call the december 17th, 2024 regular meeting of the municipal transportation agency, board of directors and parking authority commission to order. secretary silva, please call the roll on the role. director chen. present. chen. present. director. heminger. here. heminger. present. director. hines. present. present. director. henderson. here. henderson. present. director. tarloff. here. tarlow. present. vice chair. gina. present. gina.

present. for the record, i note that director hines is attending this meeting remotely. director hines is reminded that she must appear on camera and throughout the meeting in order to speak or vote on any items. places you on. item number three. the ringing a use of cell phones and similar sound producing electronic devices are prohibited at this meeting. the chair may order the removal from the meeting room. any persons responsible for the ringing or use of a cell phone or other similar sound producing electronic device places you on. item four. approval of minutes for the december 3rd meeting. directors. are there any changes to the minutes? seeing none, we'll now open public comment for item number four. seeing no public comment. do we have any accommodations, secretary silva? no accommodations. perfect. we'll now close public comment on item number four. colleagues, is there a motion and a second to approve the minutes? so moved. second. thank you. secretary silva, please call the roll on the motion to approve the minutes. director chen. i chen, i director heminger i

heminger i director henderson, i henderson, i director hines. i director tarlov. tarlov i director kahina i kahina i thank you. the minutes are approved places you on item five communications i have none. excellent. so now we'll move to. can we call the next item please? next item places you on item six. the director's report. thank you. chair kahina and secretary silva, i'd like to begin by calling up director of transit julie kirschbaum for a special recognition. okay. good afternoon. today, i have the privilege of honoring our operator, erin. nicole. malcolm. she is a true san francisco native, and she comes

from a legacy of service. she's the granddaughter of myrtle hightower, who was the first african american employee of the dmv. and she's the daughter of a respected university of san francisco faculty member. she's also a soda graduate. a her passion and work there was the violin and classical music, and we're just so fortunate that in 2008, she transferred from retail to join the muni team. and she's currently one of our best rail operators. but we're here today to recognize her for her exceptional actions. during two recent subway evacuations. the first one was on june 7th, 2024. she was operating the k westbound in the market street subway and passing eureka portal. there was white smoke

billowing over and inside the train, you know, causing it to come to an abrupt stop. without hesitation, she immediately radioed the tmc. she calmly guided passengers to safety. she ensured a prompt and safe evacuation. and then, unfortunately, several months later, on october 8th, she found herself in a very similar situation. but this time it was because she spotted that there was damaged catenary wire hanging from the trackway. she immediately applied the brakes. she prevented a much larger small problem from becoming a much larger problem. she notified again the tmc, and she was able to reassure her passengers and really work to actually keep them on the train until we were able to get a rescue train. to support a safe

evacuation. does she have the worst luck ever? maybe. maybe. i mean, we've only maybe had three evacuations in the whole year. but it's actually our amazing luck. that she was on the train in both of these incidents. is extremely rare. but i'm so grateful that she approached this work with, you know, professionalism and calm. and it's just a reminder that the work that our operators do is life and death, and the decisions that they make save lives. and the decisions that they make help people get get where they're going. so it's just my profound honor. to honor erin today. and erin, i'm going to give you this award. and if you want to say anything, but we

really are so grateful to you for. i am very grateful and thankful for receiving this award. i thought to myself on the second incident, not again. why me? i thought i was going to take a break for a little while to just get myself together, but i came back to work. you know, the next day. so. i very i'm humble and i appreciate this very much. i just want to say that the work we do is endless. we are counselors. we are everything

under the sun. sometimes doctors, sometimes lawyers. but i'm just. i'm thankful that i was able to be very patient with the second and the first incident. and evacuate and do everything that i had to do to ensure passenger safety. i love my job. i love what i do. i actually left retail. i had been working retail for 15 years. to come to join a sfmta and i truly i treat all my passengers as if they were my family because i would want somebody to do what i do in the capacity to sit up there and do exactly the same

thing as i do, and be humble. and i'm just thankful, you know, i'll one incident that i will say, and this is why i say i treat my passengers like my family. when i first started, my grandmother had alzheimer's. she had gotten out of the house. i think i was here maybe a couple of months, and the first thing i we couldn't find her in the neighborhood, and the first thing i did was call my dispatcher at my at presidio. i was at presidio at the time, and i asked her to if she could radio in and ask operators if they had happened to see this lady. my grandmother and an operator actually called in and said that he was on her bus. so, i mean, she she was on her his

bus. so they kept her downtown for me in front of the mall. westfield of all places. it was the day after thanksgiving, actually. so i was like, she's going down there early to try because this was like 6:00 in the morning and i was getting ready to go to work. and i, we discovered this. so i thank god that the operator kept her on the bus long enough so i could get down to westfield and get her. so that's why i say i treat. ever since then, i've treated all my passengers like they're my family, the elderly, like my grandparents. the kids like they're my kids. i've talked to them like they were my kids. so there's been some nice, not so nice conversations. and there's been some nice conversations and, you know, people that are like the same

age group as my, my mother and stuff like that, you know, i look at them like they're my, my parents. so thank you again for this recognition. and i'm truly honored. and go ahead, miss malcolm, on behalf of the board, before you go away, don't go away. just thank you so much for your service. thank you for reminding us that our passengers are people with lives and that are complex. and oftentimes those that you know are in charge of the space are really holding that space for so many folks that are facing so many challenging situations at any given moment. and i just, you know, there's something divine about you being in those two challenging places at the same time and, and you being the one that has had to handle those,

those different moments. but i just truly appreciate your bravery, your strength, your grace and such a challenging moment. and on behalf of the board, thank you so much for your service. thank you. miss malcolm's experience is a good reminder that driving the bus is just a fraction of the responsibilities that our transit operators have, and one of the reasons why maintaining humans operating our vehicles is so important because of the nature of the service that they provide. and service is going to be a theme that comes up several times in the rest of my director's report. speaking of which, our next special recognition is from our former board chair, amanda eakin. earlier this year, former director eakin, please come on up. had the experience of going

on a long meditation retreat, a theme that will also emerge later in this presentation that caused her to realize that there is no better place to fight for climate or equity or economic recovery or safety than municipal government, and particularly the sfmta. and former director eakin decided that she was going to do a major career pivot and go into municipal service. she was first appointed to this board back in september of 2018, and was named chair in january of 2023. as chair, she kind of reinvented the chair role, trying to focus on public trust, including launching for the first time, virtual office hours in order to be able to engage with the public in a more substantive way than is possible in the

