>> you are watching san francisco rising. today's special guest is jeff tomlin. >> hi. you are watching san francisco rising. to show that is focused on restarting, rebuilding, and reimagining our city. our guest today is the director transportation of the sfmta and he's with us to talk about the agency's 23-24 budget with the muni equity strategy and new projects across the city. welcome to the show. >> thank you it is good to be

here. >> i see the sfmta's budget for 2023 and 2024 has been approved. how will it help provide a strong recovery during the next few years for our riders, operators and staff? >> it has been a challenging couple of years. covid wiped out the basic finances. our agency is funded primarily from transit fares, parking fees and a fixed set aside for a general fund and covid has meant we have lost more than half of our parking and transit for revenue. we are not expected to recover them until 2027. this budget takes a one-time federal release funding and spreads that out between now and 2025. and our task is to rebuild trust with the voters that sfmta can actually deliver on their goals and that includes things like making muni faster, more frequent, and more reliable.

includes making our streets safer and making everyone feel safe riding the bus. it means taking advantage of the amount of change we're going to experience in order to advance equity so that we invents -- invest the most amount of money in communities that need our services the most. it also means supporting san francisco in its larger economic recovery. basically two years between now and 2024 in order to build trust with the voters and figure out how are we going to find muni moving forward because it is in 2024 and 2025 when the one-time federal release fund went out. >> are you planning on starting up? >> as a result of covid, we have 1,000 vacancies in the organization. that is why muni service is not fully recovered. this budget allows us to fully staff through 2024, which means

we can restore muni service, invest in safety, and invest in other programs in order to make the transportation system work better for everyone. >> can you talk about the mooney service equity strategies? as you move out of the pandemic, how has that plan been updated? i have heard there are elevator upgrades in progress. >> we have been working a lot on equity during muni's recovery. we have been basing our work on the muni equity strategy. this is the plan we update every two years that looks at the changing demographics of san francisco and helps us direct our transit resources where people need it the most. that means people with low income, people of color, seniors, people with disability, children, all the folks who have the fewest choices. during covid, when we had to strip back the transit system, 13 quarters of the workforce

were in quarantine, we directed all of the agency's resources to the equity neighborhoods. places like the bayview, chinatown, the mission, the valley, and even through our recovery, we have continued to deliver the best muni service's so -- to the neighborhoods that need it the most. right now we are still operating more frequent service in core lines in equity neighborhoods than we did precovid. and the result of that is extraordinarily high ridership. we are finding, for example, by investing in the frequency and reliability on lines like the 22 fillmore, that we are getting 133% of precovid ridership, even when the overall system is only at about half of the ridership recovery. that is 133%. that is on weekends. we are at about 96% of precovid ridership on our main equity lines on weekdays.

we're also investing a whole variety of infrastructure projects aimed at making transit work better, particularly for people with disabilities. on the market street corridor, our elevators to the subway station date back to the 1970s and need significant renovation. right now we are busy working on renovating the elevators at the station. we have completed the elevator upgrade for the eastbound platform. we are now working on the westbound platform. that will modernize the elevators and make them a lot more reliable, and make sure that we can continue to prioritize people with the fewest mobility choices. >> that's great. changing topics slightly, i understand the improvement project is halfway completed. have shared spaces made the product -- project more complicated? >> yes. lots of things have made the terminal project more complicated, including things

like covid and supply chain issues. we learned a lot on the first phase of the terra vale project, which rebuilt the street from sunset boulevard to the zoo, including rebuilding all the infrastructure of the streets, the underground utilities, to modernize all that infrastructure and make it more resilient, and make sure that we do not have to rebuild the street, hopefully in any of our lifetimes. we also learned about the importance of collaborating, particularly with neighborhood businesses and residents. we want to make sure that we are constructing the city's infrastructure in a time that the city is suffering and we are not adding to suffering. we're doing things like partnering with the mayor's office of economic workforce development to support neighborhood businesses through programming during this time. we are also making sure that businesses that create shared spaces in the parking lane, some of those need to be moved out of

the way while the utility work is done underneath them. we are making sure that we will either move those platforms and outdoor eating areas back as they were, or help local merchants rebuild them so that we are not adding to the burden of local businesses and that we help everyone recover in this challenging time. >> quite right. finally, many of the sfmta vision zero quick build projects have been well received. can you talk about the evans street project? >> one of the things we did during covid was dramatically expand the rate of what we call quick build projects, which are fast-moving projects using simple and cheap materials in order to redesign streets and test out new ideas and see how they work, as well as get a lot of feedback from community before moving into a larger capital project that converts all of that plastic stuff into

concrete and trees and, you know, curb extensions. what we have been finding is that our quick build safety projects are able to cut severe injury and fatalities between 25 and 75%, depending upon the location on the techniques that we use. so we are targeting streets that have the highest rate of traffic crashes, particularly injury crashes and fatalities. we focused on evans, which is really important connector for all modes of transportation between the bayview and the central neighborhoods of san francisco. also a street with a terrible track record of severe crashes. on evans, what we are doing, again using paint and plastic posts for the time being, is taking the lanes that are out there right now, and converting them to one lane in each direction plus turn pockets. what we found on streets like valencia or south bend this, or

-- south van nass, is a street with one lane in each direction plus a term pocket can move just as much traffic as a street with two lanes in each direction. left turning vehicles mean the two lanes of traffic are never really available for through traffic. these road diets that we do have been tremendously effective for improving safety outcomes for all road users, without exacerbating traffic. they do make all cars slow down to the speed of the most prudent driver. this week we are getting started in partnership with the department of public works on work to restripe all of evans between third and cesar chavez, and as part of this work will be collecting a lot of data, talking to industrial users in the industrial district and

talking to folks in the bayview commercial district and in the mission about how it is working. we will make some adjustments along the way and if it is successful, then we will start another project that is more capital-intensive to make it permanent. if it is not successful, we will turn it back the way that it was, having spent very little money. >> thank you so much. i really appreciate you coming on the show. thank you for the time you have given us today. >> it has been great being here. thank you so much. >> that is it for this episode. we will be back shortly. you have been watching san francisco rising. thank you for watching. [♪♪♪]

>> good afternoon like to call the september 27, 2022 meeting of sfpuc to order. call the roll. >> president moran. >> here >> commissioner maxwell and commissioner paulson is excused today. >> um --