lipton, first, i'll just say i'm sad to hear the news from director uchitelle. thanks for all your work here and i know this is far from the end of your efforts to help build the thriving and more livable city. one of those efforts is, of course, the side street shared space. and i'm disappointed with this proposal to reduce the successful and popular shared space program. i hope we can continue the friday through sunday shared spaces or at least just continue this item for a bit while these issues continue to be worked out. but i don't just want to focus on the number of days i hope the agency can work more to support the merchants in the neighborhood to make the shared space a success and work towards a future permanent, 24/7. hayes plaza. i'm honestly confused why we're framing this as a compliance with permit terms issue and not a what do we need to do to help make hayes street the best place it can be? one hayes street has been a sewer of double parking for decades, so why only now are we punishing merchants by curtailing the shared space? because we suddenly expect them

to be responsible for parking enforcement? why do we keep creating impediments instead of building on really one of the most popular successes of the last few years? when is the last time you've ever sat in this room and heard a near unanimous parade of merchants praising an mta program anywhere in the city ? this this program has near-unanimous support from merchants on the 400 block of hayes that are directly affected . and it's one of our city's most walkable and transit rich commercial areas. and for those who need to drive, there's a 600 space mta owned parking garage around the corner for everyone. obviously, as you've heard, the shared space is not perfect, but instead of retreating, which will do nothing to address those concerns, we can work harder to make the shared space work better and live up to the values that we talk so much about. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hi. board members. luke bornheimer here. i urge you to amend the item today

to keep the three day closure intact. it's wildly successful. it should continue. i also urge you to direct staff to work towards a 24 over seven pedestrian ization of this block of hayes street because it's so successful. many of the concerns about the closure have to do with barricades being moved and put back and where they go. there's a great solution for that. we've done it on a car free jfk. you make it 24 over seven and then you can install barriers that just stay there and you can actually engineer them, work with the fire department to make them work great. you can also install furniture, street furniture in the street and activate the street on car free jfk. we don't have concerts every day. we have some furniture out there and it's activated by just people coming. we don't need to throw parties on every single car free street in the city, every single day at every single hour. you can install furniture tables shade just allow people to come to the space. so i urge you to

amend this to make it a three day closure. but i urge you to go further and direct staff to work towards making it a 24 over seven, pile it, whatever we want to call it. we should be working towards that as a city. we know the crises we face. we know what our policies, our goals say. we know what we talk about in press releases or press conferences is we can actually act to fulfill some of those things that we talk about doing right here. this is a very tangible way to do it. thank you. thank you. good afternoon. my name is pete wilson and i am a resident of district five western addition and something somebody said earlier today about other countries really made me think because as somebody who lived in italy, 20 or 30 years ago and rode my bicycle and was hit several times on the city streets and then went back a year ago and was just amazed at the little lanes that they have and how what a great job they've

done. and how much fun it is visiting places over there where you do have city sidewalk streets, not pedestrian streets. and so i definitely would support that every day. and i like the people who are saying 24 over seven, seven days a week. i would also like to see as a somebody who is certified as a trolley bus operator, i would love to see the 21 hayes trolley bus going downtown, actually going somewhere and providing for not only the tourists. i used to work in the tourism industry, but for the residents and to bring more people to hayes valley because it goes as far as hyde. we'd like to see it go all the way downtown and to say that we need diesel busses or electric busses to come in on the weekend is not true. right now, the 31 balboa is going off wires. it could go all the way to caltrans on wires. it drives under the wires for 1.1 miles, and they're electrified wires and they're choosing not to use them. and

trolley busses use 30% less power than a than battery busses. let's remember the mining of the lithium and all that other stuff, folks. so let's bring back the trolley bus. we can use it seven days a week and there's operators who love driving those. and thank you for your time. thank you for sharing your perspective with any other speakers in the room. seeing none. please open the remote comment at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue each speaker will have two minutes. moderator for speaker, good afternoon, this is barry taranto. i was surprised as well to see that you cut down the proposal from 3 to 1 day. i think hayes valley does need the help by having the street closure for the business, but there has to be some mitigation

measures to alleviate some of the issues that are created by the by that block closure. excuse me. um, first, you need to have enough vacant space for our taxis and delivery cars to pull over and not block the intersection or not block the not double parked on golf street . you also need to also have some space on golf east of the intersection, not golf city. hayes so because what happens is that light that that left turn arrow is not long enough and so you have cars stacked up at that left turn and you have cars double parked in the right lane. so what do you do? you so there's a problem there. so i think it's important to actually put up permanent signage saying on this day during certain hours it's a towaway zone. so therefore, when someone gets their car towed because it's a

white zone during that time period, then they're not surprised. and i think it's important to enforce it. unfortunately, you don't have pco's at night enforcing the no parking zones. so this is something you have to rectify and maybe make that arrow a little bit longer. so that so therefore, the cars don't stack up to that left lane and so i think it's important to may even add another day to this. and the last thing is that the grove street exit from the performing arts garage also creates a problem when the symphony or another event breaks before your 10:00. like a lot of the time, it ends at 930. thank you. so that's another time is up next. speaker.

conservatoire minor. one concern i have is what access to close streets will the aged and disabled have now these are long these can be long blocks and physically impaired would have a difficult time patronizing business. so you really have to think it over as far as patronage goes aged and disabled . also byproducts services on this on this street and you're actually shutting down your revenue and i'm concerned about that. basically about access for everyone in the city. and you cannot favor one population over another. it should be open for business for everyone. and

what's going to happen during the winter? oh, it's going to be great to be in the open air during the summer. what about the winter when it gets cold? so basically businesses might be freezing themselves out of revenue. and i think everyone loses in the process. so i think this over very carefully and make accommodations for everyone and be flexible to adapt to all, challenge changes. thank you. thank you. next speaker. good afternoon. this is mitch records with the hayes valley small business association and hayes valley safe. we want to underscore that throughout the entirety of the street closure on hayes. we've been advocating for a fair and equitable process . our concern has always been that that process for a program that was rolled out as a temporary during a pandemic was

never clearly defined. now that we've been part of the process, we support the recommendations set forth for this pilot by sfmta. we also hope that you will not be dissuaded by others who have been trying to change the narrative for an initiative that has impacted small business operators and residents not always favorably, who have spoken up over the last couple of years with respect to their concerns evolving around scheduling traffic issues, signage and lack of activation. the current permit conditions at face value seemingly try to address these. so let's try it and reassess. i also want to express concern about the inability of small business operators to speak up and share their stance when it has become evident that there is another agenda being driven here which has hindered the much needed conversations about how to improve the vision of transit. first, in hayes valley, we would like to see the same synergy applied to optimizing the many

open spaces in hayes valley and the western addition to try to really capitalize on the big vision we once had with the removal of the freeway. as it stands now, we have serious traffic issues. we have serious public safety issues, all of which we've been advocating for the last few years. all the focus has been on this one. block thank you. thank you. no additional callers. okay colleagues, the item is before you are there, comments, questions. director kahina, please. thank you, chair, and thank you to everyone, all the members of the public and the business community that came out to give public comment on this item. um colleagues, i do see this this particular proposal as a way to formalize a pandemic era program. and that alone has tons of growing pains to it, right? like we're trying to figure out how something where the economy was shut down, all activities were shut down, was

quite successful for a lot of folks. a lifeline for a lot of folks. and how we can bring that back and formalize it with our new activities with all our different systems up and running. so i know this is going to feel painful for a lot of folks for some time as we figure out how to make this work. now with everything active again, um, i do see the proposal before us laying the foundation for something bold. i don't see it closing the door to that and it gives us about a year to regroup and really understand how to rightsize a solution here. i'm really grateful that staff worked with the office of small business. i think that was a very smart move, but also a very intentional move that i think we need to do more of in future projects as we work in commercial corridors. i've worked with mary anne thompson before when i did my work at the excelsior action group, and so i understand and a lot of the work that she does and the integrity with which she does that work. and so i was really grateful to

see that she was part of this project and that she was part of the surveying process and truly want to thank monica for all the work that you've done to shepherd this this project. i did have a few clarifying questions, though, on the proposal itself. um, you mentioned that that during the three day closure we rerouted the 21 right? i wanted to just get your sense, if there are any material changes in ridership during that time, if the closure affected ridership on the 21 and if in this proposal were mitigating some of those challenges. so a great question. director unfortunately, i don't know. i don't have that information readily available, but can easily pull that the metrics and what i heard mostly from the working closely with the transit team were around reported passenger confusion about where to find those bus on those three days because for

example friday is 4 to 10 part of the day part not and also the operator some of the operator complaints and confusion about where they need to be when. but the ridership number i don't have. and so i think as we're evaluating this permit, that would be something i'd definitely be interested in understand more. i anticipate we're going to see this item again in a year's time. so it would be lovely to have that type of information available. um, additionally, getting the operators perspective to i think that would be wonderful to also have to understand, you know, is it has it been easy to navigate any changes there? and as it pertains to the barricades, you know, i've thrown a few festivals myself. i've thrown a few events myself and i've gone through the process and it's quite intensive. and you have all these folks there from all these different departments weighing in on on a street closure for one day. and so i imagine we had that sort of level of inspection for this

particular for closure in this permit process. and i'm so great that fire was part of this and they were part of the equation here. who was responsible for setting up the barricades? i understand we're purchasing the barricades and we're setting that up, which is quite generous because it's got permit holders have to pay that fee themselves and they have to pay fees for all the signage and all that stuff. so it seems like we're we're doing our good faith effort and supporting this by also doing that. but who is responsible for setting up those barricades? the sponsor for? yeah, thank you for asking that. to clarify for every shared space street closure it is the sponsor the permittees responsible city to store and set up and take down so store the barricades throughout the year they get one set of barricades and put them out so we make sure our job, in addition to providing the barricades, is to educate them. we hornbostel our amazing engineer is here. he works on all these renderings and does this assessment for us. he'll draw up the barricade schema, get on the phone with sponsors,

talk about them, talk about the spacing, why we need them. we've often gone out in person and marked up maybe the crosswalk for them, but ultimately they have to set it up every day and take it down every day and. if this was an issue with a three day closure, just wanted to get a sense from from the team on what we're going to do to ensure that this is being set up in a compliant way and how we're working with the permit holder to ensure that they're compliant with that piece. yeah. um i think like i mentioned, the education the most we could do up front. so there's, there's this technical information so that they understand it. so there's no discrepancy from the get go. but ultimately, yeah, we don't have bandwidth. we are not going out every week. we are surveying, we are out on the ground all the time. i've gone

out there, jared has gone out there. the fire marshal and we'll take photos and we can like share that back with them. sort of like, hey, this is the tweak needed. and we don't have an official enforcement team at the mta to do that. it kind of has been on our own time, but i think that's something else i can think of is sort of as they're rolling it out to be kind of monitoring and reporting, but ultimately, again, it is a lot of the responsibility that these sponsors are taking on when they're applying for a permit. and so if in the event the permit holder does not comply with that, what do we do then? or how do we learn about it and what do we do then? yeah, this is new territory for shared spaces because they are recurring. my understanding for escort is special event when there are compliance issues, it's more reflected on when a sponsor comes back the next year. kind of like maybe are we permitting them again? so we've developed revocation thresholds and we can and we will iron that

out more for transparency and working with the sponsors. we haven't had to use that yet, but having a documentation of, ah, you not closing the street when you said you could, that's one problem, like having i'm permitted for fridays, but some fridays i'm not and some fridays i am. so having that sort of when we will on what grounds and how we would communicate at first communicate verbally and then you're on. you can be revoked. we have the ability as mta to revoke a permit. so we want to make sure that that is kind of that process is documented so we can do that. it's just a matter of how and we haven't had to do that yet, but we're still sort of new and rolling out the shared spaces program. we weren't doing much of that type of enforcement during the pandemic as we were more lenient. yeah, i would definitely say like as we as we start formalizing this process more, i think it would be helpful for us to understand what what sort of compliance measures we have and what sort of enforcement measures we have. so that we could support more

projects like this and make sure folks are given the proper guidance and the tools to succeed and see these succeed. right so that's the hope. and lastly, this is more for jeff, but i did want to acknowledge a letter that we received from supervisor preston's office and hoping that you could address some of the recommendations that were in that. and i'll point them out. so one of them, i think, was was already addressed by by members of the public. but also with your presentation, monica, of why a restoration of three day weekend closure to private vehicles. it would be challenging at this point. so i think you've addressed that pretty well. but understanding the time sensitive of this proposal, there was a request to entertain an idea of continuing the item until december to give the community an opportunity to address outstanding issues. and so i just want to get a context of is there a time sensitivity

in deciding this now, now and have we do we think within a month's time we would make any material changes to the project at with more outreach and more engagement with folks? so. well, first of all, the timing issue is just that the previous permit has long since expired. and we need to formalize the permit for a whole variety of reasons, including liability. what is clear from all the engagement that we've done is there's near universal agreement on the desired outcome. the only question is how do we best get there? the staff recommendation is very clear that the best way to achieve success, to achieve the desired outcome of a vibrant, car free, active street is to temporarily shrink the number of days we work with the community in order to figure out how to one, comply with the rules of the permit to figure out activation and three continue engaging with community

and getting support from merchants and then expand from there. once we're able to achieve success. so that's that is our primary reason in terms of the desired outcome. um, staff and supervisor preston's office are in agreement and i think generally what we've heard from the community is, is mostly agreement about the goal that we're trying to get to where there's disagreement is on how to get to the goal and delaying this item simply delays our ability to work with the community to get to the goal. we've we've heard loud and clear the various voices. thank you, jeff. colleagues, are there other questions? okay, director henzi, i see you. go ahead. um, director kikina actually, actually only asked my questions. i was curious if these permits were revocable and how we were measuring compliance

with the, the, the, the, the to configure them weighing out configurations. i did want to and this is mostly for my colleagues i did want to and i think maybe director uchitel has a proposal that he might want to propose as a compromise. i did want to say i know director kino was mentioning a year, but i didn't want to maybe consider one, maybe director you could deal gives his proposal well, maybe that we shorten the permit , permit duration and add some evaluation metrics. but i'll let director uchitel maybe toss out his proposal and then i'll add to see what he might have. yeah okay. director uchitel, please.

i feel like what is the sports metaphor? a year? what did you give me an alley oop? okay um, clearly not my strong suit. it's that thing where you pass the ball and then the person puts it in the. the basket. i'm going to keep my comments. just the hayes valley and the hayes valley. shared space. yes, i have spoken to a lot of merchants on this corridor and it's a corridor i'm very familiar with. and i know that this has been really tough. monica, also alex sweetened the mayor's office. marianne i think my greatest disappointment with this is that it got to this point where it's become so divisive and i know a thing or two about this, this getting divisive and it's the hardest thing too, because like the small business is ecosystem of owners. like we're all working so hard to keep our businesses

open. and for and honestly, the pandemic was a moment where that really brought us a lot of us together to kind of support each other. and love each other and survive and i've seen in the post pandemic period as as we try to continue to survive that unity and that that kind of togetherness really starting to splinter, it makes me sad from a very tactical perspective. i think there should be a compromise from just reading through the survey results that we gathered. it seems like a fair bit of merchants on the block like it and merchants on the either other block don't like it so much. not so surprising when we've asked them to go from it sounds like about 30 hours to something like 9 or 10 hours. i'll tell you what, my suggestion is, colleagues, that we can talk about, but i'll just take a step back and say one of the fatal flaws i think about this on hay street is, is how

temporary it actually feels. and we're basically asking communities to reorient themselves around a street in different ways on a weekly basis. so a couple of days a week you can drive through a couple days a week, you can't. and it actually is really hard to build community in a space that's quite so temporary. so i think i understand why other merchants and folks who are getting out of the symphony and people in around are annoyed and frustrated and confused. and part of it is because, as you know, our streets are also community spaces. and when we don't have any reliable city of what they're going to look and feel like, it creates a lot of frustration. an and so i get that. so i do think that if we're going to start if we're going to be closing streets and opening them up for businesses and other uses, we need to choose some streets. we do need to make them permanent. we need to actually sfmta and the city needs to invest in them and make them awesome or else they're just going to be like cones in the street and merchants trying

to book deejays and making it cool, which honestly is not really what we're good at. so i do think we need to pick a lane pun intended and we need to try to show how we can make a couple of these spaces really special. well, and putting cones up a couple times a week is not going to cut it. so i think we should meet in the middle for my understanding, they had a friday night closure an all day saturday, and all day sunday. i know it's inconven decent for our busses, but i think we should bring back friday night, which is like five hours. that's 15 hours. they used to have 30. to me, it seems like a fair compromise to kind of meet them in the middle. i also think that we should study what would it would take, how much money it would take, how much time it would take and how our agency could take this one block back street and make it something different than what it is now, and work with the fire department to think about a solution that feels good with everyone. so i think we should put our money where our mouth is