formality of this setting. it's this sort of dedication to serving the public and advancing the causes of this agency that really set director eakin apart. and one of the reasons why i have been so grateful to serve her in her term on this board. director gina, perhaps you'd like to add some comments. yes, sir. amanda, i'm honored to acknowledge you, director eakin, for your outstanding service to this board and the agency and the city and county of san francisco. i'm a san francisco born and raised so that that carries weight. during your tenure on the board, you're one of san francisco's strongest advocates for street safety. you would say achieving vision zero is the floor, not the ceiling. and you were the person that got us talking about a vision for our streets that exceeds safety. and that is one that is joyful,

delightful, safe and achieved by a protected network for walking and biking and rolling. you wanted to achieve this vision, though, and this is something that's very unique to you and something that's beautiful about you, amanda. through deep collaboration with community and its and all the folks that make up our city, and a few ways you did that as, as director tomlin mentioned, was by creating the vision zero subcommittee. that was something that you're incredibly passionate about, and you made sure that we created that committee before you moved on in your tenure, and you believed and advocated for inclusivity and co-creation with community. i'm going to emphasize that that co-creation piece, because you took that to heart and you were serious about that. and i got to see that on the back end. so that is very true. and you were really passionate that our ideas and our projects got stronger

because of that commute, because more community members were involved in that co-creation and had that opportunity to participate. you actively and deeply listened to the concerns and the feedback from community members and guided this board, this body, each one of us, to balance those requests through very difficult and challenging decisions, yet always in a thoughtful and respectful manner. and finally, amanda, you promoted this idea of creating and sustaining a culture of caring. that is something we talked about a lot in our one on one sessions, and you were so passionate about that as well. and this was an idea that was brought to us by taystee parker of the bayview-hunters point ymca. at a panel that you also co-created on how the sfmta could develop more trust with san francisco communities. i am so grateful to have been able to work alongside you for our incredible partnership, for our friendship that developed out of this work, and i thank you, amanda, for your dedication and for your incredible service.

thank you. thank you both. thank you. that was beautiful. we got a little something for you, but we'll let you speak. my turn. yes. yes, ma'am. good afternoon. chair kehena, board of directors. director. tomlin, secretary silva and deputy city attorney susan cleveland-knowles. members of the public. thank you for the recognition today. i am so moved and i really believe in these moments of recognition and pause. so thank you for making this space. i think you all know that serving on the board of directors has been one of the greatest honors of my life. i say that without exaggeration, the most meaningful part of my role, i think, has been getting to know and spending time with what i call this larger, sfmta's community of people. and that involves people in this room, people watching this, people who come to testify, people who

invite us into their communities. it's really an extraordinary community. as you mentioned, i have been very focused on trying to rebuild trust in government because i think that trust is the foundation for everything that we do. and in addition to my previous five years on the board, over the last year, i was privileged to spend most of my time in my dedicated service to the board. this just gave me the opportunity to spend more time, as you said, in community taking walk audits, being able to say yes when i'm invited on walk audits or bike rides from community members, spending time listening to the perspectives of merchants and deeply understanding their needs on some of our most beloved commercial corridors. and of course, hosting the office hours. and while we may not have agreed on everything, and i actually think that's quite healthy for our democracy, that we do not all agree all the time. my aim was always to treat members of the public with respect, to share information,

to listen, and to have a space that we could openly exchange ideas and come to great solutions. but most of what i want to do today is i want to share my thanks. you've you've shared some lovely words, but i want to are my thanks because this is actually an extraordinary moment of transition. today's meeting december 17th, 2024. so i want to thank mayor breed. i want to thank alex sweet, who is here in the audience and other collaborators at the mayor's office for trusting me to be a part of mayor breed's team and for mayor breed's office supporting this agency so deeply through your vision and your leadership, i want to thank secretary silva, who is in many ways like a foundation of this entire board for everything you do for being such a wonderful collaborator. i'm not going to look at you. you make me cry and thought partner and staying grounded and calm under a very, very stressful circumstances.

sometimes i want to thank susan and stephanie, your partner in crime, for keeping us on track and interrupting politely but very firmly when needed, to make sure that we didn't cross any lines that did not need to be crossed. i want to thank steve for donating your years of wisdom and experience to this board, for asking the tough and sometimes uncomfortable questions that need to be asked, and for somehow magically writing all of your notes on one tiny little piece of paper and refusing stubbornly to ever bring a laptop to a board meeting. to dominica for bringing your background and your passion for affordable housing into the sfmta board service. because we all know housing and transportation are intricately linked. and also for your service on the train control upgrade project, we are counting on you to speed up that t-third service and we'll be watching your success. two fiona director hines for bearing with

us and staying so present through remote meetings, even though that must be incredibly challenging, and for being so pragmatic and so thorough in your review of the materials and public comments to mike chen for your years of service on the cac, your clear dedication to this board and this agency, and also for diving in headfirst to what have been some fairly challenging first couple of meetings for you. to janet, director tala, for bringing your perspective as a small business owner and as a leader of a small business organization in your community. and that is a perspective we always need to be keeping front of mind at mta. and to my dear former vice chair and collaborator kahina for being such a wonderful thought partner and collaborator, i enjoyed our virtual walks together on the phone, and for continuously elevating equity and making sure we're putting the needs of community first in everything we do at the mta, i

want to say thank you to the sfmta staff for putting up with this board, for fearlessly leading and innovating and problem solving and continuously improving. and to jeff, i want to say thank you to you. and this is maybe this is not going to be the last one. this is the first. thank you for your steady hand during unprecedented challenges. i know the job you ended up having was not the job you thought you were signing up for, and for your holding true to your vision and your values in spite of some very challenging circumstances for being an unwavering champion and ambassador for sfmta, for your deep sense of pride in this agency, and for how clearly you care about all 6200 members of this organization that really, really shows, shows through and really shines through. and then finally, i want to thank the members of the public for caring so darn much about san francisco

and for believing in government and believing in the democratic process that you continuously take time out of your days to be here to share your lived experiences with us, to invite the mta board and staff into your communities, and to continuously push the agency to live up to your expectations for government to hold us true to your bold visions and your fearless dreams. you, all of you. in this larger sfmta community and online, you are an incredibly important part of this city and this sfmta's community. so i just want to close by saying it has been an extraordinary privilege to serve on this board. it has made me feel more connected to this city and to local government than i ever thought was possible. and it has opened my eyes. probably the thing i'll be most grateful for is it has opened my eyes to this larger community of people

working across this city to create a safer and more equitable and more joyful city. so thank you all and happy holidays. so before you go, director, i still call you director. and before you go, director, you can. members of the board, will you also like to share some words? and i see director hines. all right. thank you, madam chair. amanda, thank you for your clear vision that you gave the board. and i think director director tom wood said it. well, when he said you really reinvented the chair role and sort of how you engage with the public and also the board to engage on certain issues and how you really tried to build that trust and co-create everything

