flesh with the curb and get people in and bull back out into traffic and the bulk is the opposite and the bus is in the travel lane and extend the curb out so people can board from the extended curb and of course we have about 200 boarding islands in the system. so flag stops themselves and a little more detail from a definitional perspective. you know they're currently defined in the buzz guidelines as any stop that a vehicle stops in the active travel way. normally there's also some kind of impediment, not in all situations. you know on sunset boulevard for example we technically call them flag stops but there's no parking. it's literally stopping in the travel lane to let people board and flag stops into have some impediment between the curb and

the transit vehicle and in most cases it's parking and like the two pictures show park in between the curb and the bus. next slide. so obviously there's a number of trade off implications with what type of bus stop is at any specific intersection and traditionally we focused on frequent and rapid service our frequent lines with either bus zones or bus transit bulbs. we also have a set of guidelines so any stop in the system regardless if it's on just a relatively infrequent connector router infrequent route like the 38 for example we look at seven different kind of policy guidelines to help us layout what to do at specific locations. i want to

specifically highlight stops that have 100 combined boardings and lines and buses that are busy and try to get a zone there or transit bulb. stops in commercial areas so if it's by safeway or a library example and againerates lots of traffic and look at bulbs and regardless how frequent the service is and also locations that have heavy use of seniors or people with wheelchairs and we look at those places for bulbs or zones as well. but of course you know there's certain areas in the city where flag stops are more prevalent and i know it will be talked about more by the next presenter and broke it down by district and really that's a reflection of the kind of land use that's around stops in

those districts, what kind of service serves those stops? you notice in the dense urban core there's less flag stops than the outer some of the neighborhoods in the city so what are we going to do to address these issues? as supervisor preston noted we've come up with a implementation plan that is really in three phases. you know each one of the phases is not necessarily mutually exclusive. we don't to finish phase one before moving to phase two and vice versa but i wanted to buck it what is going to happen in each phase so it's easier to follow so phase one policy updates. as we are updating our short range transit plan which is updated every several years at the mta board we're updating our bus stop guidelines as part of that process and going to the board before the end of the year. i

think right now it's scheduled for the december 6 mta board meeting and we will be changing the definition of adding to the definition of bus stop guidelines that we should have a 20-foot red curb or uninhibited access between the bus and the curb. now these are guidelines. each individual location of course has its own set of issues and we need to work through with stakeholders how exactly we're going to address those issues on an individual basis so that's why we've broken it up and talk about the timing here some in questions and answers but basically get the guidelines up dateed . then we look to move to phase two of the process which is implementation and just doing a look across the system right now we have about 400 to 500 stops

that don't meet our current guidelines so routes on frequent service or commercial core areas that have flag stops and they're the highest priority at least at jump to address what is going on at those locations? what don't we have zones or bulbs there? and working through the outreach and stakeholder engagement process and also in phase one want to work with the supervisors' office and what are priorities for them and what are they hearing for their district as a priority? as i noted we have 1200 stops and cutting up into two levels and again the first level is focused on where we don't meet our current policy then the subset of that is where you're all hearing concerns and issues about existing stops that might not even fall within those current policy definitions. we're planning to do a process that

mirrors our livable streets daylighting process, so essentially identifying what locations we would want to move forward with in the near term working with your offices to understand those locations. then going through -- we need to address that through a public hearing process so we will be noticing all of the locations, holding a rather kind of batched public hearing process with a number -- we're not doing these individually. we will do them in groups that make sense geographically or from like a supervisor district level and then once those projects get approved we will batch them together for them to implement. now the livable streets process they do 200, 300 day lighting locations a year. we think we're going be a little less and shooting for 150-200 locations. mostly because we

think a number of locations and not do the 20-foot clear zone but a larger kind of five to six space removal and get a full bus in and served stop without having the clear space available but once again that has to go through the outreach process and that's why we're going be a little less than what they can deliver right now. >> mr. kennedy sorry. i will hold to other questions because i know we have presentations but while it's up on the screen i know you prepared the original plan before the redistricting that has occurred and yet you're here after the redistricting. is this old supervisorial districts? >> yes, this is old. >> thank you. >> yep. and then in phase iii there's obviously a number of locations that

haven't risen to the level of 311 or your office or show up on the guidelines is a location that we need more the front door clear zone so the third phase is going to the remaining 700 locations and put in the front door clean zone, going through the same process of posting, doing a public hearing and then implementing through our shops process, so that is it. love to take some questions or comments and we can do it now or after the next presentation. >> thank you. my preference would be to press forward and hear our other presenters and do questions madam chair. >> [off mic]. >> great. thank you mr. kennedy. next through the chair and appearing remotely i wanted to welcome marcel moran who i hope is online and i do want

to thank you mr. moran for all of your research that you will be telling us about and always as i mentioned for inspiring our original resolution on this. welcome. >> can you hear me supervisor preston? >> yes, we can. >> okay. i'm going to share my screen here. in we go. okay. can you see my

slide deck? >> yes. >> okay. i will get started here. thank you very much -- did that not work. >> through the chair stephanie if you can pull that back up please? >> thank you so much. so i am thrilled to be here. i really appreciate supervisor preston, chair melgar, supervisor peskin for including me, the staff of supervisor preston's office including preston killgore for engaging me throughout and the background on this. i am a ph.d candidate in city planning at university of california berkeley and a san francisco resident and i am thrilled to share the work today that contributed to this conversation. if you can go to the next slide please.