. study what it would be like to make one block of hay street into a permanent pedestrianized space. and i think we should add back friday night and take away sunday night in terms of the timing of the permit for this, i think it's a very i can imagine for hayes valley, for any merchants association, it's a lot to go through the approval process for this. so i wouldn't actually advocate for reducing the time of the permit. but i do think and i'm sure, monica, you'll be in communication with them where the kind of checking in on how things are going. we shouldn't wait a year to do that, right? we should be checking in with them more regularly and trying to be a partner to them. in terms of how it's actually going and how we can be helpful. so that's my proposal. it seems fair, kind of meet them in the middle. i've heard that friday night was very good for them from a small business perspective. as we know, friday nights is a different vibe than weekend days. it brings out different kinds of folks and there's a lot of restaurants in and around this block. i'll second that. i

i was going to suggest six months, but directory you could tell obviously has much, much more background on what it takes to secure one of these permits. so i'm happy with the year. as long as that maybe in a memo to us you know something back to us via memo in about six months just sort of check in on on on how things are going okay say something here. um, i really like this idea, but then i also think that this is this is the first time i actually got to see the small businesses representation and also the fire department representation here in my, my in my tenure working

or volunteering at city hall. it really shows shows that there's also a gentleman actually just got out of the operation desk and just to show up. these folks do have i'm myself a small business. i understand like every second count and you make your choice. why you are aware or you are that day to spend your 24 hours and really appreciate the study. and then this is not about not wanting share streets or not wanting climate, you know, saving the world, saving the earth. you know, we are all in the same focus here. we want this. we want all these amazing things on our street. this is about about, in my understanding, hearing from all sides. i'm also really aware of that. the side that actually has lesser voice are the one that actually drown ing. they can't. when you drown, you

can't even speak. so it is really about the when we're getting into the pandemic, it is what i seen is like we all have to improvise and just do something where to get everyone happier and make things happen when normally we actually would do something a little bit more and try to figure out a plan and a policy and accountability and how we actually enforce certain situation and if that actually has had life and safety hazard or concern. right? so but we don't we don't have the luxury back then. we didn't do that. and this is a really great time to learn. and how to adapt and different neighborhood is different because the dynamic is different. so i really appreciate the our staff also know the fire department, the small businesses, and also our mayor's office really reach out to talk to everyone on not just

the few representation representative of i'm really aware of the people that actually has less of a voice. and i really want to give them the equal opportunity to live peacefully the way they want to live. so i wanted to know if on friday evening is there more likelihood that the fire truck needed the access to these zones ? because i kind of remember those nights where things are a little bit more colorful in our city. i mean, if, if that's not really if that if that number data is not available right now. um i don't i don't know how am i able to justify doing the friday night. right. but my understanding from what we heard was that the new, the, the point of the new design, even when it

is in effect on saturday, is that we can accommodate fire access, is that the fire department was at the table and has worked through this, approved design. correct. but but my thing is here i'm seeing this line saying the reason of challenges is lack of activation . and then point two is inconsistently meeting permit conditions such as barricade placement and monitoring intersections. so when folks got the notice of violation in the building department is because once people got the permit and they violated what they agreed to do under that permit, so i'm just using the similar application on policy on permit holder and how we can help each other out to make our city safer and better for everyone. so yeah, i mean, i would just say to mike, to the friday night compromise, it sounds like if we're coming up with barricade placement that ameliorate some of fire department's concerns

about folks double parking in the intersection, then that's going to be the new barricade placement. so we'll see if that actually works or not. and adding friday night maybe just gives more potential opportunity for double parking, but we'll know if it works right? if it if the kind of curve works or not in terms of activation like i think the importance is like when are people coming to this area and they're going to want to sit outside and enjoy themselves. and i think the public commenter who said like like making people do like, like the irish jig in the middle of the street is not how we're going to make these places cool. it's by putting adirondack chairs and umbrellas and like just like letting human beings be human beings. and i don't know how we're defining activation, but i don't think we should be defining it as like, like number of attendees who've signed up to a flash mob on eventbrite. okay, i agree. i think the example of the adirondack i love that. just to jump in, director, i agree that we would define that as activation. it doesn't have to

be some live event. people using the space and activating the space. and i hope supervisor preston's office, if they're listening like maybe you can provide some funding for this neighborhood to buy some adirondack chairs and some umbrellas and some furniture to like make it interesting. and maybe you could also help the merchants find a place to store these things, maybe also helping them to train folks that they can actually monitor and better with the barricade placements and monitoring intersections is so and these are all things that we're eager to do, but we're currently not staffed to do. we are eager to develop a strategy for helping make sure that these activations are successful. but that's currently not within our means. i also just need to point out that that changing the recommendation to include fridays will require that we restart the entire process, including forcing the community to go back through the task process and it loses about a at least a month of staff time that would require we halt progress

on other street activations while we redo this process. so just for your consideration, as you think about what today's action wait a second, haven't they they've applied for a three day permit. you we came back to them and said we think it should be one day. we've hauled them out to the mta board for us to presumably flush this out and we can't go back to them and say, as the mta board, we think you applied for three days, we'll give you a day and a half. so deputy city attorney susan susan cleveland-knowles may speak to it, but why would you bring this to us to, like discuss directors? deputy city attorney susan cleveland-knowles so at least for this hearing, you can act today, day on director teal's motion, which would amend the resolution that's in front of you. but we would recommend you vote at your next meeting because what was noticed on your agenda for today was a one day closure. it was a little

interesting notice, but it was just for the one day. so we'd be expanding it to a day and a half . may i have just let me i'll let you finish and. sorry, director. so let me just finish on the task. notice that i do not have that in front of me. i don't know if it was the application and everyone discussed all of the issues with one, two and three days. if that's the case, it may not need to go back to task, but i can't know that sitting here unless this miss moonwatch understands how that process worked. and apologies, director. so for it did go to escott in march for three days there was no action taken, but at least that that was a step taken with the original application. three days there was not consensus, so we weren't able to sort of approve or deny at that time. so i don't know if that would facilitate that requirement or another action step would be the likely need to cut frequency on the 21

days, because friday night is when the bus is experiencing the most delay. as a result from the friday evening commute, congestion on the reroute. so i'm going to jump in here. okay, director. so director tilghman, you said something very important, and i think it really needs to be sort of fleshed out and explained a little bit more. you said there is near universal agreement between sfmta staff supervisor preston, the merchants, the community on what is the ultimate outcome. so i think it's really important for everybody here to hear you say what is that ultimate outcome in kind of specific terms so that we actually know what we're talking about. could you elaborate on that statement a little bit more? sure. i mean, the outcome is a space that fosters in enjoyment and commercial success. it is a space that's vibrant, that feels safe for people of all ages and abilities that supports the merchants success while accommodating the merchant functionality like curbside pickup and drop off somewhere. right i mean, we've we've seen

these streets all over the world. we love them. we're capable of delivering them here in san francisco. but success for these streets follows a very specific set of requirements. when we look at such successful spaces around the world. and so one of the key things that we're working on trying to develop is, is what is that entity that fosters the activation? so can we work with a nonprofit organization to have commercial activation in a box and a sort of nonprofit that can receive private funds and can staff up around a certain amount of expertise where the sfmta is role is, is making sure that the functional needs are taken care of and that the safety requirements are met for all emergency services as well as for traffic safety, as well as to the extent that it's appropriate, funneling public money that can be then combined with private money in order to create barcelona or paris or, you know, antigua, you know, where where wherever it is that

you love. may i? may i? yeah yeah. may i? i don't want to forgot my thought after being interrupted, but i thought the idea. so if. if a call is entertained, my idea. if we approve what the staff recommended today with the condition to monitor the if the operators of the merchants actually do work collaboratively to address these challenges that have been listed in here, they could come back within this year period of time to request for a longer duration of street closure. yes, that's actually exactly what we're trying to set up by consolidating two saturdays and investing in success. we're eager to not only allow, but actually encourage the merchants to expand just as

quickly as they're ready. so that's an unfriendly amendment to my motion. i want to advocate for adding friday nights back, because it's been made clear to me from the merchants that friday nights was a very successful evening for them. and so if we're trying to emulate what a successful street closure feels like in this block, having them continue to have a portion of it, we're talking about five hours where lots of people were already coming to this neighborhood, giving them an opportunity to try it out on a friday night. and a saturday, which is a reduction by 50% of what they had. so it's still cutting it in half. seems to me like a fair compromise. and but i agree, giving them this opportunity, letting them activate it, giving them a little bit more time because it sounds like some of the merchants want it gone. some want it all the way to three days. we've asked them to go to nine hours. it's just giving them a little bit more time to figure this out on friday nights. and. yeah, i think it's

no one's going to be happy with there's no one's going to be happy with everything that comes out of this. i'm just trying to figure out a way to give that, to give them a little bit more. yeah i acknowledge your intent and i'm trying to work around. so then also our agency doesn't cause another month of payroll to go back into the drawing board and come back again. i mean, you know, so then we approve it now so they can actually start trying this out. and the merchants will really start to operate it in the way that the permit is intended for them to do, and then they can come back and then add that those hours back. director henderson, you want to weigh in. i'm really i have a question for the city attorney, because i didn't understand the order of operations that you laid out. so if we i hear the amendment or. yeah, right now i hear there's it's too it's too i want to add friday night and i want us to study making it permanent, how much it would cost, what it

would look like. okay and so that's different than my recommendation is approve it right now and let's with the condition of monitoring the merchants operation now and then giving them an opportunity to extend the operational hours within this year of the permit. so then we can policy. why administrative, why we can actually proceed according to the timeline and we don't have to wait another 30 days of moniker and the rest of the team's time. but but what's on the agenda today or how to, i guess i'm trying to figure out like whatever the vote is today. i heard you say something then could occur in a month. and so what? so, yeah, let me so first of all, director, sir, was that a motion that you were making a recommendation of the. yeah as a motion that i recommend. okay. to work around with everybody. the, the, the, the, the circumstances we have and with the fiscal responsibility that

we have as an agency and also the yearning for the merchants that director to share with us and also seeing on the our staff and also the small businesses. and also can i do a hybrid fire department? can i do a hybrid motion of these two? i just hoping to capture the best of both to clarify what what did we actually henderson's? yeah, let me just reply to director henderson's the, the reason i asked is if. if director feels motion which has a second by director hensey is voted on today, it would be a motion to amend what's in front of you today to add it to a day and a half based on what miss munich said, it sounds like it was noticed at escott for three days, in which case i do not

think it would need to go back to escott. it would just come back to you here at your next meeting for a vote with the notice for fridays and saturday, and i'll be watching. oh if director sos motion is seconded and approved, she does not have a second at this point. but if she does have a second and it's approved, it would become effective. you would vote on it and it would you wouldn't do anything else except vote today. it would not come back to you have i answered your question? yes okay. thank you. if there is a third motion, it looks like we got a supervisor in the room from the chair. then we would need to discuss that. okay. i am going to make a third motion, but supervisor preston, would you like to address the board? thank you very much. usually i don't have the pleasure because our board meetings are going at

the same time as yours. and this one ended early and i was listening to some of the discussion and decided to stop by. so thank you for the comments on this. and you you all obviously know the background. i do want to just emphasize a couple things. first of all, there is incredible community support for the three day active activation motion and car free space that we have now had for several years. and to undo that on basically a week's notice, maybe 8 or 9 days is, i believe is would really is not going over well in the community i represent and is not going over well with with our office s the i would understand the board's reluctance given the staff recommendation to move

forward today with a full three day closure. and i understand from the conversations that's not where the discussion is headed. i do not understand and want to reiterate our request that this matter be continued. and there is absolutely no reason that all stakeholders cannot be brought together to plan out an activation that is satisfactory to mta staff to preserve of this three days here at and to. it makes little sense to take that action now. now my understanding is in terms of temporary authorizations that it could continue on a temporary basis through december. there's nothing expiring here in terms of authorization to continue on a temporary basis at and we really run the risk by adopting something that limits us to a day or even two days of severely

undermining the program. and sending, i think, a message the opposite of what we should be sending in terms of having a vision of really trying to protect and expand the car free space in in our city. so i just want to reiterate the request and i know you have multiple motions and procedurally we'll figure out where you want to go at the same time, i do think a motion to continue would be in order and would take precedence, if i'm not mistaken, over the various, i guess three different to three different motions that you've got. but what what i've not heard at all is any reason why this has to be done against the wishes of so many in the community on about a week's notice just doesn't make any sense. gives us some space. our office community leaders are looking forward to doing whatever it takes to preserve this for multiple days. and finally, i just want to say, because as a avid supporter of public transit in san francisco with all due respect, using the