that you did to really include all the voices, including those for the public. and i think that big picture talent that you have to see, kind of the big picture, is really what your role is now with the agency of, of like learning, teaching us how to strategize, sort of always have that big picture view. when we think about things like vision zero and, and, or our financial issues that we have coming up, we really need that big picture sense of things. and if there was ever a reason that you, you would end your term early here on the board, i would want it to become for you to become a member of staff. so with that, madam chair, i, i close. thank

you, director hines. thank you. director henzi. director henderson. yes, thank you, madam chair. and thank you, madam chair. i just want to say i appreciate all of the commitment and dedication that you really showed and led by example, down to even, you know, dragging your mom to my swearing in, i can remember i can remember when you walked in and were like, this is my mother. and i'm like, oh my goodness, you made her come to this, you know? so i really do appreciate how you just took so much time to welcome me and others of us onto the board and help walk us through the this interesting experience and, and process, and also how you really have been an example of making sure that we are aware of the goal and constantly have that in our viewfinder. but but

understand the constraints and the, you know, sort of sometimes the limitations that we work in and trying to get as much out of every, every one of us and every staff person, all of the good that we have to contribute. i appreciate you really being able to center that and help us focus on those goals so that we can achieve all the, the, all of the, the wonders that that can be achieved through whether it's vision zero and just increasing safety, but also making sure that muni is a safe and enjoyable ride for people to whatever their destination is. i, i really value the time that you spent reminding us of how important it was to keep that in, you know, front and center. and i really wish you the best on what's next and i'm sure i will see you. so thank you very much. thank you. director henderson. thank you. director chen. hi. former director egan, thank you so much for your work

on the board and your steadfast advocacy. you know, we've only worked together on the same board for four meetings, but, you know, as an advocate, as an observer, and even before i came on to the board, i've admired your vision and also how you explain the whys when you've come to a project. and as other directors have said, right, each project is a small microcosm, but then bringing that up to the context and how this helps achieve our overall vision and our goals for the agency and what we want for the future of san francisco. so thank you very much. and all the all the best for the future and looking forward to working with you more. thank you, director chen, treasurer heminger. thank you, madam chair. amanda, i agree with you about the historic nature of this meeting today, and it's only appropriate that you're here, that i'm here. i were two thirds of the search

committee that found that guy. that's right. five years ago. who was it? was it gwyneth? art torres? oh, okay. jeez, boy, it's. we've been through a few cycles of directors up here. amanda and i actually met professionally before joining this board, and we went a bit round and round on a couple of subjects at the california air resources board. amanda is someone who, my dear mother would call a tough cookie, and i've always appreciated that about you. now, it's always administered with plenty of charm to make the medicine go down. but amanda is very diligent and dedicated, and you don't want to be in her way when she really knows how something ought to go. and that's what you need in a chairman. if it were,

if it were not for our chairs and the discipline they try to impose on these meetings, we would be here 24 over seven some weeks. we seem to be here 24 over seven. so we've we've missed you since you left, which hasn't been that long yet. but i think we're going to miss you more as the days and weeks go by. and i hope it's the same for you, because it was really a rewarding friendship. thank you. thank you, director heminger. director tarlov. thank you. chair kahina. former director. amanda ekin i. i just want to express my appreciation for what you've taught me in. in the year that we've worked together and

you've always placed a really strong emphasis on leadership and exemplified really remarkable leadership qualities. and, you know, the leading by example, part of it is, is tremendously important. and what i feel like from that is just. a dedication to and passion for the work and compassion for others is really important for not just the board, but, you know, sfmta's leadership and staff to see. and then and then the actual leadership of, you know, running this board and all of the tremendous amount of work

that is part of that. and, and the, you know, the subtlety that you need to employ in order for, for our work to be effective. and, and i feel like i've just only begun to really appreciate the, the depth of that work. so, so i'm sorry that, that i'm not for my own self, that i'm not going to get to, to see that more. but i'll be just so fascinated to see what you do in your in your next role. and, and then the other thing that i just wanted to call out is the, the thoughtful way that you hold space for all of the people who want to participate in how our streets are, are run so that

they are not only functional, but, you know, are a source of vitality and joy. i mean, that was your those are your words, you know, the joy and delight that you know, to say that so often and bring us back to that. what i feel like is your pers n star. was really just such a an inspiration to see. and i just want to wish you the best. and, you know, i hope we get to i believe we will get to work together in the future. and just thank you so, so much for your work on the board. thank you. thank you so much. director tarloff. if you can step up to the side for one second, because we're going to

open up public comment for this portion of the director's report, and this is the portion that recognizes miss malcolm. and also, director ekin, there are members of the public that would like to give comment or provide comment. please do so now. hello former director egan, i didn't realize this was going to be part of the agenda, so i don't have anything prepared, but i just wanted to come up and say thank you so much for your leadership, for your openness, for your willingness to engage with my organization and all of our members and transit riders. and yeah, i agree with a lot of what's been said. i think, you know, you went out of your way to be open and honest and restore some trust to the sfmta. and i think, you know, if you look at our, you know, sfmta

surveys and just people's perceptions of the agency, i think that's coming through. and yeah, i'm looking forward to hopefully working with you some more in your new role. thank you so much. thank you for your comment. hi, everybody. christopher white, executive director of the san francisco bicycle coalition. and on behalf of our thousands of members and constituents, i'm here to offer appreciation for amanda's years of service chair. egan has shown strong, thoughtful, compassionate leadership in her time on the sfmta board. she has taken the role incredibly seriously, not just carefully reading documents and listening to briefings, but taking it upon herself to study the complex issues this body discusses reading the literature, talking to experts and staff, and asking thoughtful questions. she's listened carefully and without

judgment to hours of public comment and brings the perspectives of constituents into conversations with her colleagues. she also understands deeply that a world class transportation system for the city must continue to evolve, offering safe, reliable, convenient and sustainable transportation options for everyone those who need to drive, but also for the huge majority of people in san francisco who would often prefer to take transit, walk and bike and roll. and we are all so grateful, amanda, for all of your service and all of your leadership. thank you. thank you for your comment. i'm just a reminder, this is public comment on the two recognitions, and there will be an opportunity to comment on the rest of the director's report later. great. thank you. good afternoon, former chair egan. my name is jody medeiros and i'm the executive director of walk san francisco. and on behalf of my organization and all the people in san francisco who walk, thank you so much for your leadership and service at the mta board.