thank you. my research is on sustainability transportation. i have published a number of studies in peer review studies on san francisco, the bus stop study was a series of projects i have done. i did work on street parking using sat a little imagery and micro mobility in the city and interested in the range of issues and go in-depth on the bus stop work. next slide please. so in the summer of 2020 i embarked on a census of on street of sfmta bus stops in san francisco that culminated in 2021 in the following paper in the journal of public transportation which is appear reviewed review academic journal and drew attention from

the san francisco standard and covered by bloomberg and city lab at a national level and response from a number of transit advocates, riders and activists and supervisor preston 's office. next slide please so i was interested and as you heard mention from the mta staff on the transit first policy and pull out these pieces on the policy and first public transit and [inaudible] is economically and environmentally sound alternative to transportation by individual automobiles and travel by transit and bicycle and foot must be an attractive alternative to the automobile and one part of the context and more specifically for the topic today and decisions using regardless --

[inaudible] (paused). i as one way to test that policy. next slide please. so what i did was straightforward and basic in terms of the methodology. i went on foot to roughly 3,000 bus stops in san francisco and the mta stops and excludes other transit agencies. it excludes major transit hubs as the transit center on street and took place over may, june, july

2020 so you see the grid photo on the right. part of the process was photographing every stop so i had my own original data set that i didn't need to draw on pre-existing sources and then all that information has been shared publically so it's a way to open source all this data. next slide please. so this took a long time. this was three full months of 9-5 every week on foot. i used kind of cutting edge field survey and instrument survey 123 which creates a cloud a stable place to hold this information. next slide please. so the big take away you can see this graph here from my article and i highlighted our topic today and the take away is that across the system i

found a number of different stop amenities of falling short of what we might consider to be a true transit first policy so that the two biggest things that jumped out from the study was that seating is only provided at 1/3 of all the on street stops. shelter is only provided at 1/3 of all stop and excuse me 2/3s of the stops are under obstructed by cars of the 3,000 they went to meaning around 1/3 were obstruct obstructed from on street parking and cars parked in those places. my definition is a bit more conservative than mta's and their number of flag stops their number is bigger than mine and an interesting comparison point. there is some nuisance there in terms of flag stops and parking

based on the type of street and surrounding treatments and signage, but that was my number there, but next slide please. and so what i tried to do with this study was then to spatialize the results and see the red circle that represents stops that do not have cerealing and the white has seating and can you see across the city how the amenities are presentoir not present and how it relates to neighborhoods and supervisorial districts. next slide please. and so today i wanted to highlight the parking obstruction so this photograph on the left is an example of what supervisor preston was mentioning that san

francisco has a somewhat unique situation which a large number of stops has this layout in cars can park directly in front of a stop which means that a rider needing to board the bus is forced to navigate their way in between parked cars to then board the buzz. this also means we always think of the rider entering the buzz. this and departing and the line of parked cars to get to the sidewalk in the first place. i am able-bodied and i found this quite frustrating as a mta rider and i always tried to route this project and people with mobility

impairments and with strollers or lug an or bicycles and with this project am i comfortable of my grandparent using this buzz stop? why or why not? next slide please so what i want to show is a statistical analysis of this data in a slightly different format and so what you see on the map here is what is called a hot spot analysis and so what i was trying to do statistically is show where there are clusters of bus stops that all have unobstructed curbs and clusters of bus stops that all have blocked curbs obinstructed by on street parking and the blue is the latter group and what you can see with this political test more clearly than the previous map and stops with obstructed parking cluster -- they're not uniformly distributed across the industry and

cluster in the geographic city of the city and twin peaks and cole valley. there are clusters in the southern half of the city and including bayview hunters point, portola, burnel and a number of neighborhood there is and potrero hill has a cluster so you can see the spatial gradient between the southern and northern half of the city in terms of the specific amenity access. next slide please. and so san francisco has this certified geographical center of the city and 7 miles by 7-mile and i can calculate the percentage of amenities at different stops based on the northern and southern half and the numbers are stark so can you see that seating and shelter are provided to a significant extent at greater figures in the northern half of the city than the

southern and clear curbs and 70% in the northern and half in the southern part of the city and part of it and we don't see the large differences east to west and you can say this a route of route frequency. mta like transit agencies across the united states emphasize the amenities at high ridership and high frequent routes. i did a statistical test called a mediation analysis to indicate that the route frequency differences north to south do not fully explain the stop amenity differences north to south so there's a bit more going on there. next slide please. that's as statutory as i can i promise and. >> . >> othershs that came up in the study and why i went in person to every stop opposed to the street