21 bus as an excuse is not going over well. as someone who rides that bus daily, that thing is running once every 20 minutes. so if there's a problem with service right now, it's not about the shared spaces and the threats of friday activation to ongoing bus service. it's the fact that the bus is barely running at this point on a shortened route three times an hour. so supervisor preston, can i just bring you in? i don't know if you've been watching, but can i bring you in on on an important thread of this conversation and get your perspective on this? sure. i think that director uchitelle made a very compelling point, which is that we want the rules of the road. to be clear, we want people to understand what's going on and that the clearest solution is actually to look at something more like a 24 over seven closure rather than well, which days of the week. i can't keep track. and this is causing frustration and we don't want that. i can't even remember what what nights it is. and i go there all the time. so. so that's compelling to me. and that that that that gives an opportunity for some more

permanent placemaking and permanent community and that you made the point that popping up and going away and popping up and going away doesn't actually kind of create something meaningful. so i just wonder in all your dialogs and conversations, is that your vision as well? look, our offices vision is we would absolutely be supportive of looking at ways to expand the hours we've worked. we've tried to balance the various interests around the days, and i know i've spoken with some of you and with director tumlin about what's been an evolving you know, originally it was a three block closure to private vehicles. has since become the one block happy to discuss. and i think there would be significant community support for more like a round the clock type closure. but again, i don't think these kind of decisions should be on the fly, constricting it or exploring the broader closure. the again, there's no reason these, you know, these kind of decisions should be made on this. the kind of 7 to 10 day

timeline. so i'm wide open to and i appreciate that suggestion and i do think that would give increased clarity to folks. i think we have to we would have to talk to the businesses and the residents. right. about their views of the of the 24 hour closure. but our office, certainly, to the extent there was community support for that, would be supportive of that. but what i'm concerned about is what's before you right now, as i understand it, is eliminating 70% of the hours. i will just tell you on behalf of my constituents and from my office that that is perceived as and i believe accurately perceived as a gutting of car free. hayes that is unnecessary. and that to the extent we can have a collaborative discussion and bring everyone together and explore these kind of possibilities, i see no reason that can't be put over a number of weeks or we had recommended early december here that i'd like to go ahead and put my motion forward for consideration. thank you,

colleagues. thank you for being here. did you want to respond to the supervisor's comments? i have a quick point of clarification. if i can. go ahead. i just wanted to in the spirit of things being clear on the street and the hours, they are closed, i just want to make sure it's top of mind and doing my transit colleagues justice that as i understand from them, the friday difficulty of a part day is really challenging for reroute possible. but when it's a part day, it is difficult not just because of the yard compared to the weekend, but how they do it for when it's not a whole day. and it impacts riders as well. when they they know know to pick up the bus part of the day versus another part not it's solvable but it is just a trade off. i want to be transparent about for fridays as well as the fact that we're going to be going into earlier evenings very soon. it'll be dark sooner. yeah. and that just means nighttime activations are just feel a little different into the winter. okay. thank you. so i would like to recommend that we approve. we

take action today that we approve what is before us and what has been noticed and what has been studied of the saturday permit, because that is a foundation as vice chair kahina said so eloquently that we can build upon that is not a ceiling. that is a foundation. so we take that action, we approve that piece, we direct staff to study and explore if there are solutions on the friday night closure and come back to us within six months with a recommendation. if we want to add that piece in and that we look at what it would take a study of what it would take to actually make it permanent to your vision. director of the 24 over seven, which may ultimately be the evolution that makes the most sense for this community. so that would be three pieces moving forward and you would get to vote on it today. so jerry can for clarity, what was that that middle piece? so we've got we've got the approving ones before us today. and the study of and then we would direct staff to look at just rather than doing this on the fly, we

would direct staff to look at the friday night piece which we've heard from the community as meaningful. but rather than doing it today, we would study that and make sure that we're working through the issues with our operators whose concerns we take very seriously and come back to us in six months with a recommendation of what you what you think is the right way to go forward to potential add fridays and study what what it would take to make this permanent in line with so many people's visions that we've heard today. so then the duration then would still be a year or sorry, sorry. director lindsay, the permit duration, would that still be a year that under your motion permit duration would be a year. but i'm open to alternatives. if people feel strongly. right right. so you're recommending a year as well? yeah okay. okay. so can i respond to your i mean, we'll vote on all these

amendments and see where the votes hit. but this street closure has been worked on by our staff and by the community and nauseam. there's been two surveys, multiple departments, the mayor's office, the supervisor, his office. i think there are two competing petitions us from from multiple groups about what should happen and should not happen. i just don't want to send our folks out there and have to do like a whole nother set of surveying and look ing and wondering and just to come back to add five hours. and so i just i actually don't think that more study about what the community wants is what is needed right now. i think they need i think they need to be given their parameters of what the street closure should be. i think the merchants have heard loud and clear, i don't want to speak for them that the mta wants certain things to be done, not mta, but also fire the community like this has been bruising. so i think we should we should we deserve to give them some clarity about what this block should look like and then we should give them the opportunity to try to make it happen. so i

would just say from the perspective of like putting this to bed a bit, having them like we think we might want to give you friday night, but we want to give you like a couple of months to see if you can do friday night. like it just feels very unsettling. so i think whatever should come out of this, we should be giving them clear parameters. we don't we don't make them come back to scott and go through that whole process again and then just let them try to make this work or not work. that's just my reaction to your to your third. but we should vote. see what people think after the fire forgot how to address you. fire marshal. fire marshal was trying to say something to us earlier. i wonder if he'd like to share. i just wanted to respond to director sos inquiry regarding feedback. as as monica stated, they're not there 24/7. we're we're working 24 over seven. and we provided consistent feedback. when we have problems. actually, one of the slides, one of the pictures was one we took our when we couldn't get through or upon return from a call. so we

you will receive feedback because the fire department will send mta feedback of incidents that occur. and that has happened consistently over the last year with lloyd through monica has received feedback regarding it and hence the reason why we modified the cones in response to the inability to staff the ends. so whatever you approve, we don't the fire department doesn't have a problem with it. we just want to be able to get through. okay. that's that's all it is. so we provide soul feedback on can we get through when we need to in an emergency situation. so you will receive consistent feedback from us because we have let our companies in the field know we have our own process internally to feed that through. it goes to my office and then i just send a nice little message over to monica and she can go ahead and archive that. so i want to let you know you will receive feedback, whether it's one day, two days, three days through mta what kind of response we're going to give. okay. so that's all i wanted to say is you can't

get feedback. director tomlin can you can you just please explain how significant of an issue the 21 friday piece is? because we want to honor the fact that this streets change exists within a part of a multimodal agency, and we want to honor our transit colleagues. i can't quite tell how much of a concern this is. monica, do you want to speak to this or i will try my best. so two things is i think when they reroute, there's certain shifts that an operator takes. and i think when it's broken up and when you only close the street for the five hours in the weekend and on a day like on friday, it is proven to be very difficult for those shifts. so an operator comes into the shift. it could be midway through a shift. they've actually driven through the closure a few times on fridays and we've had photos sent to us and it's like, oh my goodness, and a problem. we can work through. but it is unique to

fridays in terms of shift. and then the second piece again was, i believe, the presidio versus the kirkland yard, presidio yard on the friday services trolley busses overhead wires. and that reroute is also different for oh, julie, just in time. we're we're a three minute time delay back there. okay so i would love to just hear what you just said and then i'm happy to. julie i was explaining about a friday closure in the 21 that there are my understanding the presidio serves it on fridays, that there are shifts that operator takes. so if the closure is just 4 to 10, it has proven to be a little bit difficult for operators and how they're communicating. and it could be part way through a shift versus the weekend and the kirkland yard, those operators have much clearer understanding of what they need to do with a longer day closure and also the rubber tire busses can maneuver around the closure a little bit more easily. so it's clear from

this discussion that there's a lot of moving parts to this issue and transit does not want to be a barrier to follow thing. the board's direction on this topic. we do currently have to go off wire in order to implement this change. that's very easy to do. when we remove the wire, the poles from the wire because that doesn't require the operator to get out of the vehicle. so it is a little harder when we go back onto the wire because cause even with some of the pans we have that direct the wire, there's still about a 1 in 3 chance that the operator is going to have to get out of the vehicle. we also had some challenges is kind of with with this friday shutdown

because it happens mid shift so we did have especially when the barriers were not put in place, we did have operators that either didn't receive the proper training or just kind of lost the. we're not we're not expecting it and went through the project area instead of doing the reroute because it happens mid-shift it's definitely harder to for us to manage something thing that doesn't happen all day long but that being said, we have other places that we are dealing with complexity in the transit system . so we will certainly be follow the board's guidance and make whatever our kind of solution we come to work. for the 21 days

and for the customers having more, much better support on signage is critical and having support on the barriers is critical, which i know is something that we have communicated to the project sponsors via the via monica. okay. some times my colleagues use the term blocking concern. do you have a blocking concern with us approving friday night? no. okay. thank you. okay. any other colleagues want to weigh in. okay. i think procedurally i'll look to you, susan, what's the best first order of business here? we have these three motions. you only have one motion that has a second motion. that's a second. marnie's motion on the table. and also for procedure for christine is also

a good resource here. okay um, so can you, can you can you restate your motion, director uchitel, for clarity for everyone? it's to amend the item to add 5 to 10 p.m. on friday nights and to require the sfmta to study the cost and the design potential design options for a permanent street closure on this block of hayes with been. six months, six months to just study those questions study the permanent peace. yeah how much it would cost and what it could look like. yeah 24 seven but that's it. was it different than what you were suggesting at first? no no, i don't think so. no it's seemed to me okay. is she trying to comment? no, i was

just backing up. director. you could you. okay. and you still second that motion? director hensley. yes. um, yes. yes. assuming so. director or deputy city attorney susan cleveland-knowles. you're saying that we're not going to hold your feet to the fire, but you're saying that this would not probably need to go to as god? so with so we could vote on this today and then it come back at our next meeting and then it'd be would be binding on. yeah. okay sorry. director hensley. yes. so the vote today for director yaku would be to amend the resolution that's in front of you. but because it expands the number of days and hours noticed for today, that resolution would be brought back

to you on november seventh or whenever the secretary calendars it and you would vote on it at that point. we appreciate you. yes. still second that motion, you would vote on the amending the resolution today. yes. then the resolution would be amended. and you would then we would re notice it with the appropriate days and times. and it would come back to you at your next meeting. yes. okay and it could be on your consent calendar or not. okay that's your preference to have no action today? well, it's not no action on it's amending the resolution and you guys have to do a vote. you have to vote on an amended resolution . director hemminger, please. well, i'm not going to make a motion because we've got plenty of those. i do want to ask a question. supervisor preston

indicated that he had gotten very little notice about this proposal. so what are the facts on that question? i'll defer to staff. monica minovitch sure. um the permit expired in march, so we've been working with the community since march. they were, for example, went to a public hearing in march because the permit expired and we've worked directly with the supervisor's office through the summer to while they've been in this sort of transition period. and and when did the one day come up for first versus three days, which is the status quo? early september for about a month and a half ago at the completion of the stakeholder meetings is when we first brought that back to the community. well, labor day weekend, you know, there are a

lot of ideas on the table here and i'm just trying to distinguish among and between them. it sounds like director yakhchals idea cannot take effect until a subsequent meeting and i don't know why. we just couldn't take advantage of the fact if that's true and i'd call it a continuance until that meeting. and talk to people and vet the idea that he's suggested as a compromise, which seems reasonable to me, and go forth from there, you could call it a continuance. you could call it a delayed reaction in which i guess is the implication of the motion that is on the table from director yekutiel. does that all track with you? council well, yes. that is correct. also, just because you amend the resolution today does not necessarily mean you need to have the same vote

at the next meeting. so you could approve director yakhchals motion today and but you could also direct staff to notice it's a broader spec item of dates and times. you know, i'm not going to go into potted plants today, but but it seems to me this is one of those moments again. and i just don't think we have a satisfac free way of dealing with uncertain certainty because as you bring a staff recommendation to us at a board meeting, we want to change it, which is what policy boards are allowed to do. and we're told that, oh, in that case you've got to wait 30 days or 60 days or and it's sort of that information is being weaponized against us. so that we adhere to the staff recommend motion instead of having a better way to handle an independent policy

view. and i think if it has to do with just how we organize as the meeting and how we characterize the items so that we have some wiggle room in this case, the wiggle room is one day or three and twos in between. so if we had written it so that we could have chosen chosen among them again, i just don't think the process should be a way of tipping the scales on whether we approve your recommendation on or approve one of our own and i'm afraid we're stumbling into that too often. i certainly hear what you're saying, director. we have talked about this issue before of making sure that for our more challenging or controversial projects that we invest the extra staff time necessary to have a discussion item first to get feedback and then do the additional staff

work to have potential multiple completed resolutions is available to you. and i realize that's a drag, but i do think it would allow us to have a pure policy discussion instead of worrying about what is this going to trigger this codicil on the brown act? yes. so we're in complete agreement. however, you've also provided us with a direction to move a lot more quickly. and the greatest constraints that we face here, in addition to money, is staff time. and our staff time is our staff. availability is shrinking dramatically right now. so we are simultaneously trying to deliver more with fewer people and that means making some hard choices about where are we directing the staff time regard to with regard to decisions like this. in this case, we made a judgment that that because what we were doing, because there's agreement about the outcome,

we're wanting to take action about the floor or to build from towards that outcome and that we can change that outcome at any time. we could change it three months from now if we figure out some solutions to the problem. but in the meantime, we needed a real permit and so in this case, the staff recommendation was to move quickly to establish the floor for and then use our staff time to build success rather than using staff time with more bureaucratic processes and writing additional resolution for a more for a policy choice to happen here. and i have to say, colleagues, i find that to be compelling. and that is why i am motivated to act today as opposed to continue this, which then involves more staff time, more process, more dialog, more bureaucracy. and i'll heat up a vote today. my bias is to second chair egan's motion. the rules of order. thank you. so we have

two motions with a second and i want to state something that according to the slide that i got today with the report that the office of the small businesses actually went out and conducted aid and reached out to the merchants on these three blocks and 92% of them. and the result i'm seeing is that 66% of them are in favor for prefer or satisfied with a one day closure. i just want to state that that on record. so, susan, we have two motions now. one is for an action today. one is to amend the motion. how do you advise we proceed, christine, do you want to answer that question or my understanding is that you would take the first motion first. so director patel's motion. okay. which has a second. they both have a second now. they both do, yes. okay so are we trying to weigh in again? well i was i think trying to ask

you a question because, again, getting back to the point, i was making, there's going to be a delay either way. right unless your motion is approved. and if director udall's motion is approved, it can't take effect until all the next meeting at the earliest. right okay. yes yes. or we can act today. continuing to evaluate friday with our transit operators to study the 24/7 closure and keep moving forward of trying to act fast. i don't know how much more , more discussion we need to have about one versus two versus three. it's three choices. one, right after the other. and there there clearly is not consensus on. three and one on. and so that i believe, is why direct tory was trying to come up with to and so i don't know how much

more vetting to would have to take. but if we do the vetting and it comes back and we can say, okay, we're going to do two instead, or we're going to keep three, or we're going to do. one my understanding from staff, this was always your intention on approve this floor today, continue dialog, continue building activation, continue to explore what the vision is for this space. so that's consistent. that's right. and in particular, remove the hardest day, which is friday in order to build success and then once there is success, we can reevaluate fridays. can i just throw another bone in here? what? what it sounds like, at least from the staff perspective, that friday night presents a lot of difficulties. what if we give them sunday instead of friday and. in that

way we remove the like, the potential issues with the shifts and the 21 days and i'm just trying to throw the merchants who really love this and think it's really helpful to their businesses a bone here. i am not advocating for staff to go back and do a whole nother round of surveying and talking to the merchants and figuring out one versus the other. i do not want to advocate for that. director henderson. so i what i'm hearing, i just want to be clear. what i'm hearing is not necessarily go back and study one, two or 2 or 3 days, but go back and study, move forward today and study permanent, which would be beyond three days. but instead, the entire set of blocks for or 24 over seven. and i think that so i don't think

that there's a today i don't hear a choice between the one or the two or the three days. it's either one, one or or not or we continue for this half a day, whichever days of the week. i guess we can work that out with the, you know, by next month. but study but i hear the direction is figure out the next the possibility for a long term 24/7 closure right and so can we make sure that or can we add that direction to study to any of the motions that come forward ? because it sounds like that's where the that sounds like the goal or the end goal of this is to figure out what's possible for the long term, whether whether we land on one, two, three days. i think that was in both. yes. okay. and so we vote now or you know, whenever your

direction is. but we vote first on on director hotels. day and a half proposal and we don't does that day and a half have to be specific like do we have to say 15 hours between friday and saturday or can it be open like we were suggesting in the staff and the merchant groups? figure out the best 15 hours of the weekend to do it. can i respond to that? the reason i proposed friday night is because it was communicated to me from the merchants that that period of time that that luscious kernel of time was the time that people were utilizing this space the most. and so trying to protect the time that people are actually going to hayes valley and eating and want to be out on the street. and we all want it to be successful. but so the idea is giving them a little bit of more of that time to utilize. and so that's why i wanted it to be specific, because we've done

a lot of feedback. we've done a lot of surveying. that's what's been communicated to me as like an important time not to lose. okay so yeah, i do want to keep it specific. i do want to i do want to amend the resolution to add friday nights. we both are in agreement that we want to study what 24 hours would look like, though. okay so just from a process standpoint, so everyone understands if director kaushal's motion is approved, that's it, then there's not a possibility to take an action today, correct? sure you can. if i could correct myself. i'm sorry. okay the substitute motion should be voted on first. so your your motion. the second one should be voted on first and then we can go to the original motion. okay. and then process wise, if that motion to approve today and study the longer term as director henderson laid out, if that's approved, how do we then why accurately consider the other motion? because that feels like direction today. whatever. if the first motion that's voted

on is approved, then that's that's done. okay, but not like a why not me vibe. but if i, i propose my motion first and it was seconded first and shouldn't shouldn't since that was the first amendment, that motion that was proposed in second, shouldn't that do i not understand the rules properly? maybe i don't. is that the direction of our secretary if i don't at this point, five years later, the situation should get voted on first? is there any understanding as a substitute. i've been substituted. you're the main motion. no, she's the substitute. your main motion. okay okay. so we're going to call a vote on the proposal, which is to move forward today. move forward with the floor of saturday. closure for directing staff to study the question that's been raised of the friday night and just make sure that works for our transit partners to bring back as soon as you're ready recommendation on that piece as well as to study the

larger 24 over seven closure, which has been seconded. could you please call the roll on that motion? this is your this is chair eakins motion. correct. okay. correct it. if i may, just quickly ask the city attorney, there was a resolve clause that that staff needed to add to this approval. yes. that is correct. the vehicle code requires for a road closure that your resolution includes the following an additional resolve clause that for the reasons discussed in the public hearing, the sfmta board finds that the street closure is necessary for the safety and protection of persons who are using that portion of the street during the closure. so, chair aitken, if you could amend your motion to include that language, so we would appreciate it. thank you. deputy city attorney cleveland-knowles okay. on that motion and the amendment. director hemminger no grenade director henderson. hi, henderson. i director hinsey no.