you are a true pedestrian safety advocate, a real safe streets champion. under your leadership, we really you established the vision zero subcommittee, which was so important to have those real conversations, to dig into the challenges, to look for solutions, and to bring so many people to the table. that was really critical and really important for the movement. and i appreciated so much last year when you asked every single member what their priorities were for the year, and 100% of our board members said vision zero, that means a lot to the community. that means a lot to us as an organization. so thank you for putting everybody's priorities out in the open. we're going to miss you intensely as chair, but we know that you have good colleagues that are going to fill some shoes, and we know that you aren't going to be going far. so that makes a real difference to us. thank you so much. thank you so much for your comment. next speaker please. barry, toronto,

san francisco taxi workers alliance i came here specifically to honor amanda aiken. i think it's interesting that the first four speakers represent major stakeholders that rely on the mta for their their transportation, their livelihood and their safety. and i want to first thank amanda on behalf of taxi drivers for taking leadership roles and trying to do the best to help facilitate taxi use in san francisco. not only that, she actually walked the walk, but the talk by actually taking taxis and using the flywheel app. and i encourage you as board members to actually do the same. download flywheel or curb to in order to get an idea about what we deal with every day and every night on the streets of san francisco, i myself don't drive as many shifts because the

streets are still dangerous with taxis and in some extent, delivery drivers so desperate for money and so desperate to get around, they don't care about anybody else on the road. however, chair aiken tried to do the best she can to make it harder for them and more difficult for them to actually create problems on the streets. although it created issues with us being able to make a living. but she did the best she could, so i want to thank her. on behalf of the san francisco taxi workers alliance for her work, and wish her the best of luck as a member of the muni of the mta community. thank you. thank you so much for your comment. next speaker please. so you're leaving. that's it. or you stay around, you're going to stick around, right? i mean, the job is not finished. i get a witness. so beauty is going to take over. i mean, you need to

stop creating traffic. you see, you need to help because you are creating traffic. you know, with messing with the lights, traffic lights. everybody sees it, but it's nothing is going to work. so get on the job here. otherwise you are not going to be happy here. thank you for your comment, secretary silva, do we have any remote accommodations? none. excellent. okay, so we're going to take a little pause just to take a photograph with you and present you with something that we got for you. the first letter. is. from.

samantha. all right. thank you, everyone, for indulging us a moment. and we'll now continue with the rest of the director's report. all right. we got some more news

items to cover. a couple of brief updates. last tuesday, the board of supervisors voted to overturn legislation that the mta board passed on october 1st. this legislation would have granted the director of transportation the authority to prohibit large recreational vehicles on blocks, where it was determined that they had created public safety or health issues and were viable. offers of shelter had been previously offered. so while the mta board legislation was overturned, you all, as the sfmta board can continue to consider whether it makes sense to implement overnight restrictions for oversize vehicles, and the mta staff can continue to enforce the existing rules. meanwhile, we will continue to work with our partner agencies, particularly social service agencies, to address health and safety issues with oversize vehicles. much appreciation to streets manager marty hunter and streets director victoria wise

for their contributions on this very difficult matter. another brief update. as you all know, ab 413 is a state law that mandates that intersections be de lighted from the approach direction. this is the standard law for the entire rest of the world, and 40 states that california is catching up with. as you all know, when vehicles are allowed to park right up to the sidewalk, people in wheelchairs or children or other shorter folks cannot see or be seen by motorists approaching the crosswalk until there is the point of collision. one of the most cost effective and effective ways that we can advance pedestrian safety in san francisco is by implementing ab 413. we had already done the work of daylighting intersections for most of the high injury network, and we're

almost done with that work. and to implement ab 413, we have already been communicating about the coming law since 2013 or i'm sorry, 2023 and our pcos have been issuing warnings since november. but we've realized, particularly given comments that we've heard from the board of supervisors, that additional outreach is needed so that the public can understand that implementing this law is about safety and not about revenue or anything punitive. so we are going to continue issuing warnings until march 1st. in addition, we want to reduce the citation for illegally parking in an unpainted daylighting zone to $40. again, in order to make sure that this is about safety and not revenue, $40 is around the cost that it it it costs us to actually issue and process the citation as well as send the share that is needed by the

state. in the meantime, we're going to continue to do significant campaign work to make sure that we that everyone knows about this law and how important it is for the purposes of safety. another key update. as you all know, back at our board budget retreat many years ago, we had a conversation about resuming what we call the indexing of muni fares, as well as everything that we do as an agency. our costs increase every year with the cost of living. we have to pay our workforce a living wage. and so our expenses increase every year. and in order to not bankrupt the agency, we do need to make sure that our fees increase at the same rate. we had not increased fares for the entire duration of covid. and at your direction, we are resuming indexing of fares. although we're keeping the cash fare at a consistent $3. so what

we're doing on january 1st is increasing the clipper cash fare by $0.25 from $2.50 to $2.75. similarly, all of our muni passes will go up by a basically similar rate. and as always, we will continue to promote all of our discount fare programs, including free muni for youth, seniors, people with disabilities, our lifeline and clipper start passes, as well as continuing to promote free muni for seniors, which has seen a recent uptick. next up, i want to talk about fix it week. one of my favorite innovations in the years that i have been working at the sfmta. as all of you know, about every 3 to 6 months, we've been doing an early evening shutdown of the muni metro subway in order to give our crews a full work

window for about a week, where all of our crews go down into the subway all night long and deal with a ton of deferred maintenance. one of the main reasons why we have succeeded in eliminating 60% of delays in the subway is because of our quarterly ish fix it week. so next fix it week is going to be january 13th through 17. and what this means is that we will stop running trains in the market street subway at 9:30 p.m. and substitute our train service with busses on the surface. you can get all the details on the bus rerouting plan on our website or in any of our stations, and this month's fix it week will really be focusing on replacing replacing worn rail and overhead catenary wire where we've had some maintenance issues over the last couple of months, so we'll be dealing with some permanent replacements of overhead line issues. will be inspecting the

entire drainage system and clearing that out in time for the water table to be rising this winter. we'll also be focusing on critical signaling maintenance, particularly at the places of greatest vulnerability, particularly where the n and j trains merge with the klm trains between church and venice stations. as always, we'll be having a multilingual campaign that is audio signage and the systems signs in all of our busses to make sure that everyone knows about that, as well as having ambassadors out at our stations starting at 9:30 p.m. next up, director secretary silva, if you can bring up some photos, our youth transportation advisory board again. also, one of our favorite things that i've done at the direction of the san francisco youth commission, they all got together to dedicate powell cable car number 19. it's

now on the streets and is actually getting a good deal of social media attention, because it has been decorated to celebrate the holidays. so many thanks to all of our wycb crews, and particularly to fred butler and his incredible team over at the cable car division. also in fun news with photos at your direction, mta board of directors. we this year have started producing some fantastic schwag for the agency, including first ever holiday sweaters. thank you to our partners at bart for inspiring us on this. i am so glad that our design crews designed a sweater that is appropriately ugly, holiday style, and yet so much more stylish than any other agency. so we held a sweater fest, a multi-agency sweater fest at chinatown rose park station.

