putting out fires as opposed to establishing consistency for the quality of service.

that's shown not within the field units but our ability to provide operators engagement like their performance evaluations, meeting with them regularly at the division level. our industry standard is about 25 to 1 employee to manager ratio. right now, most of our divisions are about 300 to 350 operators. you can see that our ratio is very tough. we're taking steps utilizing our dispatchers, our supervisory personnel in order to get our employees to supervisor to manager ratio down so we can provide more meaningful contact and counseling support for our operations front staff, our operators and our station

agents. just our continued investment in our supervisory staff and all of our support staff will show us a greater return on the quality of service that we're able to deliver. >> good afternoon directors, sean kennedy, transit planning manager, m.t.a. as we've discussed several times with this body before, we have several big constraints on service planning. issues related to the covid period including one enhanced cleaning procedures that have increased our fleet needs and social distancing requirements that impacted our current capacity. after this latest round of service increases, which was on january 23rd, -- as we put

back rail service in the spring and early summer, that will allow us to redeploy additional buses to the system to address crowding, make some additional connections. of course, on top of that, we anticipate that there will be covid restrictions around the same time period. we'll restore quite a bit more service on the street. as we add that service back, we will be following the tenant's reviews throughout the covid period noted there on the left as we've come up with the covid plan. on top of that, we will be talking and starting the discussion with stakeholders in the spring about what kind of fast frequent network would look like. where we have heavy service on major corridors, supported by transit capital priority

improvement projects and the temporary transit lane program as well to just provide a much more frequent and reliable base system with connections into -- that will reduce transfer angst and provide that coverage for the system that the city, residents have come to expect over the years. it's reallial two-pronged approach as we restore service when rail starts getting back up and going. have more buses put out in the system. we'll be doing this eye with the fast frequent network in the future. we'll be working toward that as we continue to restore service back through the summer and fall.

>> in the interest of time, i will wrap it up here. i'm happy to go into more detail any of the questions that we raise in this section of the presentation. try to preserve more dialogue time for board feedback. >> director hinze: i have a question. looking forward to the future as we add more routes back, is headway scheduling because it seems sort of -- is that something there's a possibility that we can keep that?

>> absolutely. the feedback we get from our operators they really enjoyed it. puts a lot of how they manage themselves and the line in their hands. it also allows us to have the kind of flexibility to make realtime adjustments and also the expectations are we're able to get you good vehicle at regular intervals. coupled that with headway service is, we can couple it with a fallback operations, which means we have an extra operator on a line that allows the vehicle to continue in service but allows the operators breaks, more breaks and as you know, we operate in a tough driving environment. operators need to use the

restroom and they need time to collect themselves after a rough trip. our service will not suffer but at the same time, we can also provide relief to our operators by utilizing headways and fallback operations. >> director heminger: thank you madam chair. julie, i really liked your, maybe it's sean, i don't know which one, your either, or questions, i thought really cool. i'll just answer one of them. i would personally feel better if the cable cars were back running around empty. just the sound of the cable cars is so much part of the city. frankly, it wouldn't have to run them around empty. i would put all the covid nurses and give them a free ride.

get the cable cars back. that's any answer to one question. [laughter] >> director yekutiel: thank you so much, chair borden. director jones, good to see you again. i want to follow in the footsteps of director heminger and answer either or questions. i would suggest looking at which transit only lanes you'd rather invest in and ensure are successful as possible. part of the thing to ask director jones about planning is understanding as business does come back, which transit only lanes has highest value on speeds with the least amount of impact potentially on the ability of small businesses to operate on these corridors. on some of them, they've been

put in on streets that don't have a lot of commercial activity. some of them there's more. we don't know what the future is going to hold. my sense on answerings that question is to get the ones that have been implemented kind of studied and work as best as they can. if that is a tradeoff that needs to be made. >> director yekutiel, i look forward to continued exploration of this issue. i think street with great transit can be a really great catalyst for small businesses. it does require construction and quick delivery and things like that. i don't necessarily see those two issues quite at odds as you described them.

>> director yekutiel: i would agree with you in general. it does seem like in general there doesn't seem to necessarily have to be a conflict. but the devil is in the details. what has to happen for these lanes to be installed, what construction process might look like, what is currently happening on that street. i'm not trying to set the agency up for saying these are always either/or. we need to be careful about the implementation. >> thank you. >> vice chair eaken: thank you so much. i agree with director heminger. i love these questions. i wrote down a lot of notes. in terms of the hiring, waiting for revenues, it does seem --

i'm getting bad feedback -- we need to be keeping eye on the financial stability of the agency. we have questions about -- i have questions about what we learned in the last year in terms how we projected transit ridership coming back. i think we're a little more optimistic than what turned out to be the reality. i guess i would lean on the side of being little more prudent on that one and waiting for the revenues to stabilize before scaling up because of those constraints and that past history. i'm a transit emergency lanes, i lean towards getting all the transit emergency lanes that could be beneficial immediately on the ground now and focusing on the permanent legislation later. i feel clearly on the first one. just on the last two, i don't