and director. so yes. so i. director uchitel. no. uchitel no. director kalena nay. kehena no. chair aitken a chicken. and i thank you that motion passes 4 to 3. no, it doesn't pass. i think we. oh my gosh. only i'm sorry three votes. so that motion fails. okay, we can go back to the second. the original motion director uk'otoa's motion director teal's motion is to amend the resolution to add the friday evenings and require the agency to study potential permanent street closure of hay street. and don't forget, deputy on that and susan cleveland-knowles amendment to very good thank you. and what about the sunday versus friday thing that you just put in play?

i'm going to i'm we're going to forget that. okay. yeah. thank you. can someone repeat one more time? this motion is the motion is to amend the resolution motion to add friday evening and require the agency to study potential permanent street closures of hay street within six months. and to add the amendment, as stated by the city attorney, adding that resolve clause. okay go ahead and call the roll director hemminger. hi hemminger. director henderson. hi henderson. i director hinsey. hi, director. so. director. so i'm thinking can you go to somebody else first? no, you can't. no we cannot. this is voting to just amend this resolution and not take a vote.

not take an action today. all right. i so i. director yuku a yuku i director coquina coquina i chair egan egan. i thank you. that motion is passes unanimously. okay. next item. let's go ahead and call the next item. thank you. item 11 amending transportation code division two, section 601 to designate full time transit only area on hyde street between eddie and mcallister streets and approving various traffic and parking modifications between geary and mcallister streets to improve transit and pedestrian safety as part of the hyde street. quick build project includes items a through. to you in the agenda. okay.

can you hear me okay? yes, go ahead. thank you. um. thanks. good afternoon, chair ekin directors. my name is jennifer molina and my senior transportation planner in the streets division in the project manager for the hyde street quick build. i'd like to recognize the entire project team. this project was a team effort across multiple divisions. but most importantly, this project would not be before the board today without the determination of the tenderloin community. before jumping to hyde street, i want to provide a quick overview. two of the important work city staff and community partners have accomplished over the past several years in the tenderloin. this map highlights the various

traffic safety and street changes that have taken place in the community. this includes four quick builds, two shared spaces and a neighborhood wide no turn on red and speed limit reduction from 25 to 20mph. this work would not have been possible without the dedicated advocacy work of those who live and work in the tenderloin. so hyde street quick build. it's the fifth quick build in the tenderloin. our quick build efforts continue to inform our agency's ongoing outreach and engagement practices. hyde's outreach process was centered on partnering with community residential based groups within the community. also, i want to point out that this team continues to work closely with our transit priority team, who are leading the high transit project that that went to the board earlier this month. this ongoing ongoing coordination was key to advancing this proposal. proposal you see today. so hyde

street today, hyde street is busy, mixed use corridor with a variety of civic facilities, libraries, parks, as well as small businesses, apartments, sros and health and service oriented organizations. it's also a very popular pedestrian corridor for those walking or strolling and rolling, especially for families, seniors and people with disabilities. high street is a one way southbound corridor with three vehicle lanes between geary and mcallister street. it also has parking on both sides of the roadway and loading the 19, polk wrote in three golden gate transit regional bus routes travel on the hyde street within this project corridor to the 19, polk connects several neighborhoods, including neighborhoods identified in the muni service equity strategy on average, one person on hyde is hit every month based on five years of collision data over half of those collisions are pedestrians. the top three most

frequent crashes crash types are drivers failure to lead and yield in the crosswalk, followed by red light violations and unsafe speeds. starting in fall of 2022, our project team focused on listening and relationship building with community stakeholders along hyde and nearby. this work included several visioning sessions with our community partners to co-develop an outreach plan. partners included organized and residents from the community, including the tenderloin, people's congress, cbd, safe passage, the tenderloin, traffic safety task force and code tenderloin in winter of spring of 2023, the outreach team focused mostly on in-person engagement, including pop ups in block to block outreach stakeholder meetings were also set up to connect with community and resident based groups, both virtually and in person. so during this listening

period, the outreach team collected hundreds of surveys, mostly in person, to understand project priorities and top traffic safety concerns. the top four priorities include ensuring pedestrian safety, improving transit reliability, considering a protected mobility lane and speed reduction on. so based on these priorities and the feedback collected on both phases of outreach staff recommend actually, i apologize. slide eight building up the team's first phase of outreach, the project team developed two quick build design options as understanding a hybrid approach was important for outreach. the team developed an interactive story map that presented project background and walked viewers through proposals with an option to take a brief survey. our outreach team also organized several in-person tabling events and workshops at trusted

community spaces and sros to review designs and engage with project staff. these workshops included monolingual events in both spanish and chinese. okay so based on these priorities and feedback during both phases of outreach, staff are recommending advancing a road diet between geary and eddy in a transit only lane from eddy to mcallister street intersection safety improvements at ellis and eddy would include painted safety zones and left turn safety treatments. the project also includes a modest curb management plan that proposes additional or extended color curb to provide more space for loading and also to deter double parking. given the growing interest in the community to see a protected north to south. mobility lane in the neighborhood, the team did propose a similar design to our recommendation that also

included an east side running mobility lane. the design proposal for a quick build was was limited by several constraints for the project team that included existing bulb outs, muni service loading and parking in emergency response needs. one of the major trade offs with the design. with this design specifically was that all east side parking and loading would need to be removed for the entire six blocks. while it was clear that the tenderloin community is in support of a protected mobility lane, the design this design would further exacerbate parking and loading challenges, especially for small businesses, but also for paratransit and taxi services. staff are still committed to working with the tenderloin community to identify a north and south mobility lane. there is currently an opportunity to identify future active transportation projects and policies with within the active communities plan. so so given

the team's recommendation today, we are asking the board to consider for approving the transit lanes on hyde street between eddy and mcallister street in improving traffic and parking modifications on hyde between geary and mcallister streets. if approved, quick build implementation would start in late october into early november. for this project will also be followed by a six month evaluation in spring of 2024. our project work will also include ongoing coordination with our transit colleagues, both in construction and project evaluation. that concludes my presentation. an and thank you for your time. thank you so much for your presentation. jennifer directors, are there any clarifying questions? yes, i did have some questions, but i'm very scared. if i may. yes, please. before director lindsay. um just a few comments and

questions. first question questions. i know that when the transit only lane came before us last week, we talked to we talked about an express some concern around the fulton plaza, um, surrounding areas. and i, i know that staff has been doing some work around those intersections. so i don't know if kimberly or jennifer, you want to sort of summarize at a high level where we're at with those, um, with those discussions. sure i can speak to the updates that i have. and also kimberly is here to add if needed. so thank you, director, for that question. yes and so as part we did receive some feedback from community members around some of the pedestrian safety concerns they had at fulton and hyde as well as fulton and larkin. and that's

really essentially with the farmers market moving over to the fulton plaza, the there is a there is a concern around people, particularly seniors and people with disabilities, accessing that and crossing over . so our team did actually look at some options. and we are we are recommending right now is installing large wide painted safety zones is essentially to shorten the crossing distance for people, but to also increase visibility through the application of post and some khaki khaki paint essentially. and that one we know is feasible on the larkin. so on the west side of larkin, we can do so. it's just a beefed up version of a painted safety zone. we've done it along. lincoln and this is something we know we can do and do fairly quickly. the option on hyde and fulton is a

little bit more complex since we're working with our transit colleagues as well as there's ongoing construction with the with the project work that our colleagues over at ruskin park are doing. we have to see if and when that actual application of a large painted safety zone would be actually feasible and so that's ongoing conversation with with transit and our city colleagues. but we are committed to the larkin and fulton application of a large pedestrian safety painted safety zone. and that i think at this point we anticipate we could complete that by end of year. excellent. and thank you for looking into that so quickly and um, we've, we've had a lot of conversations around and other hearings today and needing to come back with other hearings. so um, and i don't want, i don't want to put the community through another hearing so can

you maybe clarify that we wouldn't need a additional legislation? yeah. no, that's a great question. i think well, essentially for the larkin fulton location in the area where we're actually proposed posing a painted safety note painted safety zone is already a tan set. so essentially we wouldn't we wouldn't have to go through through a legislation process there. the other location, again, i don't have information on the hyde fulton location. we still need to see if and when that's actually possible. yes. and then my last question and then have comments and gratitude for the team. but our last question is, i know that there is some concern around when the this segment of the transit only lane is going to be color colorized. and i, i

know that transit technically considers is this a you know highlight while we look at the design so if we if you could speak to that speak to that i know staff intends to colorize it at some point in the future. no thank you for that question. and i do want to note some transit only lanes in the city are not necessarily colorized red. so in terms of the question around and i just want to confirm you're asking whether the section from eddie to mcallister would be colorized red, correct? yep correct. all right. thanks. well, at this time, we are not colorizing the section between mcallister and eddie red. we our plan is to actually evaluate the effectiveness, effectiveness of the travel of the transit lane as part of our six month evaluation plan, including

looking at transit travel times and the reliability of the 19. poke our conversation with our transit colleagues is essentially any reduction in the speed or impact to the 19 poke will require us to review and look at the revision of our design, how it's functioned operationally wise, like in terms of our our lanes, how operators are feeling and then that would include the option to colorize to increase driver compliance between eddie and mcallister street. i think this evaluation actually the timeline syncs up really well with our agency's commitment to colorize hyde between mcallister and market in mid 2024. so meaning the entire eight blocks could be colorized on a similar timeline. but we really would like to use this time to make observations and monitor how this extension of the transit only lane on hyde is working. i would. i would actually agree with you. you you you know as well as i do that um

that this project for the transit lane is it's also a transit lane but it's also a road diet. but i know because of the design of the transit lane that we need to assess the effectiveness of a transit lane. but it it is critical as a road diet. but i do understand that we need we need to evaluate it before we paint it red. so i i'm actually and i know that staff knows that in portions of the road diet to the community. so those are those are my questions and colleagues i have been sort of involved in the outreach process and working sort of i've had jennifer can attest i've had many meetings with staff about this and i just want to emphasize that jennifer has done

a very intense level of outreach to the community. and she was being very modest in regards to the amount of work that she's done. so i did just want to read commend the team for this model of outreach that we've taken up. and i know that you will. there's a commitment there to work with the tenant and continue to work with the tenderloin community. also so and i know that there is a vision within the tenderloin community to have a protected bike lane of some sort someday. and i know that staff isn't necessarily giving up on giving up on that. so i will. and i know that we'll continue to do an increased amount of work in the tenderloin. and so i just want to acknowledge that. and i think to that end, kerrigan

pending discussion and public comment, i will make a motion to approve the project. second, it great. there's a motion and a second we don't have any other director comments. you took your hand down. so let's go to public comment please. for anyone in the room on this item. hey, good afternoon. my name is simon viloria, organizer and co-chair for the traffic safety task force. first off, thank you again to jennifer and mta staff for the engagement and continued communication with our community . um, i've already mentioned in last meeting, but again, want to reiterate the need for this project to be done simultaneously as the rest of hyde street. i know it's also frustrating that added complications to this project with one chunk having a separate

hearing as well as an additional issue on pedestrian safety with the market moving, i understand that this wasn't anticipated and i think staff might share the same frustration. so i just want to put that on record. also, we need a solid commitment of painting the transit only lane red and evaluate before and after colorizing as colorized transit lanes is a greater visual indicator of road diet. and with the problems in the lack of enforcement, it may also act as a deterrent. and then finally, we ask that we continue to be transparent and to continue clear communications with the community of the evaluation results and if any changes will be made. and this will help continue to build trust, exemplify this culture of care and put equity policies into action. so again, thank you for your time. thank you to mta and looking forward to getting this project completed. thank you. next speaker, please. hi,

stacy randecker for the tenderloin. i believe has the lowest percentage of car ownership of any neighborhood in san francisco and they suffer disproportionately because their neighborhood is designed as essentially a highway interchange. you have these massive three and five, including parking long one way streets going in in in opposite directions. the sister street whole concept it's great for throughput, but it's terrible for people. i didn't see a bike lane in there. if polk were pedestrianized, i'd get it. i'd understand, but polk is a show. okay. it is very difficult to bike on. it is not safe and it is the only north south corridor for in in the whole that whole quadrant of the city. i mean.