more than 200 people showed up, including lots of media, social media, and lots of good feelings, including passing out of some of the materials that are available in our online store, which is at the muni store.com the muni store. all one word. please do continue ordering your holiday. well, it's probably a little too late for holiday swag, but birthdays are coming up and mother's day. father's great gift for dads valentine's. valentine's day. like you know, you know your special someone is just as much of a transit nerd as you are. and if they're not, you may want to be rethinking that relationship. all right, so on a more serious note, and i hope that you will indulge me with a rather long speech here. i think all of you saw the announcement

that i will be stepping down from my job at this agency when my contract expires at the end of the month. back in 2019, i was living the good life in the private sector. it was great and like former chair amanda eakin, i made the terrible mistake of going on an intense ten day meditation retreat. i do not recommend this to anyone. like whatever you do, do not go in an intensive meditation retreat because one of the outcomes of going on an intensive meditation retreat is a deepening of clarity about one's values. you are reminded what is important and what is not important. and i came to the realization then that in addition to being called to service, there was clarity that there is no better place to

serve than municipal government, municipal government, particularly right now where the federal government is in crisis. this is where the action is at, and particularly at a municipal transportation department. there is no faster or stronger path to dealing with climate issues, safety issues, equity issues or economic recovery issues than at a municipal transportation organization. i in all seriousness, this has been by far the most meaningful job i have ever had in my life, and i would recommend it to anyone. despite the chaos that it has entailed. our board chairs at the time, including gwyneth borden and amanda eakin, knew that i didn't want this job. and

after this, my stupid meditation retreat, i had to say no, no, actually, i really do. and they said, no, no, jeff, you really don't. and i'm like, no, i do. and like, well, let's just say they made me promise out loud. twice while i was standing in a warehouse, turned into an art gallery in new orleans, where it was 110 degrees, i had to promise that if i took the job that i would stay for a full five years. yesterday was my five year anniversary, and it is with great satisfaction that i leave this with a sense that my term of service is complete. and holy cow, did we accomplish a few things. and you know there are more things that we accomplished than i can say, but i want to just summarize some of the things to the whole streets team, many of whom are here, including director of streets.

victoria wise. with so many headwinds against you, both political and financial, you quadrupled the pace of delivery of dramatically meaningful change. we accelerated the production of protected bikeways. we now have 50 miles of protected bikeways. in san francisco. you built 32 miles of slow streets and are, i believe, the only city in the country where we're continuing to expand and connect our slow street network. you built 35 vision zero quick build projects and evaluated them. and we realized that those projects, on average, have cut severe pedestrian and cyclist injuries by over 30%. you've saved lives, and while there is so much more work to do to achieve our goal of vision zero, when i look at other cities like los angeles, which

doubled their pedestrian fatality rate, what you've been able to achieve here in a time of rapidly diminishing resources is absolutely extraordinary, and you should be very proud. also, partnering with other agencies like rec park in order to deliver jfk promenade and now great highway park, a completely safe connection for everyone from the panhandle to ocean beach and in a couple of months, also connecting to fort funston and lake merced and san francisco state and lowell, and with our biking and rolling plan, working on continuing that even further to connect every city, to make sure every neighborhood in the city, to make sure that every middle schooler can bike or skateboard safely and comfortably to school, every senior in a wheelchair or in a mobility assistant device can take care of their shopping or get to the doctor that anyone in san

francisco can take care of the needs of daily life by safely walking, biking, skating or rolling to get to where they need to go. that's the that's the goal and you are well on your way to achieving that. and in fact, you've helped to make san francisco the safest city in the united states for biking and the second safest large city in the united states for pedestrians, just after new york city. really an extraordinary job well done. thank you as well to the entire muni team. many of you are here. muni director julie kirschbaum is here. who would have thought that in the face of crisis, we would be able to deliver a muni system that is faster, more frequent, more reliable, cleaner and safer than it has been in decades. who would have thought that muni

would be the only government service that rose in voter esteem during the pandemic, with the highest public approval ratings that it has had since we started collecting data? who would have thought that we would be able to eliminate most delays in the subway? i mean, do you even remember what it was like taking the subway in 2018 or 19? it was awful. like, no longer is the train shuddering to a stop, and you're just stuck there in the tunnel for 15 minutes every week. we still have work to do, but what an extraordinary set of changes. who would have thought that in a time when montgomery station was at only 35% of pre-covid ridership, that we're hitting over 120% of pre-covid ridership on key lines like the 49 venice and the 22 fillmore. really extraordinary work, and it goes on our paratransit program. getting by, by far the highest service delivery in our,

you know, in since we've collected data on it and getting an over 90% public approval rating. but the external work is in many ways the least of what we've accomplished. the thing that i am most proud about is the way in which we've helped to build the culture of the agency, and i want to make sure that i don't take too much credit for this. right. because i feel like, well, first of all, we couldn't have created such culture change as rapidly without the complete traumatizing catastrophe of the pandemic. but i also feel like what we did is simply saw what was already there and helped to bring it out. we removed some crusted over ness of bad management practices, saw people where they were at, and just helped to cultivate people a little bit. there are three key things that i think i'm most proud of, that we saw and helped

to develop. one is thoughtfulness about strategic risk during the worst of the pandemic. like there was no way we could have delivered anything that we needed to deliver without radical change. and going through that period of radically restructuring everything built up a muscle throughout the agency of how to be clear about the desired outcome, how to face the reality of our limited resources, and try to make the best that we could in a period of time where there were no rules. it was incredible. there were no rules, and people were a little terrified, but then saw that it was working and also saw that it was okay to make mistakes so long as we communicated skillfully about the mistakes and quickly recovered. and that pattern of every time we do something new and innovative, of pausing for a moment and evaluating what went well, what didn't go well, and helping to

learn and teach each other about mistakes has, i think, been institutionalized. the second thing that we discovered, and i love a lot, is there are so many people in this agency who take joy in fixing broken things, right? i mean, it's obvious the joy. if any of you have never been down in the subway at midnight watching the crews during fix it week, i highly encourage you to do that because like, the workforce just loves it. you can just see the esprit de corps and the pride in which people take in fixing broken things. but it's also true with our accountants and our hr team. like you can fix broken things in a spreadsheet or in a bureaucratic procedure that is not delivering on its outcomes. and we see that everywhere we go, this tinkering, this permission to tinker and to make things incrementally better every single day, but really at