know, i feel like we've done really great work, taking advantage of this very strange time to get some needed improvements and upgrades made in a way that will cause the least pain to travelers. for both 70, i was leaning in that direction. if we can get the work done now with less disruptions, we'll ordinarily be the case, i would lean towards getting those overhauls, getting that improvement work done now. thanks for these questions. >> thank you for that feedback. it is my working recommendation that we keep the subway closed for evenings over the current calendar year. i think that there's a tremendous amount of work that the subway task force is

emotional -- mobilized and ready to do. we do know that the pace of downtown recovery while unknown, we will continue to offer some potential to really get some important work done. it does mean that people who previously took a train back from the theater or from their swing shift job, will now be asked to take a bus. it has become an important topic for the board to weigh in on. >> chair borden: i want to say, i associate myself with director eaken's remarks. i think it's important to take the time and do the work that needs to be done. unfortunately, in the next 12

months, we'll be taking public transit sporadically. they're going to judge their trip by the one time or two time or five times they transit. it's better if things we have less things open that are reliable and staffed well than to have everything open and not delivering things well. i believe that really important. when it comes down to the streetcars and the cable cars, really if we can do a cost analysis of like three buses equals one cable car, i think if we can look at it that way, we love the cable cars, as a general matter for mobility in the city, i don't know that's where i put the priority at this time. if we can have better information, i think one of the things i heard a lot from the unions is not understanding like what we're talking about in terms of financial manpower tradeoff when we make a part about subway open or closed.

this is 25 people versus 5 people. those kind of things. costs, manpower and a number of people that can be served if we can look at things like that and particularly in terms of source service frustration. that will be a better way to frame it. it's hard to pit the things against each other without having a data that makes less emotional. >> director yekutiel: thank you chair borden. on that piece about underground train networks, i understand and empathize with the desire to get as much work as we can while our city is in recovery. when do you think it will all be done? if we can get everything done that our city is able to bounce

back, what does that look like in terms of timetable? >> one of the things that we've been talking about over the last six months with the board is subway renewal and what it's going to take to get the deferred capital that needs to be done in the subway. unfortunately, we have two or three pretty complex projects that can't possibly be done on our covid timeline. most complex of which is replacing the train control system which we estimate to be kind of 5 top 7-year endeavor, more on the two to three-year time frame, we need to replace the track as well as the more complex crossovers where the trains can go from one route to the other in the downtown

subway. we built our tracks when the tunnel was built about 40 years ago. infrastructure is very much at the end of its useful life. there's a tremendous amount of work that will preserve and enhance our day-to-day reliability including replacing overhead wires, continuing with the rail grinding which will extend and stretch the life of that rail, replacing incrementally some of the track while we wait for those more complex special crossovers to be out of order. >> director yekutiel: maybe i'm being more optimistic than director tumlin. i do think there's going to be a

moment. i hope. where sufficient amount of san franciscans are vaccinated, we open up mass vaccination sites. this administration will deploy enough supplies where the lion share of folks can get it done. i really hope that once that happens, museums are able to be open and small businesses can reopen and educational institutions can return to life that our agency is fully ready to switch that light on so we don't -- we can try to accommodate all those businesses and institutions that are going to need us to get people specifically back to soma and downtown. i wonder disturb don't have to u don't have to answer this now. what that balances between trying take advantage of the time that we have and not missing the boat.

in the case that there comes a moment over the summer where it actually turns out that we can all open again. it's time to try to find way to get the lights back on. >> i want to build on that question. not only does it relate how we approach infrastructure which is more flexible and we do have the ability to start or stop if we see ground swell of mobility. refer you back to director eaken's comments about are we preparing for a slow recovery or we preparing for a quicker recovery. there's very little in terms of the service restoration that we can do right now that will feel like switching on the light. a lot when you shut down the system, particularly a system like cable car or historics, even some of our bus service,

starting it back uptakes months and months of preparation. starting with hiring, retraining and service, exercising the infrastructure and we very much -- while we don't have a crystal ball about what the city is going to look here 3, 6 or 9 months, the decisions that we make today and in the coming weeks about how quickly we'll restore service, will very much impact our ability to react to that what if the lights come back on scenario. >> director yekutiel: is this workshop where you're trying to find out from this board if it's timely to now start preparing for a quick recovery? >> yes.

>> director yekutiel: okay, thank you. >> director tumlin: it's really much more of of risk assessment. we don't know when the recovery will come. the question is, how many of our reserves should we be risking now we don't know how long the recovery is going to tick or if we will be able to resolve what is still an an going structural deficit back to the boom economy. if we don't win in 2022, we will bankrupt ourselves if we start making new investments in restoration now. [please stand by].