yeah. oh yeah. you gave a little bit on battery but what are you supposed to do. i mean it's like this is not equitable. public transit includes vanpools is an economically and environmentally sound alternative to transportation by individual automobiles within san francisco, travel by public transit, by bicycle and on foot must be an attractive alternative to travel by private automobile. this is in your transit first principles. it goes on all the documents that are printed. every project has this and more are emblazoned upon it. why aren't we adhering to it? why are we talking about keeping parking? why aren't we read ing and greening this entire city or closing it to automobiles so that you don't have to do any of those things where are we going to do that? please is thank you. any other speakers in the room? okay. please open the phone. actually, i want to speak on the project. jay is not quite yet. this is

the hyde street. that's item 13. thank you. remote public comment at this time. we will move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. moderator for speaker. hi this is dylan faber community and policy manager at san francisco transit riders. we support the hyde street quick build project and thank staff for the extensive outreach that's been done to transit riders and the tenderloin community. but we would at the same time like to see the addition of red paint, the inclusion of transit only lanes and a road diet on hyde street from eddy to mcallister will improve safety and reduce conflicts on the corridor, all while improving speed and reliability for the thousands of riders who rely on the 19 transit. only lanes are a common sense solution to improving transit service in our transit first city. but we're concerned

that the proposed designs presented today do not include the red paint. it's standard for 24/7 transit only lanes in san francisco to receive red paint to make it clear to drivers that they should keep the lane clear for transit vehicles. we know red lanes work sfmta studies have found that painting transit lanes red can increase compliance from drivers by up to 55, even if overall overall car traffic on the road increases. so we support the swift implementation of this project with transit only lanes added immediately as soon as possible, with or without red paint, but red paint should be added as soon as staff capacity and resources allow. so before approving this item, the board should direct staff to update the proposed designs to ensure that red paint is included as part of the transit lanes. final implementation. thank you. thank you. next speaker. hello directors. my name is eric roselle and i'm a long term

resident of the tenderloin and the director of state programs at timberland community benefit district and chair of the tenderloin traffic safety task force. first, i want to thank the sfmta staff in particular jennifer and kimberly, and their hard effort in addressing our some of our questions and then some of our concerns throughout this entire process. as jaime had stated earlier, we really do ask that the fast track, the quick build project in its entirety from geary to market street. second, we ask that the complete implement station of the transit only lane from eddy to market happen in tandem with the high street transit lane project. and that number three, that the paint of the traffic only lane is red painted red from eddy to market street. that was indicated in the first outreach extensive outreach that

was done that was shown that it would be red. it wasn't until later that it was indicated that they would not be red and there was not extensive outreach when that plan had been changed to inform the community in detail that that plan had been changed. um, and so we feel like there's been kind of a bit of switch bait and switch going on there anyway. we also want to ensure that transparency again does happen with the evaluation process. thank you for your time. thank you. next speaker. can you hear me now? yes, go ahead. great. david pilpel, again. so on this item, i am opposed to this proposal. hyde street feeds eighth, which is a major freeway access route in my opinion, there is not that much transit service on this segment. the 21 hayes the 27. bryant and

golden gate transit can all be rerouted off of hyde. so that would only leave the 19 polk, which doesn't run that frequently. somehow i thought that capacity on hyde street was either a condition or a mitigation measure for the van brt project or the polk street project. it's one of the few north south streets, in this case, a southbound street that was not impacted or was not directly affected other than having additional traffic from the van ness and polk street projects. and as i said, it feeds eighth, which is a major freeway access route. i think that if this project is approved , this will mean more congestion and pollution on a corridor in a neighborhood that doesn't need it. it's not my idea. but in fact, people drive people who

live in the city drive to the peninsula to drive to the east bay, need to get to a bridge and a freeway. i don't see that the benefit here outweighs the costs. 30s i am opposed to this item. thanks for listening. thank you. no additional callers . okay, close public comment. we have a motion and a second. please call the roll on the motion to approve director hemminger. hi hemminger. director henderson. henderson. i director hinsey. hi, kinsey. i director. so i. so i director yukou i director kahina. i kahina i chair egan i egan. i thank you. the motion passes us. thank you, colleagues. i'd like to given the late hour. i'd like to recommend we take item 13 next, which is an action item related to the j church project and then reevaluate if we want to continue item 12 to the next meeting or keep going. okay. very good. thank you. places you

on item number 13 amending transportation code division two, section 601 to designate full time transit only areas on san jose avenue between ocean avenue and carter street, and approving various parking and traffic modifications include the designation of a class four bikeway at church and market street, with staff available to present. okay good afternoon, directors. good evening. whatever it is now , my name is michael rhodes. i'm the transit priority manager in the transit division and i'll be presenting today about proposed muni forward improvements on the j church. the j church line, the

j church muni forward project is a capital project that is split into three segments. today. i'll be talking about proposed upgrades at the intersection of church and market streets and on san jose avenue in the mission terrace neighborhood. a future phase of work will be looking at muni forward improvements to the j church in noe valley. the project goals are to improve safety, accessibility and comfort at church stops to address traffic safety concerns and support reliability on the j church, as well as supporting small business and neighborhood commercial vitality, especially at the church and market intersection at church and market streets, thousands of people get on or off the j or 22 every day. it's also a key transfer point to church street, muni metro station below ground. and just as importantly, it's a

vital neighborhood commercial hub. we've made a series of quick build improvements since 2020 to enhance safety and accessibility and the overall transit passenger experience. at this stop in short, we've basically been gradually upgrading this area from a basic transit stop to more of a transit and pedestrian plaza. and we're working on more quick build upgrades coming soon, focused on enhancing the transit, enhancing the actual plaza space. as you may recall, this board already approved permanent transit plaza upgrades in december 2021 at this intersection, detailed design on the permanent plaza is underway in collaboration with public works and local merchants and we expect construct on the permanent plaza to begin in 2025. the reason we're talking about this intersection today is to give you an update on the design and to seek approval for a sidewalk level bikeway through the permanent plaza. here are

some of the elements that will go into the permanent version of the plaza. there are basically two main zones in the plan design. there's the transit passenger zone. that's kind of where people are waiting for the train. that's kind of more to the left of the diagram here. and then a public plaza space kind of an extension of the sidewalk right next to sort of verve coffee and in that area there where people can drink coffee or dine from local restaurants and basically have high quality neighborhood gathering space. the plaza will include a permanent, wheelchair accessible platform, um, comfortable and welcoming transit, passenger amenities and streetscape upgrades and seating . church street is not a designated bike route, but it does have a fair volume of cyclists and we want to make sure they're not riding in the track lane. so we're proposing to include a bike path between the two zones. the original approval for this plaza included

an exemption for bikes in terms of the traffic restrictions, but it didn't designate it as a class four bike route. so this is sort of an administrative clarification of what was originally approved. so that's an update on what we're working on at church and market. and again, the only action item for the board for church and market is going to be to potentially adopt the proposed bikeway. shifting south. we've also been working on improvements to san jose avenue along the j church in close partnership with local neighbors and supervisors. our safire's office there are three main challenge areas we're looking to address with the proposed improvements on san jose. first is safety. this is a high injury corridor and we've had extensive you know, requests for safety improvements from neighborhood residents for many years. it's been on the radar for a long time. there especially concerned with speeding and safety when crossing san jose and as well as pedestrian safety at transit stops. second, of course,

transit reliability and finally, accessibility. there's currently a gap of almost two miles between wheelchair accessible stops on the j church in this area. that's from basically glen park down to balboa park. as i alluded to, there's been really a tremendous amount of community advocacy around improving safety for people walking in this neighborhood. on san jose avenue about a year ago, our project team kicked off an initial round of outreach to key community members and community based organizations in the neighborhood who were already kind of organized and interested in safety improvements and knocking, knocking on our doors to have us come talk to them. over the past year, we've presented about potential improvements to the local neighborhood association, to community based organizations, missions, to neighborhood leaders and merchants along the corridor. and this august, we returned to the community to share a final revised proposal that incorporates a lot of the feedback that we've heard throughout this outreach process

. throughout the outreach, we've heard very strong support for safety improvements and improving transit reliability. we've heard a lot of requests to enhance the crossing experience, especially for pedestrians, particularly along balboa park and some more localized feedback around parking and loading needs, especially at the roxy food center at san juan avenue. so here's what we're specifically proposing on san jose avenue between to 80 and ocean avenue. first, it would be transit lanes, which would really primarily be there to reduce speeding while supporting transit reliability. this is really about creating a road diet on an overbuilt roadway to reduce speeding while keeping transit moving. so this would reduce the roadway from four general purpose lanes, so two lanes in each direction to two total through lanes. so one lane in each direction, vehicle is making a left turn and taxis would still be allowed to use

the left lane or the track lane where the trains are. there would also be extended boarding islands to provide safe loading for all train doors. currently, some of the islands are too short and people are stepping off into a traffic lane. wheelchair accessible transit stops would be added at two intersections, so four total transit stops would have wheelchair ramps added that don't currently have them to improve accessibility and flashing beacons, sidewalk corner bulb outs, daylighting and left turn, traffic calming and continental crosswalk striping to improve safety for people walking as well. in total, this project would remove a net one parking space. as i mentioned earlier, one of the key pieces of feedback we've received has been about crossing san jose avenue along balboa park. so this is an important gathering space for the neighborhood. it's a major a major destination park as well. currently there are four

intersections along the park where people may cross. as you can see in this map, labeled one, two, three, four, where currently focused on upgrading the three intersections that have existing marked crosswalks to make these really good crossing options at havelock, santa ynez and ocean. so those are three location that are not only intersections, but they have a marked existing crosswalk. but we've also received a good amount of requests to add a marked crosswalk crossing. san jose at sergeant john young lane, which is a small park street midway through the park. these requests came a little later in the outreach process and we've just completed the engineering analysis in the past few days. so in the interest of transparency and timeliness, we wanted to share an update today. instead of waiting to get these results out to the community a later date. for now, we're recommending that the focus does remain on upgrading existing marked crossings to the park. we're not currently recommending adding a marked crosswalk at sergeant john young lane based

on a few key considerations. first, there's been no recorded injury collisions at this intersection crossing san jose in the past five years. the pedestrian volumes based on the counts we've done are pretty low. this isn't a through street, so for most people santa ynez or ocean would be the most direct path of travel. the closest marked crosswalk is at most about 370ft away at santa ynez, where there's a stop sign and marked crosswalk and a j church stop and finally adding a crosswalk here would require significant investment, such as curb ramps and flashing beacons or a traffic signal to really make it work well, because if we just put a crosswalk there without ramps and without some higher visibility measures, it's not going to be a successful crosswalk. unfortunately, we do have limited resources and improvements are urgently needed at a lot of other high injury locations throughout the city. so that's why wayne, this current safety record versus the cost of adding a crosswalk here with signalization or with a flashing beacon and with the curb ramps, we're recommending

that we do not add a marked crosswalk at this time. but but we do understand the interest in this crossing and will continue to monitor it and can revisit our recommendation if conditions change on the street. so in summary, here's what we're asking for. the board to vote on today along with the san jose avenue corridor, we're proposing transit lanes that allow busses and taxis or that also allow left turns from ocean to carter street. a left turn must turn left northbound at ocean avenue on san jose to facilitate the transit lane. it attended boarding islands and new accesses stops at santa ynez and santa rosa intersect ocean daylighting at san juan paulding, santa ynez and biden and baden rather. and flashing beacons at san juan and pauline avenues. these flashing beacons,

if you're not familiar with them, are those pushbutton signs that you push and it lights up and says there's a pedestrian crossing the street as well as pedestrian bulbs or sidewalk corner extensions at paulding and baden streets at church and market directors due to the fact that the required language for the class four bikeway was not included on the agenda for today . we are recommending that you approve the entire item today except kept the bikeway, which is item h, and we will bring the bikeway back for your approval on november seventh. on your consent calendar, we will. we've given you the background information on it, but we would bring it back for approval in two weeks on the consent. and here are our proposed and next steps. october 17th. that's today. the sfmta board is reviewing our proposals for san jose avenue, the class four bikeway at church and market would be postponed for two weeks. as i mentioned, you're going to receive an overall update about muni service today, but just to clarify, there are

no proposed changes to the church as part of this project or in general at the moment. later this year or early next year, we will implement the quick build phase of the project on san jose avenue. if approved and planning and outreach, we hope to also start for the noe valley segment. the final segment of the j church muni forward project in that time frame over the next two years, we would complete detailed design of transit plaza improvements and the san jose avenue permanent version of the improvements and starting in 2025, we would start construction of full capital elements at church and market, san jose. the whole project, including boarding islands, flashing beacons, accessible stops, bulbs, all of the elements that we can't complete during quick build. so so thank you very much. directors of course, our team is available to answer any questions you may have about the proposals. thank you, colleagues. in light of the late hour, i'm going to go to

public comment ahead of your questions. that's okay. any commenters in the room for the j church item? i do have some speaker cards. prudence hall. hillary bao. david hooper. samuel thomas. go ahead. i'm hillary brown. so start comedy. yes, actually, my name is hillary brown. i'm with the mta. sam m sfmta museum and accessibility committee. i've been serving on this committee for like five years. i would like to eventually invite to speaker, do a presentation to the to the mac community because we want to learn about how this project is pertaining to accessibility throughout the citizens in san francisco. i'm wondering, i've been serving it for five years and i want to hear about how they talk about accessibility. for example, not just wheelchair, but people who are blind. that should be taken consideration. i wasn't speaking

that because i also wish there was a committee i think there's a committee for the geary line, of which there were a visory committee for this project. and if there is, i would like to serve on it. i just all i want to say thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. microphone is tall. my name is prudence hall. i'm a resident of the mission terrace and i have been meeting with sfmta for a number of years on this on this. thank you. i am personally in favor of everything that i see on this list. i mean, some of the items i like more than others, but you know, hey, anything is great and we would like them all. and i'm very disappointed. covid that sergeant young lane was not

included in this list, although i want to really appreciate it that it's on the map now, because when we first met with philippe and with aaron mcmullen , it wasn't even on the map. but we have followed their suggestions at the several meetings we've had with them and with michael jacobson of the traffic calming program. we've pulled in our community partners. carol jankowski, who is the area five manager for rec and park, and also now captain amy hurwitz, the captain of ingleside police station, and she's appointed a person, sam berenson, who works with us on this. and we've asked for a crosswalk at that spot. but i do want to point out that it's not just a random road. it is the access to ingleside police station. it is the access to

boxer stadium, a commercial stadium, and it is flanked by by a children's playground. and the baseball fields. and we really need traffic calming at this t intersection as all intersections in this section are t intersections, not squares. thank you for your time. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hello board members. my name is samuel thomas. i'm a mission terrace resident at and i live on san jose avenue. i'm a part of the movement for a safer san jose. i have a 17 month old son who uses balboa playground and crosses the street, literally every day. so this is a big concern for me and for other families in our community who are in the same boat that my entire family uses the corridor and we use it regularly myself and the community supporting

safer, san jose are very excited that this project is moving ahead. we appreciate all the mta staff's hard work in making this happen and in making this project a reality. we're glad the board is listening and taking action. these are all great things. overall, we've heard from the majority of the community that we've spoken with that they're pleased with the proposal, even if it doesn't contain everything that we would like to see, we would like for the board to approve this item today and for the mta to move immediately with the quick build portions of the project so that we can see the situation improved as quickly as possible. with that said, one remaining issue that has not been addressed in addition to the crosswalk is the elimination of left turns from paulding onto san jose. this is a big problem in the current configuration vehicles turn into a crosswalk across four lanes of traffic and that includes transit vehicles, cars and this is extremely dangerous and puts pedestrians in harm's way. we know it's

dangerous because our 80 year old neighbor who one of our directors has met was struck and injured in exactly this way a little over a year ago. and he now requires a home health aide with him most of the time. so with that said, i think we view this project as just the beginning, and there's still a lot more to do. we need a comprehensive set of streetscape improvements every thing in this proposal is fantastic work. it is a transit optimization project. we would love to have the signals team as well as the streets team engage with us to move things ahead. thank you very much. thank you. next speaker, please. stacy randecker. both these projects hit me hard because my son, well, both my kids went to everett middle school and because the 55 doesn't go all the way to across to church and market, we will often drive him

to church and market to catch muni to go to lowell and my daughter started her high school career at balboa. my son played ball on that field many, many times and i am very familiar with the street they're talking about. and that is a desire line that is how people go to the park. and that should have at minimum, the lousy freaking crosswalk that you have there right now. just stripe it. just make it something, make it bold, make it pretty big. i don't know. but make it so that drivers can see it. if you can't do all of the other capital improvements, at least apply some stinking paint. so these people feel better and in terms of like how can you make it, they don't read signs, they read the roads. so you can have all the signals you want, but you've got to think about dieting it. you've got to think about taking away some of that, that parking have the park, the rec and park get involved. how about having tree plantings that go out that, you know, we don't have enough street trees in our city. we

must have i know we've allocated budget for that. can we get street trees that come out and make these roads more narrow that take some of these parking spaces that make it safer for people so it doesn't have to come out of sfmta's budget, but we've got to start getting crafty about how we make these streets safer for people all. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. my name is david hooper. i've lived in mission terrace since 86. i want to throw a little cold water on this project since the line was extended in 1990, there were no tracks on that portion of our neighborhood. the line itself, my i. i did 33 years with muni. my last 12 years were at central controls, the train controller and a manager. the line through our community does not suffer for

schedule. that's the first. the second is that it's only 12 years ago that we got the crosswalk with a stop sign at santa ynez to be able to cross to the park. we've been beating the drum about pedestrian safety , you know, why did the pedestrian cross the road and we've been trying to work with this so some things are great. improved islands, the bump outs at the various intersections, the effort to square off for the motorists at paulding and at baden, that hazard, the yellow hazard lights that's like are they going to work? that has to be seen. it's a very wide street . i saw the lights are on either side. but the big item for me is that painting the town red painting, the transit lines. red is it's nonsensical and the line doesn't need it for transit at the street on either side. we

have nothing but left turns. we go, it's a t, you have to make a left turn to go into the park, to go to the police station, to go to boxer stadium, you have to make a left turn at paulding or at baden going northbound because you are going on to a freeway overpass coming southbound. it's the same thing. we don't have any of the squared off intersections. the cars will still be in the red lane, the left lane. and it's monkey see, monkey do once others do it, people will do it. i don't see the value. thank you. thank you. any other speakers in the room, please open the phones at this time we'll move to remote public comment. not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. moderator first speaker to. great. can you hear me now? yes, go ahead.