the core of the sfmta and why this agency uniquely has been able to outperform so many of its peers in the worst of times. the core of our identity is the understanding that we are all in service. we are all in service every day to the public and particularly the public that needs us the most. we are all in service every single day to all members of the public and those of us who are in leadership. we are in service to the people of the mta. it's my job as the executive director to clear the path and to create the shield so that staff feel like they've got the resources and the protection, particularly the political protection that they need to do their jobs and that they need to take risks. the greatest joy that i have experienced in this job is not going to ribbon cuttings. the

greatest joy has been watching the extraordinary leadership and skill development that i see in every corner of this agency, the pride that people take in their work and their willingness to experiment, their collegiality, their eagerness to break down silos. this is an agency that is truly dedicated to service. so it is with tremendous honor and deep humility and wistfulness, but also an overflowing heart that i. i find myself here with my term of service rendered complete, and that is also made possible by the fact that i am completely confident in everyone in this agency being ready to step it up, and most particularly our current director of transit, julie kirschbaum, who i will be asking

to step into the role of acting director of transportation. i know that these jobs have a timeline, and one of the most important things for any executive is to know the exact right moment to depart. we've got a huge amount of work still ahead of us, most importantly, bringing the regional transit funding and particularly muni funding working group efforts to a conclusion in order to win in 2026. now is exactly the right moment for me to step aside and to welcome an extraordinary new leader who will have a rather different style than i have, and who has exactly the style that is needed in order to bring that work to a conclusion. so i want to thank all of you. you all have driven me nuts and you are the best transportation agency board in the united states by far. also the best commission in

san francisco. i want to thank, of course, my entire executive team, but my greatest gratitude goes first to mayor london breed for her vision and the space that she created in order for us to do our work. and secondly, to the entire 6000 people who make the magic happen. despite all of the headwinds against us. i did this for all of you. thank you so very much. jeff. boy, it's hard for me to imagine the sfmta without you at the helm. i truly mean that you've been the director of the agency since i became a board

member in 2022. you love san francisco deeply, and you can see that in everything that you do at the sfmta every week and every weekend. you're all over the city, like literally all over the city, at farmers markets, at community meetings, at sunday streets events and others making sure you had your finger on the pulse of the city and making yourself accessible to the community and its members and even its critics. i remember the time that i ran into you at powell station, with a whole crew of staff walking a group of staff through the transit rider experience and viewing the wayfinding needed to improve the experience. that's how in the weeds you got with the team. that's how. that's how much you poured into this city and how much you poured into every detail that came out of this agency. i always knew that you valued my perspective as an advocate for transportation justice in the outer

neighborhoods of san francisco. you always made it a point to make sure that in our meetings, we were including the outer neighborhoods and that we were being as inclusive as possible in our decision making. and i knew that you actually wanted me to do what i was going to do anyway, which is to always keep in front of mind the community members who often don't have a seat at the table. jeff, you are a true visionary, and it's not often you can say that about the head of a government agency, but i really believe it's true. in your case, you pushed us to think about how our city needs to change, and if it wants to meet the climate change challenges we face and become more equitable, we had to do some really challenging work. change isn't easy, and it's always it's always met with some resistance. but i believe that the push for change, the resistance, and then the process of coming together to move forward as a city is what's keeping san francisco the vibrant city it always has been

and will always be. jeff, on behalf of all transportation nerds, thank you for everything you've done for san francisco and i look forward to collaborating with you in the future and to the rest of the colleagues, if you all have something else to share about jeff, this is the moment. director henderson. well, jeff, that was a whirlwind of a year that since i first got the chance to be on this board and work with you. and i just want to say thank you so much for really having a clear setting the tone and having a clear vision and path forward. and, you know, i can't imagine coming into a job and then having a pandemic happen that really could have, you know, done a number on on this agency. and so to be able to lead through that and build on that and create, you know, create as inclusive

and special an environment as i can see is growing within this agency. i really appreciate it. i want to also just say, i think it's really important and important example that you said to surround yourself with people who are with executive level staff and with staff in general that are different than you are and think differently and can and the fact that you're open to really hearing those perspectives to make sure that the system and the agency is getting the best out of all of us, i think is really remarkable. and, you know, i can tell by the just the, the spectrum that your, your team, your executive team in particular reflects that that is a core value for you that has really added benefit and added value to, to sfmta. and so thank you for all of the work. i was

you know, obviously i was like, what? and i'm very i feel like in a time at a time when there's so much change happening at every level, it seems that i will. i do appreciate the sort of measured, very stable and just steady feeling that i get from you, and maybe i'll be able to accept change a little bit better if i embody some of those qualities that that you showed. but i, i appreciate your work and i really wish you the best and hope that the, my experience in the transportation world and, and probably even in the, in the housing world and just, you know, throughout this bay area community, i hope to cross paths and make sure that we are winning in 2026 and any and on any other things that we have in front of us. so best wishes. thank you chair. thank you. director henderson. director heminger. thank you, madam

chair. i mentioned earlier in the presentation today that when the three of us on the search committee concluded our work and handed it in to the board, and it approved that recommendation, we thought we had the right person. when the pandemic struck a few months later, we knew we had the right guy. on the one hand, i could imagine jeff just looking at his contract and the force majeure clause and saying, is there some way i can get out of this? because literally that was the sequence of events. it was get hired and have a pandemic. and i think even more impressive are the legacies of that crisis. the slow streets, quick builds, parklets, jfk it's

quite a list. and you also heed drag a couple of slow moving capital projects over the finish line, which is never fun but is necessary. and that's our dearly beloved central subway and the van ness brt. the lesson of which is, if you're going to mess up a project, don't do it in front of city hall. but jeff, i think you have a lot to be proud of. i think you have much to be thankful for as well. as you indicated today, with a great staff, a reasonably compliant board. and in my book, i, you know, five years has always been a pretty good run for a muni general manager. and you made it with a couple of days to spare. so good for you.

i look forward to you popping up somewhere that we may not know right now, but i certainly hope you won't be a stranger because you're you're part of the history here at city hall in san francisco. and it's a pretty good history. and i would also add, for those of us who i think are a little too gloomy about the prospects of our city today, don't count us out. thank you. thank you. director heminger. director tarloff. thank you. chair kahina. jeff, i. i, you know, have really grown to admire you over this year and to be amazed by the just the

enormity and complexity of the role that you and acting director kirshbaum will assume and what you have, what you have inhabited so graciously. and i guess what i've been struck by is the necessity of holding both the present and the future together. and giving each its due. they're both very, very important and envisioning the future. working toward the future is really what we do here. but understanding the present and as a lot of the, you

know, members of the public frequently do, reminding us of our history and our roots. and where we've come from is a really. it requires a lot of intelligence, a lot of sensitivity. and you mentioned, you know, kind of holding the political. function of the role and how important that is, is, is really is really remarkable. and it's been very, very educational for me to see. and i guess, as i said to you very recently, you know, the admiration of the staff for you and your work and the dedication