view. science [inaudible] and legiblity were an issue. signs were faded from sun exposure and illegible. a number of signs are on telephone poles that are hard to read. some stops have signage on the pavement which can be covered up by cars and can be difficult for riders to find. the middle image you will see also indicates the bus stop. this is in potrero hill that is encroached by perpendicular on-street parking. next slide please. there's also a number of other accessibility issues that my study gets into. on the left we have an image from bayview. in the center is baker beach. on the right is st. francis wood so there's a range of other accessibility issues because just

adjacent stop parking. planting strips and these sidewalk quality issues so there's a number of other directions to take that we won't address today but obviously are still important to riders. next slide please. and so i will just close my presentation and i am happy to take questions from supervisor preston. i will just close my presentation with a few photographic examples to nail home what we're talking about, so this is an image from potrero hill that shows what a bus stop looks like that has adjacent parking and adjacent perpendicular parking which i found profoundly limits riders ability to ingress and ex grises on the bus here and navigating between these types of vehicles. next slide please. here's more of a common example in the mission

district where you have signage on a street pole and additional signage on the pavement and a car parked right in front of it. next slide please. here's another example here between nob hill and rationsian hill. next slide . this is a picture from bayview. next slide please. i will just close with this slide from twin peaks and i not to make one final nuisanced point here and i think some people found this surprising. stops that have adjacent on-street parking also at times have fully bullet shelters and signage and map and i found this interesting and san

francisco went into investment with these shelters and construction and maintenance and make the rider experience more positive with this kind of built shelter but having the final stretch a clear curb to the bus is missing so i will close my presentation there. i really appreciate the chance to share this research. i appreciate the work that mta is doing in response to the board of supervisors' resolution. i hope it's a meaningful dialogue to continuously improve mta which we all rely on. >> thank you so much mr. moran. i appreciate your research and presentation. we also have director bon from the mayor's office on disability who is available for questions if the committee has any, and i just want to

confirm director you don't have a presentation; right? you're just available for questions? i don't want to cut you off if you were planning on saying something. >> hi supervisors, not a formal presentation but i am happy to answer questions about disability access in due course. >> thank you so much and thank you for working with our office on these issues. i very much appreciate it. i would like to start with some questions from mta for mr. kennedy. thank you for the presentations and i appreciate the effort to timeline it out so i want to look at where we are in the timeline and talk about this approach so first off when is the policy change you described scheduled to be before the mta board? >> so we're updating it as part of the short range transit plan update and that

is scheduled to go to the board i believe it's december 6. >> thank you. and then once you present and i understand there's a certain amount of i would say individualized attention to these stops, right, and really i understand that part of the assessment is saying we're leaving it alone which i can't imagine we do anywhere except the sunset type situation or something unique like that. are we painting the curb for 20 year or doing a zone or bulb out? and i understand that analysis is a stop by stop determination with the factors laid out. what i don't get is our starting point? what i don't get is why the plan isn't first to immediately go out and paint every curb red

and/or if there's a process and do the noticing. i mean it's labor intensive because it's a lot of stops but it's a pretty quick hit at the stop focus you're doing the red. if you make a agency decision parking is not okay and get out and paint the curbs red. >> >> and then do the detailed analysis that you described and which is a box zone or a bulk out or left alone? and why can't we do all of them at the front end just with the 20-foot painted red and go from there? >> it's a nuisanced question, very good so let me do my best to answer that fully so a couple of different considerations. one each intersection or each stop is unique. you know these are flag stops for reasons i mean over the years we put in bus zones even if they don't meet our

policy. we do transit bulbs and things like that if we don't have the boarding for the particular location so there's specific issues or could be specific issues at each stop that we really want to pay attention to, be a part of a solution, versus just going in and putting in red curb. we know that community input and outreach, stakeholder involvement is paramount in making any policy work so we want to work with everybody while doing that. we can difficult go focus on -- like i said we have 1200 stops that are frag stops. we can focus doing the 20-foot of red curb at all 1200 but we don't think from a community outreach standpoint and hold public hearings regardless so we need to take public input on all of the locations regardless and three the shop's

backlog in general. as i said we're doing 200-300 of the day lighting locations a year and if we add this on there's -- this and can't paint them all in that time and takes time to get them implemented and do things that make sense and prioritize the ones that we think are important first and i have noted we have 400 or so that don't meet the guidelines and we wanted to focus on those and i think most should be full zones and not this kind of front door boarding location so those are going to take a little longer to work through with the community what that means and how much spots that is going to be. during that process we can still and phase one and involve

your offices and figure out where you think the priorities are and the 20-foot red zones and prioritize those in the first phase but i think there will be 500, 600 stops that aren't prioritized and don't need to be in the first group and focus on the first group first and roll it out from there, but all that said we are happy to take feedback.