great. david pilpel again. so on this item, while there is some more discussion of stakeholder engagement in the staff report, it just raised some additional questions for me. if the community asks for various things, it didn't really commit more than just, oh, we're going to, you know, maybe look into it . so i'm i'm just concerned about the lack of meaningful discussion about stakeholder engagement in staff reports. it is not particularly clear to me why these changes are being pursued right now, given what staff said earlier about about staff availability and other things. this just doesn't seem like the highest priority to me. i did hear david hooper speak a few minutes ago and i heard him speak at the friday hearing on this that essentially that this project by itself will not improve j church reliability. and i agree with him. i think that is true. and he has a lot of experience since as a transit

supervisor for central control dispatcher, train controller manager for it seems to me that there really are far more important priorities right now. so i'm not sure that i would approve this particular action today as it is, staff already said that part of this will be back at your next meeting. and i agree with the speaker a few ahead of me that said that this really needs a comprehensive plan and this just seems like bits and pieces on the san jose avenue portion. 30s and it's a thanks and it's a follow up piece that church and market that's somewhat inconsistent with other things that could be happening there. bottom line is i'm not sure i would do this the way this is currently packaged. and i think the better solution is to harness. stacy ran decker's energy as a power source to supply power to muni and to all of us, because i was

very impressed with her passion on this and other items. that's all. thanks for listening. thank you. no additional speakers. i'll close public comment. colleagues, i think we had a couple of questions or comments earlier. director kahina did you want to? yeah speak. of course. well, thank you to staff and to all the community advocates that really brought this issue to the board. i think it was last year where where folks were really pounding the drums to make sure that we paid close attention to san jose avenue and to really focus on traffic calming in that in that corridor, particularly after mr. martin's collision. and i did have an opportunity to meet him and it was really challenging to see how he was just still navigating the streets, still bravely crossing the street, even though he almost perished after that collision. and it wasn't a

fatality, but it was a hair away from being a fatality. so i just really want to thank the community for rallying for him and for his for his safety and for so many of the folks are elder community members in d11 because we do have the highest percentage of seniors, highest percentage of families in that district. and so a corridor like this that serves the park, that serves schools, it's imperative that that we are doing our utmost to make sure it's safe for pedestrians. and so i did have a few clarifying questions about the project itself. i did see that. so the intersection where mr. martin was was hit was on paulding and san jose. and so i appreciate that we are looking at some solutions there, particularly the rapid flashing beacons. and i do see that within the i guess like the many options of treatments there. we also have left turn traffic

calming as one of the pieces that we're considering implementing throughout that corridor. why are we not implementing it there? thank you . so the challenge at paulding, unfortunately, is that there isn't the street space basically to add the additional space that you'd need to put the left turn traffic calming. it's basically a, you know, it's posts in the street or kind of a space in the street that that folks people to make a wider turn at at at a at at baden there is space there is extra lane space but at paulding the lanes are really you know basically as narrow as you can make them without squeezing in. there's not really room to squeeze in that kind of traffic calming. we can certainly, you know, sharpen our pencils and look back at it. it doesn't it's not really a legislative change. it's a project feature, but it's not something that requires an approval per se. but we can you

know, we can certainly take another look and see if there's anything else we can do to further support that. yeah, i think that's it's critical, especially like paulding and baden specifically. there there are ways that folks from the monterey boulevard or that that particular neighborhood connect to san jose then get on the freeway or cross into other neighborhoods. and so it's a they're both like feeder streets to the freeway. and so it's i think it's super important for those streets in particular to get the most amount of treatments as possible because folks are usually speeding to get across those streets at the other street that came to mind and i appreciate all the public comment on this too, because it's i think it's merited. sergeant john v young lane so i understand. and that you all did a study, so i appreciate you doing the study. but you know, i know the street very well. a lot

of folks there's a there's a parking area for folks that frequent the park and it's cars are often going there like frequently just to find parking to access the park, to go to the police station to use the diamond ring, like all these different activations that are that the park has. and this is one of the few parking areas is in that park. and so there are always cars going through there at various speeds, even though there's a police station right there. it's really interesting and so curious why why we're not proposing something there more substantial to create a safer passage for pedestrians. there yeah. and to your point, that is a busy well, you know, it has it has activity. people accessing the park and the one collision that we do have in the past five years at that intersection is actually somebody walking along san jose crossing sergeant john young lane. so it's, you know,

in that crosswalk where they're crossing, sergeant john young versus crossing san jose and so we will be upgrading that crosswalk from a kind of traditional kind of two lines kind of crosswalk to a continental crosswalk to improve the visibility. we've also so the that that intersection has full daylighting at this point to increase the visibility there. but in terms of the collision history, what we've seen is really just that one collision. that was somebody crossing john v young and it speaks to what you mentioned, which is that there is activity of people kind of driving in and out of sergeant john young. there are people crossing in. john young, so certainly we want to make sure that's as visible as possible. so again, like i think we really need to explore for making crossing across san jose, whether we're exploring it or studying whatever it is. but i do think we need some intervention there and i feel quite passionate about it considering i think also the members of the public also talked about this too. so there

are tons of families that get serviced by that intersection. and i just i see it as as a miss if we're not really paying close attention to how that that particular intersection can be safer. and i don't want to wait for a collision to happen to make the call. so i would encourage staff to really explore that thoroughly. if we're true to our visions or goals, the other piece, let's see if i want to let me see. i think those were the two main pieces that i wanted to bring forth to the board, and i know there is quite a lot of energy for folks to eliminate left turns on paulding. but i can understand why why that's something that the i don't know if you all want to explain that a little bit more, why we opted not to eliminate left turns. there yeah, it mostly comes down to the street grid in that neighborhood. there's only a few streets that actually cross to

80. it's not a regular street grid where streets go through. there's not a lot of full kind of four leg intersections. so when you restrict the left turn there, it's not like the mission or somewhere where you might just make or downtown where you might make three rights to be able to access your destination. it requires a lot more foresight to know, oh, i guess i need to turn left here and turn right there and if you miss your opportunity to do that, you're kind of in a tricky spot and there is a commercial corridor immediately north of paulding that we want to make sure people can access and not make that too difficult for the small businesses that are there. so those are the primary considerations. we, you know, we like restricting lefts in some cases to preserve safety or protect safety and keep transit moving. but this is one location where we think the circulation was a little bit bigger consideration. and just to state my position on this, i fully support this project. of course, i want more on that street. this is a neighborhood that doesn't really get its due, its investments. and so i appreciate

the level of effort and care that the team went through to make sure that they were connecting with all the members of the public. and i understand that not everyone got 100% what they wanted, but this is close enough for me to support this. thank you. vice chair cajina director. so and thank you for the presentation. i like a lot of the graphics and i'm trying to make it brief because it's like 6:00. i just to really two questions. i love that balboa park playground and also my daughter's always go there now practicing various different kind of sports. so i'm just curious of why you chose to have a stop sign on santa ines crosswalk. whereas you know, on the sergeant john vision, you just have a no mark crosswalk. yes. thank where? i'm sorry. that's actually where exactly all the parents would go with

their three year old toddler that's like that would be the one they will cross. yeah. totally understand the question. as a parent of a three year old toddler, i totally get that. but the main there's kind of a couple main reasons, one of which is that sergeant john v young does not continue as a street once it crosses san jose. so the only kind of case where sergeant john v young would be your most direct path of travel is if you were located immediately be kind of to the east of it's not a through street, whereas santa ynez is a through street that, you know, kind of circulates into the neighborhood. santa ynez is also the location of a j church stop. so that's where people are getting on and off the train. and we want to make sure that's safe, accessible place to have a stop sign. so those are you know, it's that circulation element and it's the it's the train stop. so is it too much to ask for having that? number three, you have that blue dot there to actually have some sort of flashing on the marking on

the street? i just want to make sure that we don't have another our toddler got run over by a car and killed. so. absolutely. so most of the time we will take the shortest cut because kids, we just want to get them to the playground as quick as as possible. and you know, i mean, like, you know, that's that's the you know, can we do that? you know, i get that completely. so the reason that we made the recommendation is that if we are going to mark this as a crosswalk and say this is a place you should cross this, you know, right now what the street tells you is you should cross at santa ynez or at ocean because those are marked crosswalks. they have a signal or they have a stop sign. they have the infrastructure that sort of invites you to cross. right now, if we were to add a crosswalk at at at sergeant john v young, we'd really want to add more than just a crosswalk because as we've seen at other places along the corridor, once you have a basic crosswalk, that's not

enough by itself, right? so we would probably need to do a flashing beacon. we definitely need to do curb ramps which don't exist currently. we might need to do bulbs to really make it work well or a signal, you know, there's all these additional infrastructure pieces. so it isn't necessarily a decision between nothing and a little bit. it's sort of like, do we make a significant investment in this intersection, which, you know, isn't a through street, doesn't have high pedestrian volumes right now, right now, our recommendation is to channel people to that, that nearest intersection 350ft away. but we understand that, you know , if you're trying to get across the street, there's the playground, just get out of your car. we get it. i totally get it. that that's that's an attractive place to cross. so i would just weigh, you know, this is a location with no injuries. we have a lot of locations in the city with high numbers of injuries that could use that same investment. it would probably be, you know, $600,000 or so to make the kind of basic curb ramps, flashing beacons and striping that, you know, a lot

of other intersections have competing needs. but that's that's sort of a policy choice to weigh. and that's why we made our recommendation. but it's not, you know, it's something to consider. so because it was going to cost a lot of money. so how about you combine the two? i move the bus stop or move that number two point that you have. i'm just trying to i'm just trying to say that can we solve of a lot of problems with one resources that we have like move the number two and three together. i think if we were to do that, there would still be the desire to cross at the existing streets and we'd still have requests for crossings so that would be my concern with that. that is kind of unfortunate. yeah, it's really unfortunate. my other question is that you mentioned about that bike path of travel on on the other side of town. now, bike path of travel is going to have

to go through some review. it's not even that it's simpler. we just literally there's some additional sql related language that should go on the agenda that's posted for the board of directors and the item itself was listed, but it should have said some language about this being an approval action under sequa. et cetera. so it's just a noticing issue. it's not a review or anything else. do you mind then explain to me where does it start and where does it end? sure. i only see the little highlight photo shop color block on the map. yes. so it would be basically from, um, market street, which is kind of the north end of the transit stop. and it would travel through the transit stop shop and then it would stop sort of mid-block through the market to 15th street block of church, basically just getting people through to the, the boarding area, you know, because after that, there's a second lane of traffic that bikes can use. but

through this transit stop area, there's just nowhere else for bikes to go other than into the track lane. so it's probably, you know, 300, 400ft, halfway through the lock. and it's it doesn't continue into a bike route. it's not really a street that we're trying to channelize bikes to, but we know that there are you know, 60 to 100 bikes per hour that use this route because it's flat and there's restaurants and there's places to go. so we need to basically we feel like we need to give them somewhere safe to get through that transit plaza. there's no bump or anything. it's just the grade level is the same currently. we would propose it to be at sidewalk level just to kind of make the plaza feel more like a continuous space. there would be there would be kind of truncated domes or, you know, like things on the street. so if your vision impaired or have other, you know, just so that because it's flush, we want people to know where the bike lane begins. but it would be at the same level as the rest of the plaza. so when the bike get off of this path of travel, they will they will need to have like

a little curb cut or something to kind of make sure they're safe to get off. yes, there would be a ramp at the beginning and end of it. okay that answers my question because i was like, well, this is doesn't look very safe for cyclists. you would do you would make sure that they don't end up ran into these little ram edges, right? yes they would have a ramp that would meet our standards in terms of the you know, how quickly it goes up and down for bikes. okay. all right. thank you. i would really highly, strongly encourage you to really consider doing something more to mark that crosswalk to the balboa playground. if you can. thank you. thank you, director. so, director util, i will make this very, very quick. it is about the plaza. i believe we talked about it almost four years ago. is that right? december 20, 21, three. two

years ago. so i'm just a little it says here that it will begin construction in 2025, which is over a year from now. and that intersection is suffering a lot. i pass by it every single week and there are a lot of that side of the street. there's been a lot of closed businesses. there's trash everywhere. it looks very junior varsity right now. and i'm a little worried that we're saying it will be another year and three months before we even begin construction. and i don't see an actual timeline for completing construction. so one, why can't we start construction construction sooner? and two, how long do you think construction will take? right. so the that it doesn't that the treatment we have right there right now is not abetting the neighborhood like junior varsity is a good sports metaphor for the current situation out there. yeah, it's we've been kind of iterating on it. we added some some paint to kind of claim the space and clarify where the plaza is. but totally agree with you. we don't want to wait till 20, 25 to make any kind of

improvements. the next step would be another phase of quick build that would be really focused on supporting the businesses. and we want to we're working to partner with pwd and the local castro business district to activate that space to get it, you know, to get better parklets out there, to get the kind of near term activation we can. we think this is stuff that we could do in a matter of months versus waiting till 2025. does that look like just like filling it out with something that isn't like dirty white paint, like concrete or even like a some kind of temporary structure? it could be seating, landscaping, some kind of programing. so you're saying that you're you're planning on doing that in the next few months? that's what we're working towards right now. we you know, as as sort of came up during an earlier discussion, ideally mta sets the safe traffic conditions and we partner with a local organization that can operate some of the, you know, the seating or the, you know, the other elements that kind of make it a great space from a pedestrian plaza standpoint. but we are reaching out right now to

take those steps and partner and then completing the final, final plaza with everything in the permanent way you said begins in 2025. how long is that supposed to take? when will it be done? so the overall project, we expect that to be a two year construction time frame for the whole j line corridor. but i would expect that the plaza would not take as long as the overall project. it will probably be one of the first things that we work on, given the you know, it might even happen simultaneously with san jose. so probably you know, hopefully under a year. okay. then my final thing is just as i know we're working on a lot with muni forward, just don't forget this intersection because it's been such a tough one for some of these small businesses. we just had another small business open just like 2 or 3 months ago, and it's such a like delicate, delicate ecosystem right now. and i really want to protect it. those business owners who are trying to make it and i do think our treatment right now is hurting them because it feels very abandoned.