to a shared goal is one of the most important things that i've noticed. and then what i didn't say is that when i was sworn in to my role as director, there was a lovely swearing in ceremony with the mayor and my two kids, who are 23 and 25, came and you know, you you took so much time with them to just kind of share in the excitement of the moment and to talk with them very seriously and deeply about transit, which, you know, they're both very interested in. and, you know, there were lots of muckety mucks that you could have been spending your, your time talking to, but you spent your time talking to my kids, and it meant a lot to them, and it meant a lot to me. and it

really told me a lot about you as, as a person and as a leader. and, and i just really wanted to thank you for that. and i will really deeply miss what what you bring to your role. but i also look forward to seeing what's what's next. so thank you so much. thank you. director tarlov. director haynes, thank you, madam chair. and jeff, i'll add my voice to the chorus of thank yous for your service. and i think, as director kahina said, what is clearest to me is how much you love not only this agency, but the city and how much you care about sort of visionary transit and moving the city forward into sort of heads

up and be really a model. it's hard to be an innovator in the, in this structure of municipal government. but it is you can't be it. it's very rewarding experience. i think you were the perfect person to sort of have that vision. and it became particularly necessary as we as we navigated the pandemic. so i appreciate your vision and that you always appreciated, appreciated our perspectives as a board. i know that that we can be a very ethical board and we challenge you, but that's only because we also care about the city and care and want to see really our your vision that you have for a sustainable

transportation system. we realized and we want to. push the city towards that direction. and you've been a great leader both externally. as as chair. kahina also mentioned that i also do see that you you're out everywhere and i see you with the teams, and i see you with the crews. but you know that i have a particular interest in tenderloin work and, and advocacy there. and i appreciate you for always pushing on that score and really standing with me and helping push that work and your wonderful staff that you've assigned to that work. in particular. and so but we know that given your role here,

you've developed new skills and appreciation for the work that you've done. and but you you'll bring that into whatever next role that, that, that you that you'll hold and that you always hold san francisco close to your heart. and so we appreciate that and we wish you all the best. thank you. director anz director chen. thank you chair i'll keep mine short. but i think one thing i remember from 2018 and 2019 was it was sort of there was the infamous summer muni meltdown. and i think there was there was a lot of things that were not working very well for me at that time. and one thing that i my narrative on that was, i think the agency was overpromising and under-delivering. and i think what your service on the board or on the agency was being able

to i think to talk about reality, to talk about trade offs, to talk about, i think some level of like, oh, how do we make sure that we are proactive. and what i've seen in different facets of the agency looking at, for example, like contracting reform, hiring reform, preventative maintenance has been has been working very hard to deliver service for customers to hold, uphold a great vision. and i think in many ways that we've seen some of the results externally. but also what i've seen internally a little bit is a culture of openness, innovation, a willingness to try things and, and try things and, and to try to find solutions. so thank you so much. thank you. director chen. i would now like to call up alex sweet for the mayor's office to share some remarks. hi, alex sweet, transportation advisor in the mayor's office. this is my first time being here

and giving public comment at this meeting, so thank you for having me. i usually watch remotely, so directors secretary silva, susan, i, i first actually jeff, i first wanted to say thank you publicly to this board. you know, at the end of i don't i it's too soon to tell where i'm going to land. but i think at this, this is an end of a chapter. and i wanted to thank each of you for the incredibly difficult and important decisions you've made during mayor breed's term. so thank you. and same with you, jeff. you've been an incredible visionary and leader. and we've had a lot of meetings together. so many meetings, in fact, that i made my own jeff tumlin bingo game with phrases that you

commonly use that i play by myself. so if you're like, as alex paying attention, it's like mostly. and maybe when your term is done, i mean, i mean, i'll give you a couple. i'll give you a couple. hold on. let me bring out my bingo card. okay. ready? so if he says these phrases, i get a point. also, i was told i have no time limit, but i do have a meeting, so i have to leave. and it has to be said in jeff's way. so one is deeply check. and then of course check after someone says something and it's jeff turn. he starts with, that's right. and then continues. and so i've got about i don't know 20. so maybe by the time we're not right now. no this is public i'm going to. so maybe after your term you know in january i will share my

complete list and show you how many times i won. i mostly teasing, but adding some levity to the end of really an incredible chapter and how much you have to be proud of. and we are all very proud of you in this board. so thank you. thank you alex. we are still only on item six, so there is still an opportunity to win. i'll now like to recognize amanda eakin to share some remarks as well. i know you have actual business to get to today, so i'll try to keep this brief, but i just want to let you all in on a little bit of inside baseball from the process to select jeff tumlin. and there was right after we were making our decisions, one of the other members of the committee said, like, it's kind of a bold choice. he's either going to strike out completely or he's going to hit a home run.

and there were other safe choices, and you were the bold choice. and i think your legacy makes clear you didn't just hit one home run like you hit a whole handful of home runs. and the way i like to think about your legacy is you really have gotten sfmta's house in order. think about all the projects that were, like, really challenging that you took on. and one by one by one, you have knocked them off. central subway, geary, van ness getting automated speed enforcement authorization from the state legislature, which took a whole village. but that was a very clear vision. it's always been clear you've had such a strong and compelling vision, and i feel like we've taken steps, but there's a whole lot more vision for this city that lives in your head. and that's been so motivating for all of us. and i think we always knew choosing you that like, you're a global transportation expert, like we know we're getting an expert, right. but i think what we didn't know, what i underestimated and what to me has been like the most extraordinary part of watching you grow is what a loving,

caring and compassionate leader you are and how your your hope and joy and dream for this city manifests in you wanting to be the defender and protector of the staff and really go to bat for the staff and put up with some very difficult situations on behalf of the staff. that has been like my what has really blown me away about your leadership and i and i know that it just comes authentically right through your heart. and so i just wanted to say thank you for setting such a high bar for what excellent, compassionate leadership looks like in local government. and you are leaving some very big shoes to fill. thank you so much. thank you amanda. if folks will indulge, i know we have real business to get to, but if you have a moment, we'd love to invite our photographer to take a picture of a group photo of us, if that's okay. yeah, okay, let's do that. yes, yes. all right.