and so thank you for trying to come up with a short term and a long term solution for it. okay do we have a motion to approve the item? motion to approve a second. second, please call the roll. i do want to clarify that you do as staff suggested, you amend that resolution to indicate that items a through g striking item h for the class four bikeway, which will come back to you at a future meeting and remove the associated language from the first resolve clause for the bikeway. can i presume that is the motion? okay, great. thank you. all right. on that motion and amendment, director hemminger hemminger, director henderson henderson. director hinsey hinsey director. so i. so i. director yaguchi i director ina i kahina. i chair. ekin i ekin. i thank you that motion passes. okay colleagues, we have one more item. the media service update we've considered pushing

it to the next meeting, but we have a packed agenda for next meeting and we now have to take hays street again at the next meeting. thank you. director yekutiel. and what was that about appreciating you at the next meeting? i'm just kidding. so i would like to go ahead if it's okay with staff and go ahead and take that presentation now. so very good. item 12 presentation and discussion regarding fema update. right good afternoon. slash evening. so we'll keep this fast. so but do have some great news to share. so thank you for allowing us the chance to address you today. so sean kennedy i'm the senior manager for the transit planning group at the mta. my staff has already handled most of the difficult discussions today. so i'll just get to talk about good news. basically, we want to go over where we're at with the service restoration and talk through some really great

trends that we're seeing both in ridership and customer feedback and then talk about kind of next steps and where we're going over the next several years. so i guess with that, oh, one other thing before i get going. you know, a really good transit system has is great transit priority and great service planning put on top of each other, complimentary hand in hand. so i will be today i'm focusing just on service, but we'll be coming back at the second meeting in november to talk through a muni forward update as well. so with that, you know, with the support of this amazing board, we've really become national leaders and looking at changing ridership patterns and how to adjust and adjust and change for that growth. and over the next two years, we're going to have the opportunity to get even better at those skills. so we are really focusing on quality of service. that's kind of our our

key metric these days. and what we mean by that is a fast, frequent, clean, clean, safe and reliable service. we have been focusing you see the five bullets on the on the screen in front of you. you know, we could go into ad nauseum detail on a number of topics and projects that are addressing those different bullets. i do want to highlight three real quick just to give you a taste of what kind of stuff we're doing to address this quality quality of service idea. one is we've changed the way we do our scheduling. so now we are now scheduling based on operator hiring or the pace of operator hiring. if you may remember pre-covid, we were delivering in 92, 93% of our scheduled service. that means we were missing about 5 or 600 trips a day, really, really impacting how customers viewed our service. you know, really breaking that kind of bond of

trust that we were getting with riders. so we have really refocused. we've pulled back. we now have about 82% or so of our service, pre-covid schedule out on the streets. so we've really reduced the amount of service we're putting out on the street, but we are now delivering 99 to 100% of service. so really trying to reacquaint that bond with people that when we say there's going to be a bus there, there's actually a bus there showing up on time. we are also, of course, continuing our muni forward work. michael just did a great job on the on the j church couple last month, this board approved the geary project, which gave us the last ten blocks of transit lanes on geary. so now the entire corridor has a has a transit lane and protecting that service. we also this board also recently approved the 29 sunset project, which we think will save about 15% travel time for that route over the next few months. once we get the quick build in place. so really exciting stuff getting getting

better use out of our existing resources. his and the last project i wanted to highlight is our msw staff who you know i think julie's talked about this before but the great work they're doing on the it week to even come up with that idea and then put it in place once a quarter in case you you don't know that project once a quarter we shut down the subway a little bit early for a week we go in and do state of good repair work so that it doesn't become an emergency and doesn't become that huge long delay that the subway subway was seeing pre-covid. and that's why this graph here is so important to us. we're really proud of it. we reduced long subway delays by 70. when you look at pre covid service. and one of the big reasons for that really is that fixit week program. so the customers are noticing, which i think is a super exciting part of this. you know, often we do projects and it kind of goes unnoticed, but our approval rating is up 10% from 2021. we have of, you know, a lot of

tweets and a lot of anecdotal things that are saying that people are really appreciating what we're doing. and i do want to point out that it's not just the structural changes we're making on the muni forward side and the service side on, you know, on how we do our maintenance work, our frontline staff are contributing a ton to this, this idea of quality. our maintenance staff, you know, our car cleaners, our operators are really embracing this idea of, of, of leading with quality and leading with kind of the customer and customer service as our north star, as we keep delivering this service. so that's really exciting. and, you know, our ridership is backing that up, backing up some of the good things we're hearing. i want to i want to highlight i can't say it enough and i'm really excited about it. i know jeff and julie are two, but september was our highest ridership month in four years. you know, four years. it's super great going in the in a really great direction. if you look at

our average ridership in september and average day versus our average ridership in august on an average day we have about 20,000 more people taking muni in september than they did in august. so going in the right direction, really exciting to see. and if you if you look at just those general trends, those are those are interesting. but even more interesting is when we kind of dig down into it and look at some specific lessons that we can learn from from these trends. this this graph is showing what our top ten recovered lines are, meaning looking at 2019, our pre-covid ridership and the 2023, what we saw in we were using actually august for this this look, look ahead. so what we saw in august of 23 versus august of 19 and what lines, as you have seen, the biggest growth and you'll see on there, you know, some lines are at 100, 120, 130% of what we were seeing in pre-covid. an interesting thing to note is that seven out of ten

of these lines are what we call crosstown routes, meaning they are connecting neighborhood to neighborhood. it's not the downtown centric you know, straight into the financial district during the peak period type of ridership. and that is just a really interesting testament to how the riders are using our system now, but also explains how you know, kind of we need to shift our thinking and really kind of focus on where ridership is going versus where we traditionally have have seen that ridership. also, i do want to point out all ten of these lines have either a capital project or or frequency changes attached to them as we try to address this additional crowding that said, you know, our budget outlook is becoming a little bit more clear, and it does look most likely that during the next two year period, we are not going to have an increase in in funds for adding service. and so what that means

for us in my group is that we are going to have to be making ng adjustments to crowding in and trip, trip, trip serving in a cost neutral manner. and that sounds kind of kind of strange, but basically what that means is we're going to be moving resources around and on the margins, really, it's there's no big huge moves that are going to be made. it's trying to move. you know, we've got some crowding over here. let's take two busses from this line and put it over there to try to reduce some of the crowding per bus there. so it's going to be a lot of that kind of we're calling cost neutral movement of resources is, of course, our, you know, our our highest mandate is protecting the most vulnerable of all of our users is so because of that, we really hope to really kind of continue using the decision making framework. we protect we really made during covid. and that's that's this slide here. i know you guys have seen this several times, but, you know, focusing on equity strategy,

neighborhoods, using data, both actual ridership data, but also feedback from from our customers on where service needs to go, where we need to add more service on the on the margins and where we can take service from to make sure that that happens in order to kind of formalize that framework. we're starting a new program called the biannual service evaluation, which will be looking at system needs a holistic look at system needs across the entire system and then prioritize leading into every two year budget cycle coming up. so this is not just a data driven, data driven process. of course, it will involve a lot of stakeholder interactions and feedback. most importantly, we are starting a muni equity working group that will be directly involved in in talking through these trade offs and how we make some of these decisions. so really excited to get that work going and moving forward as we as we look once

again at a cost neutral cost neutral, forward looking stance. so that said, i wanted to you know, i think the theory behind cost neutral is easy to understand. and, you know, maybe it it it kind of loses a little bit in translation. so i wanted to walk through with real, real examples like what does that mean on the street? how does how does how do we make these changes? what are the impacts s and how do we reassess? so using what we did in august, august 19th as the base of that beginning, beginning example, i want to talk through, you know, it was the start of the school year. we looked at data at the end of the previous school year, so the may june data store where crowding was happening in got cers from school students and others to understand like kind of where the big problems were going to be. when school started back up in august, one of our biggest and most crowded lines

was 19th avenue, specifically the 28. so we knew we had to get some more service on 19th avenue when school started back up. but we also knew we had to do that relatively in essentially cost neutral. so what we did was, is we took the 28 local, reduced that frequency. so instead of coming every nine minutes, it now comes every 12 minutes. and with the busses we save from that, we started up the 28 rapid. and so now at our rapid stops on 19th avenue, we have six minute service instead of nine minute service and we're able to do that really at a at a cost neutral way. and you'll notice also in august we did some extra school service, some extra school trippers, which we paid for by basically reducing the five frequency on the weekends. so you know, that's how we that's how we kind of made some adjustments cost neutrally, but, you know, since then we've been doing a lot of data work and coming up with our next round of service changes. and i want to bring up my acting manager of service planning,

jessica garcia, who's going to talk through the data that we looked at and where we're going in august. so jessica. thank you. good afternoon. or good evening. board of directors. as sean mentioned, we wanted to share some of the ridership trends that we've been seeing since making those changes in august and also how they're influencing our service changes in the future here. so this chart here compares current ridership on some of our highest ridership routes to last fall, and we typically see an increase in ridership when school starts. but we wanted to see how that compares to this time last year. and so what we are seeing is even with that traditional spike , that spike is actually even larger than it was last year on these routes. and again, mentioning the 28, it was particularly interesting in the data that we're seeing is even with the introduction of the rapid line in august, instead of the rapid line absorbing ridership from the 28 line, we

are seeing that the 28 line ridership has been actually pretty stable and the 28 the rapid line is actually capturing more riders. so overall, more people are riding the service and it's just another indicator of our overall growth that we're seeing. and with that ridership increase, we also are seeing increases in crowding. so this chart here shows the percent of trips that are over crowding capacity in a given hour. and we have a defined threshold for how many people can fit on a vehicle depending on its size. and in this chart, we defined a crowded trip as a trip where the passenger load meets that crowding threshold for at least 5% of the trips along that route . so looking at this data, it really helps us to see which routes need more capacity and at what time of the day. and a trend that we have been seeing is that the crowding is happening at actually very concentrated periods of the day. so it's good news to see that our ridership is increasing. but

the challenge is with our resource constraints is how are we going to address that? how are we going to address that demand in a cost neutral way? and so this slide narrows down, narrows down the previous chart to concentrate on the routes where we are seeing needing the most help from here. we look at the passenger loads at the stop level and the direction and the time of day to know how much service we actually need to reduce the crowding. so viewing the data in this way is really helping us target out, be more targeted with our solutions. as, for example, if the crowding on the 44 line is highest from 7 to 8 a.m. in only one direction, then we can then look for more efficient solutions to address the crowding, such as maybe scheduling operators to do an extra trip on the 44 line before do they go to their regular route instead of assigning an extra vehicle on that bus for the entire day? so we are also looking at the inverse of this data to knew, to know where to pull from, um, so that we can know how many resources we can pull without pulling too much.

and so overall, this approach has been driving our decision options to reallocate resources where they are needed most, especially in this environment where we're seeing the ridership growing. but we're needing to find a way to address it cost neutrally. it's also dynamic. so we are evaluating the effectiveness with each service change and our fine tuning as needed. and so there are next service changes planned for this winter with an effective date of january 20th. using the data that i just covered in those previous slides, we identified these routes as those needing increased frequency to address crowding during the school day as well as on weekends. and for these routes we are increasing frequency another minute or two on these routes with some of them being all day changes or just where the frequency is needed based off of some of the analysis that we've done to remain cost neutral, though, we are offsetting these increases with decreases on other routes. so we selected the routes though based on the extra capacity we saw in the ridership data and

are implementing the changes that would not impact our ability to deliver high quality service. so the five rapid and local and the nine local will open up from a ten minute to a 12 minute. this will make the combined frequency on these corridors is six minutes from the current five minutes and the 33 ashbury we are opening it from a 15 to a 20. the 15 line. we are not taking any resources away, but we heard feedback that the line was not meeting its schedule. so we're keeping the number of resources the same and instead adjusting the headways from 10 to 12 to make the service more reliable. we are also making a couple stop changes to this route in response to feedback that we heard to add better connections around the caltrain and ball park area in the hunters point area of this route. so in the coming coming up with our service changes, as as sean mentioned earlier, we want to take the opportunity again to point out that we that looking at ridership is only part of the

larger decision making framework. our overall approach continues to be rooted in our equity strategy. and to refresh your memories on the background of the equity strategy, it is based on the muni equity policy that was established in 2014 and the strategy is updated every two years with our budget cycle. and the overall purpose is to focus our investments in the system centered around people who need and depend on transit the most. so as sean mentioned earlier, we'll be rolling the equity strategy framework into that biannual service evaluation project. and i'll hand it back to him to cover what our next steps are for that and others in the coming coming months. thank you. great. thank you. thank you, jessica. so as we look to the next budget cycle, we'll be starting the biannual service evaluation, working with our muni equity, working group and then, of course, continuing to make cost neutral changes like we like we just went over, i think, you know, one thing i

want to point out and you know, michael did a great job on the j. you know, there are a number of lines that are not going to rise to the level of needing additional service. you know, based on crowding, based on ridership. and the j is one of those lines we are not planning to add service per se to that line right now, but we are still doing capital projects like the muni forward program to still improve the quality of service on that line, regardless of, you know, actual service resources. and we'll be able to, you know, if we can save enough time, we can roll those resources back into the j itself. so just wanted to point that out. and with that, glad to take any questions or comments. thank you so much. director hemminger, please. so sean, when are you going to start picking on the five? fulton well, i mean, you hit you hit us in august and now you're going to hit us again. what a memory you're going to

roll in the five r, which is the best thing muniz ever done. well yeah. you know, that was like my first project, by the way. i'm really proud of that project. it used to be called the, you know, the, the five limited, but we changed the name to rapid lo those many years ago. but yeah, you know, unfortunately or maybe fortunately, i don't know how you look at it but you know the five corridor has more service on it than, than than what it needs. now i know that that i know that trip by trip or trip by trip, that's not necessarily true. but right. well, and when you're looking at the whole system, you know, and trying to weigh all those different things, the five just has a lot of service on there. what what we're proposing right now is it'll go to 12 and to 12. so the long and the short will both be 12. so that still gives us six in the inner portion of the line. but you know, the point of kind of going over those august changes and now these next january changes is to say. that,

you know, it's all iterative and iterative and we'll just we're going to keep looking at it. and obviously, if we miss the mark, you know, and we and we pulled too far back in the five, we'll be finding a way to put some more service back in there the next time. so when you say cost neutral. yeah. i mean, how fine grained do you get? because i assume some bus lines are more expensive to run because they attract more senior drivers. i mean, am i wrong? well, i mean, well. so cost neutral meaning the umbrella of our overall operating budget will stay basically the same. and how you kind of plug and play in there. you know, typically we use might have played into the effect on the five, right? no yeah. no. right. right. no no. we don't lay off our senior personnel and then that's that's what i have to conclude. yeah. yeah. well so and that's why all these service changes are tied to sign ups. right. because what happens is, if we, if we say we're taking a couple busses off the five and

senior operators wanted to drive those, now they can't right now their seniority allows them to pick other runs where it makes a lot of money so they can go to a different line and make the same amount or more money depending on their seniority. so i'm hoping that the five user to my right will make some comments as well. i can only speak for myself. yeah, tough decisions for sure. i see you, director henderson. i have a related comment to that, if i if i may, and this is just i remember when we did the very significant redesign of the transit system during covid took away some lines. you made recommendations to bring back certain lines. some were left out, out. and then sort of in response to public feedback as i recall, we sort of reluctantly brought back some lines that maybe had not been in staff's initial strategic recommendation. and i would think because it's been a topic of conversation today, like the 21 is one that occurred, that it feels to me like it's part of that category,

like it was not originally your recommendation to bring it back. and then we did in response to public comment. so what i want to know is what have we learned from that? because the case was made effectively that it's a lower frequency route, that the five is performing much higher service and ridership anyway. so why bring that back? we did, as supervisor preston said today, it's running at very low frequencies. my anecdotal experience, it's not that reliable all it's very empty. so i want to know what we have learned from those ones where we maybe made the decision that we had not originally recommended as a nod to what we heard from the community. and if in fact we are affirmed in our initial recommendation. and then why aren't we seeing some of those proposed for reduced service if that was staff's original recommendation, does that make sense? i know there's a little bit convoluted. sean, do you want to take that or do you want me to? sure. well, i mean, i can start and then and then maybe you can add add any extra bit in there. but you know, yeah. you

know, we have definitely learned a, you know, we're always learning. hopefully knock on wood and you know, the 21 provides us some connectivity for some people that maybe had mobility issues or something getting up to the five or down to the seven. but yeah, you know, we have seen stronger ridership on the five and the seven than than the 21 is providing. and you know, we're just going to have to continue to make those those changes. at this point, we are not proposing . i think what you're trying to get at is, well, why don't we just, you know, not run the 21 and instead that way we wouldn't have to reduce service on the five. you know, at this point, like i said, we're pretty these are pretty like minor changes. and our budget, you know, it it it looks pretty stable, at least, you know, for right now it could all change of course. but i don't think we have to make those kind of big, drastic moves at this point. we're making some subtle changes based on crowding. but you know for sure, if the budget system or the budget outlook goes goes, goes south, then, you know,

things are back on the table and we're going to have to get more drastic because, like i said, we're we're doing cost neutral cuts. if we have to actually save money, it's a different ball game and we're going to have to be coming back to you with with much harder decisions. thank you. and if i could add a couple points to that as well. so san francisco, though, is one of the cities in the world with the greatest extent of work from home. that wiped out the financial base, not only for muni, but particularly for bart. that was really, really dependent upon downtown commuters. those folks are slowly trickling in to downtown san francisco and activity and ridership is slowly coming back. so one of the things that we learned is adapting to changing travel patterns is super important. and no property in the united states has adapted more to changing travel patterns than the team at muni. the second thing that we learned is that investing in making transit , as sean said, fast, frequent,

reliable, clean, safe that drove ridership up far more than anything that we dreamt possible. so here we're in the city in the united states with some of the greatest loss of transit riders due the loss of commuters. we also have some of the transit lines with the greatest rate of pre-covid ridership recovery in the entire country. what are we at? it's over 130% on the 49 and close to that on the 22 fillmore that we had never dreamt like we were hoping to get up to pre-covid, we never dreamt that it was possible to greatly exceed pre-covid ridership on now ten of our lines so that was an extraordinary learning that people would respond to so quickly, even when overall travel is down. if we deliver quality of service and at the same time, the third thing that we learned a lot of it in the

very, very detailed work that we did with community in the tenderloin in japantown town and other neighborhoods, is that for some of our lower ridership and lower frequency lines, some or portions of those lines were exceeding important to community members and that align in 2 or 3 blocks away simply didn't replace that function. so one of the reasons why i think the two sutter is a really interesting case study where we brought the line back but reconfigured it and shortened it based upon what we heard. and the two is actually getting more riders than i would have expected, given that it is significantly shorter. similarly, the 27 bryant we rearranged in interesting ways and have been tracking that significantly. it's never going to be crush loaded like the 49 vns but but it remains exceedingly important

for the riders that it serves. and so that is our challenge. and one of the reasons why we're fighting so hard for additional resources. muni is this outlier buyer success story in terms of how we've made investments during covid, but our underlying financial goals are still weak because we can't reroute our train lines. our train lines are all pointed downtown. i can't have them serve our neighborhoods. and so we're still struggling with our financial base and seeking additional gap funding as for our ridership starts to increase throughout the system and not just on our our non downtown lines. so core core learnings. director henderson, please. yes, i just have a couple of i think i'm going to say some of my questions to the future presentation that you mentioned, but i just have a quick question about how will you measure the crowding? so is it measured just

by taps or are you doing some sort of visual survey or like how does the. yeah, great. no, good question. yeah our busses and now trains are equipped with with are equipped with what's called apcs or automatic passenger counters. so every time somebody gets on or off a bus, we know somebody's getting on or off. we don't go by fare revenue. we don't go. we by visual inspection except on the on the cable car system. so so, so yeah, all of our busses now have apcs and same with our rail system. got it. and then excuse me. i'm sorry. also the slide that you had about with the tweets or the x's. it just says to me that there are some thought about customer satisfaction. and so i'm curious to know not now, but i'm just curious to know how are the ways that you go about determining customer satisfaction from, you know, i'm sure through social

and other or other ways, you know, there's you know, when you're in the airport, right, and they have the happy face or the smile, the sad face in the bathroom, you know, is there like some version of that for. well, we do. do we do a rider survey? and that was the number i was quoting. i quoted that we were up 10% on favorability since 2021. so we do do a rider survey to gauge customer satisfaction and what they feel. additionally, the city does also . so same kind of thing. they don't obviously don't do riders, they do the general population. but yeah, there's several different methods that we gather that information. the tweets i note we carry a relatively robust social media presence. and so we have pios that monitor tweets, get back to people that are tweeting, and then we capture some of the some of the good ones. so we also have what's called 301. so really, it's a it's an information system. i mean, usually it's

used for complaints, but sometimes people say good stuff, too. so you know, we have a number of different ways that we capture what people generally think. okay. thank you, director. so. so i really appreciate that to share all these data. and it's like a really nice way. one thing about is like transparency is very key to bestow trust amount all the stakeholders and i really appreciate to show us like how you dissect the data to really identify why the overcrowding and the busses that where we need the resources. so really applaud you on that especially me addressing crowding for our school kids time like the number 49, the number 29 and the 44 which each service not only high school children but also elementary school children. and i really appreciate these effort

and the presentation on the numbers on the charts is really self explanatory. i love it. i only wish that we can see when the really friendly, smart lady who show us the jessica. yeah, right. thank you. thank you, jessica. when she said that she used the same strategy to look at the inverse version to identify by which bus line that we can utilize, because that may be a little bit overly resourced . so we can create a equilibrium equilibrium and cost neutral hopefully. right. kind of like take some of the area. i wish i can see those numbers to identify that. like how the san bruno number nine and then the bayview 15 is actually ended up on the board of like increasing wait time. so i would like to see those similar transparency

on data. mostly it will be helping us and also helping our communities to understand. and wait a second, you know, because we are talking about we are looking at racial equity and communities and but then now we're like looking at the san bruno and i and number nine and also the bayview number 15, where we haven't actually increased the speed for the t line. so actually after getting off of not dr. sorry director henderson swearing in ceremony i jump onto the t, but then the t got stopped for no other, whatever reason. so then i was told by the operator to quickly hop on the number 15 and that that 15 is fun because it just goes it zipped literally. thank you. it zips through so, so, so i would love to see those similar level of presentation. so it just helps us and also

help the public to understand. and maybe there's too many zips, you know, i don't know. so and also maybe if because the number nine express had already taken care of the majority of the capacity of the passenger for, then we can actually delegate the number nine. but we should it will help us to deliver that story to the public better in a comprehensive way. so then that then we can really get out here really happily. so that's that's all i wanted to say. but i'm i'm happy that we're adding more on number 22 on the weekend. that's my favorite line. and the warriors season's coming and also all the concerts. so i'm looking forward to that. so thank you. and number 44 is my daughter's favorite line. so that's i got to tell her, hey, you don't have to wait for too long now. so thank you,

director. so i want to use this as an opportunity to do a shameless plug of our data portal. so all of the data that sean showed today is available on our muni data portal and is updated every month. and that's at. sfmta.com/muni data. it shows the crowding, the ridership recovery, total system ridership. we try to be completely transparent with the public about how we make hard choices with our limited resources. thank you. thank you, director. so and i just do want to underscore, i'm a little bit dismayed to see the 15 bayview-hunters point express on that line for decreased frequency as well. i consider that a huge success story. we've celebrated that line again and again. that was a close partnership with shamann walton's office. i understand we have to make tough choices. the nature of my previous question was if there were certain lines that were marginal to bring back at all before or and you had you

had tried to convince us that we don't even need to bring back those lines. i would rather see some of those lines on this list than what i consider to be some of our workhorse routes, like the five, five, 15 and the nine. that's the nature of my question. yeah. so so that's great. so just trying to explain this a little bit more, the you know, i was i was when we were talking about the five, i said, you know, it's good or bad, depending on your point of view because there's so much service on the lines like the five line, the 38, the nine, the 14 that when we're looking for a few busses, you know, you go to those lines and not the lines where a bus is coming every half hour. because if you take a bus that comes every half hour now you're talking about our headways and that's, you know, no basically no service. so, you know, it really becomes that's where the balancing act comes in. and i would just say on the 15, just to reiterate what jessica said, we are we're not taking any actual busses off the 15. we're having problems

meeting the schedule with the 15 because the running time is not correct. we had too few busses to meet the running time. and so the number of busses on the 15 is staying the exact same. but we're we're changing the frequency so that it can actually come every 12 minutes when we say we're going to be there instead of coming. you know, every 11 to 14 minutes. so hopefully by providing a more like reliable system, it'll actually work better. even though on paper it looks like we're reducing the frequency by two minutes, hopefully that made some kind of sense. but okay. okay. yeah. please julie kirschbaum the only other thing i would add is that time frame for the changes that sean and jessica are making is very short, so we wouldn't without a more extensive public process. reckon mend diverting the 21 hayes resources is eliminating that route and then applying it

to school crowding in the kind of 4 to 8 week period that they've had to put together these types of changes. we're doing things that are more incremental and less likely to be noticed by customers. but if it is the board's direct action that we go back and look at some of those harder choices that would take more of a process, yes, we can start to see how that would fit into the overall work plan. it's just not something that would build trust under the timeframe that we're having to say, wow, august was amazing. we thought we had solved school crowding and in fact we had put an itty bitty band-aid on school crowding and now need to go back in january and make more robust changes. so having the board feedback back on those kind of tough trade offs would would be very helpful. and then we can take that back and think through the

kind of timeline and the process that would need to be allocated in order to consider those bigger type changes. dr. hemminger yeah, i won't be long here, but sean, i think you mentioned the fact that if we're talking about saving money, that's a totally different ballgame. and i guess i'm wondering when that game is going to start and how prepared you are for it, because it does it seems to me that's where we ought to focus a lot of our attention. i mean, i was giving you a hard time about the five, but this the changes you're making now are at the margins. yep, exactly. yep. if you need to save 20, that's not the margins anymore. nope. so do we have a schedule for when that whole bunch of trouble is going to start? yeah. so we've been more successful than we were expecting at improving efficiency and generating revenue. so that pushed the

soonest we would need to start shrinking the agency into calendar year 25 when exactly in calendar year 25 is dependent. you know, there's many the cliff is the cliff. the cliff just got pushed out a little bit. we are of course, working very hard at the metropolitan transportation commission level and at the state legislature to identify additional gap funding to, you know, the goal being to push the cliff out beyond the november 26 election. and so in the meantime, we are keeping a very, very close eye on revenue and on hiring, on thinking of hiring again as a throttle. so we can we can push the throttle forward . and if revenue looks good and we can hold the throttle steady, which is what we're doing right now. so we're neither shrinking nor growing. we're continuing to hire to replace those people lost through attrition. and then we can stop hiring in order to shrink the agency. and my goal

from the very beginning of covid was always making sure we have enough runway to be able to shrink the agency as needed through attrition rather than layoffs in order to meet a worst case scenario, budget projection . and we are maintaining that a lot of time i'm going to open to public comment for anyone in the room on the transit item. thank you for this update. hey, good evening. i'll make this quick. i'm organizer in tenderloin. i do appreciate this presentation on kind of curious about the metro lines and how they're doing. i also appreciate the comment about incremental changes versus anything drastic. i'm definitely think we should not think about redirecting resources by getting rid of services, at least not in the

meantime. um, i think we should consider the timing of those decisions, especially if there are any ballot measures that we're going to be pushing for in 2024 for that, if we cut service , that could affect how people will vote for a transit line that doesn't exist. so again, just want to make sure those are considered. i think i heard director tomlin mentioning 2025. so i think that that's a good timing. but but definitely not into cutting the 21 or any of the services that are currently running. so thank you for your time. okay. thank you for staying so late to provide comment. our next speaker. hi stacy randecker this is it was great to hear this report and i love the little incremental cost cutting. it seems like that's something that we should have always been doing all along and maybe we have been, but like that's that's the kind of stuff it should be. a well oiled machine that is always being fine tuned based on needs. my daughter started at balboa, but she graduated from lincoln and she's one of those kids who got

passed up many times last year and her trick was and many of them, they would ride it backwards to ride it forward so that they actually could get on the bus and so anything that can be done in terms of working with the schools and their release times and the schedules and whatever to make sure that our kids get where they're going. would be great. i mean, my son just got home hour and 11 minutes from lowell soccer. so it's really tough to be sticking with muni and not drive when your kids have these, you know, hang ups about about getting where they they need to go and then the other thing that really hurts is hearing about any sort of constricting or whatever or funding and whatever. and i will say once again, you've heard me say it before, are ppe this city there you should never be parking for free in this city. we could essentially be doubling the budget of the entire agency

if we would put make every person pay for parking and then be charging a more market rate for that. if you're worried about any legal things, throw in a free muni pass with it. charge $1,200 a year for parking in our streets and you get a free annual muni pass that i believe would help solve things and is we need the money. we should not be cutting transit. we need to be cutting down cars and i think that would help. thanks thank you. any other speakers in the room? seeing none. please open the phone at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue each speaker will have two minutes. moderator first speaker great david paypal so i continue to converse regularly with sean kennedy on more of the detail on this topic. our next scheduled chat is this friday afternoon,

just as an example of some of the ideas that i have that we're talking about, i support rerouting the 28 r to the golden gate bridge with the 28 local bypassing the bridge during the day and to provide a connection from the bridge to the presidio ultimate to connect to the marina. some 29 sunset trips could be extended back through the presidio as is service used to exist to improve those connections. as and i think i can do that in a cost neutral way. other proposals should be considered, including some combining of route segments on the 18, the 23, the 54 and the 58, the 66, the 37, the 35 and the 55. the 12 and the 27. and the most obvious isthe easiest thing is the 22, which should have a long line, a short line pattern. and there are others i know and i think we all know

that we can have better service where riders need it for the same or less cost using available staff and operator availability. so i support cost neutral resource reallocation on that. john talked about. and to that end, i plan to continue working with sean and others at mta on those efforts. i wanted to conclude by saying once again thank you to director yasujiro and for the record, i have nothing against the five fulton i've ridden it before. i will be on it again very shortly and finally, despite the level of division and strife in the world today, i think this meeting, although long was quite civil and this is actually kind of a model of how we can have civilized debate and discussion. so thanks for listening. until next time. thank you. no additional callers. that's a great note to end on. thank you, david paypal. all right. if

there are no further comments, we'll go ahead and adjourn this meeting and i'd like to adjourn the meeting in recognition of the service of our dear colleague, director, we are going to miss you very, very much and we look forward to acknowledging you more fully at the next meeting. if you can commit to being there. yes yes, we. okay. thank you, everybody. good night. -

>> shop & dine in the 49 promotes local businesses and challenges resident to do their showing up and dining within the 49 square miles of san francisco by supporting local services within the neighborhood we help san francisco remain unique successful and vibrant so where will you shop & dine in the 49 san francisco owes must of the charm to the unique characterization of each corridor has a distinction permanent our neighbors are the economic engine of the city. >> if we could a afford the lot by these we'll not to have the kind of store in the future the kids will eat from some

restaurants chinatown has phobia one of the best the most unique neighborhood shopping areas of san francisco. >> chinatown is one of the oldest chinatown in the state we need to be able allergies the people and that's the reason chinatown is showing more of the people will the traditional thepg. >> north beach is i know one of the last little italian community. >> one of the last neighborhood that hadn't changed a whole lot and san francisco community so strong and the sense of

partnership with businesses as well and i just love north beach community old school italian comfort and love that is what italians are all about we need people to come here and shop here so we can keep this going not only us but, of course, everything else in the community i think local businesses the small ones and coffee shops are unique in their own way that is the characteristic of the neighborhood i peace officer prefer it is local character you have to support them. >> really notice the port this community we really need to kind of really shop locally and support the communityly live in it is more economic for people to survive here.

>> i came down to treasure island to look for a we've got a long ways to go. ring i just got married and didn't want something on line i've met artists and local business owners they need money to go out and shop this is important to short them i think you get better things. >> definitely supporting the local community always good is it interesting to find things i never knew existed or see that that way. >> i think that is really great that san francisco seize the vails of small business and creates the shop & dine in the 49 to support businesses make people all the residents and visitors realize had cool things are made and produced in san

thank you, everybody. i just want to thank everyone for coming today. this is truly one of the most proud that i've ever been at mission housing and on behalf of us, to you, thank you for coming. kapuso at the upper yard is a true product of what's possible when community works together. you'd have to go all the way back to 2008 for when community groups and organizers really started focusing to work on this, which is well over a decade. it was the community who came together to ensure that this piece of land would one day become the landmark that it is today. this development