very nice. so. yeah. that was the right thing. to share. all right. thank you everyone. okay. so we will now open public comment on the second portion of the

director's report. i have some speaker cards barry tarantino theory christopher white sorry, i have to apologize. under the bus of reality, that's where you you are going now. you don't serve anything. but usually that's why you are in big trouble. that's why so usually means ugliness. so you are serving ugliness because you are unintelligent. it's not necessary to lie anymore. i'm going to go to the board of supervisors. yes. no qr codes, no absolute incompetence called i because we don't want digital ids. we don't want a security state, bio security state linked to transportation and everything. everybody knows it. there will be no slavery, no matter how hard you try. it's not going to work because i'm here under the supervision of

the skies. so san francisco is not science fiction, you understand? okay. you live in science fiction here because you are cowards. you don't have self-control. you go after the money. i said usury, which is going to fail. accelerated self-destruction of ugliness. see it? it's on its way. you don't want to accelerate it. it's going to destroy anyway. because that's the only end for unintelligence, you see. or ugliness for the benefit of beauty. thank you for your comment. next speaker please. barry. toronto, some taxi workers alliance. i'm speaking for myself though, so i want to thank director tumlin for all

the work he's done to help promote taxis and to try and work with the thames division. unfortunately, i became more of a scooters division and less taxi division, although he did support some of the initiatives that that did help the taxi industry, such as boosting up the paratransit program, such as making a very much more lucrative ramp taxi program by providing incentives that made it easier for those people devoted to that service to do the job. so i also want to thank you that you had to deal with the pandemic and the thrust into it, and i'm sure that you didn't expect that. and i think i'd have to say you did a great job of trying to make do with what we had and what you had to do, and, and that you were forced to do things that you probably wasn't your choice, but it was

for the best for the city and best for the getting people getting around town and making the streets safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. and i appreciate that, and i appreciate that it made it a little tougher, challenging to get around town. but i knew personally myself that it was done for the best because the police were not as being as cooperative. and, and in that way, you had to do what you can in order to make it safer and easier for everyone to get around town without always using a car, a vehicle. i want to say that shamann walton did ask for painting the streets, the corners red and for 13 because it created a problem for the people he represents. and last but not least, the there's just too many. anyway, i want to thank you for your service.

thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker please. good afternoon, directors and director tumlin. i just wanted to express my thanks as jody medeiros walk, san francisco for your service and how greatly appreciated it is. you had to study a really big ship during the most difficult time, and you have an incredibly different, difficult job and always did everything with grace. i run a very small nonprofit, and i can't imagine what your job is like because i know what my job is like. and i believe that san francisco is incredibly lucky to have you at the helm during the pandemic. and what is really coming out of that is san franciscans are seeing our streets through a very different lens. our streets are now about community, about joy, and i can't believe how much we've had a parklet explosion, 1.5 miles of car free jfk, which is now a promenade full of art. and soon

we'll have the great highway park. and we cannot forget the slow streets program. it's a huge accomplishment with a lot of legacy that you're leaving behind. it's incredibly difficult to see you go, but i do look forward to working with the newly appointed interim as well as the rest of the smart, talented and passionate leadership team that you're leaving behind. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker please. hello. good afternoon, directors dylan fabres with san francisco transit riders and san francisco transit riders would like to thank jeff tumlin for his leadership at sfmta over the past half decade. director tumlin led the agency through some of its most challenging times as the covid pandemic forced shutdowns and led to drops in ridership. but he made the most of the emergency by leading the agency to quickly make lasting infrastructure changes and addressing long overdue maintenance issues that allowed muni to meet the moment

and continue to thrive. once the pandemic began to wane. while we didn't always see eye to eye, it's clear that at the end of the day, director tumlin understands the importance of public transit in creating a connected, equitable and thriving san francisco. as muni continues to recover, san franciscans can take pride in the fact that, thanks to his leadership on implementing transit improvements like quick build and muni forward projects, we now have a ridership recovery rate 10% higher than even the new york subway system. despite our slower downtown recovery, director tumlin will be leaving the agency with growing ridership and muni riders satisfaction at an all time high. so while there's still significant work to be done to ensure muni is fully funded and safe from service cuts, the director is leaving muni better than he found it. so thank you, director, for your professionalism and leadership. we wish you the best of luck and

look forward to continuing our work with the agency and with incoming acting director kirshbaum to create the world class transit system that san francisco deserves. thank you. thank you so much for your comment. next speaker please. hey, nice sweatshirts. yeah, should have been here earlier. i made a rookie mistake of facing the wrong platform. but yeah, i just wanted to say thank you, director tumlin. you know, transit wasn't something i organized around, but, you know, maybe to the detriment of having to deal with a lot of the headaches from from our folks. thank you for hearing our demands and restoring the lines. i know that might have been a difficult decision to make, but we do appreciate it. i also want to thank ex-director ekin. i didn't realize you were commending her earlier, so i just want to say thank you for your tenure. yeah, i wish i had more something more, more prepared, but i just want to express my thanks. i know we don't see eye to eye because

you're taller than me. and. yeah, and hopefully good luck on the next phase. and the rest of us will continue to figure out how we address this transit deficit. so thank you so much. thank you for your comment. next speaker please. you think he's taller than you? i'm andrea buffa, i'm a staff member at the sfmta, and i can't say i speak for all staff, but maybe i speak for a few of us. i came to the sfmta after i heard jeff tomlin interviewed on kqed forum at the end of 2019. he was talking about transportation equity, and at the time, i worked at a health equity organization where we focused on how the community determinants of health, including transportation, impacted people's health. and i was like, wow, i want to work for this guy. and i applied for a job and it took a really long

time. but i eventually got the job and my cover letter, i said, like, if you all really want to make these changes in the agency that you say you want to make, i want to come work for you. and i thought, well, if they don't want to make them, they they won't even interview me. so anyway, they hired me. i want to i could have said this at our staff party for you, which we're going to have one. but i wanted to say it publicly. i've had a lot of bosses in my life, and i'm also a person who tends to speak my mind, and that's not always appreciated. and jeff said he wanted the staff to feel free to speak out, and he really does. and even when we disagree with him and we think something the agency does did is wrong, he welcomes us saying that and i feel like he really listens to it. he doesn't always do what we want, but he really listens to it. i want to encourage bosses everywhere to do the same thing, because it makes you feel really great about working at your organization and makes you feel like your opinion is valued. thank you jeff. thank you so

much for your comment. i don't see any additional speakers. secretary silva, do we have any accommodations? we do have one accommodation. speaker, you've been unmuted. this is for the director's report. this is herbert weiner. first of all, i would like to commend amanda aiken on her civility. despite any disagreements we might have. i hope our paths cross in the future. the paths of agreements. now. esther. jeff. come. i certainly think he's going to have a bright future ahead of him. he's on the. land, on his feet. he's going to have a good future ahead of him. but i do want to my disappointment in raising the bus fare. it's going to be a hardship on all of us. and unfortunately i'm going to have to live with that at other

passengers. will. but really, should have been prevented. and i deeply regret that the chairman raised. thank you. thank you. no other speakers. thank you. thank you, everyone, for giving us a moment during this report to make some memories. and i just appreciate everyone's grace and letting us do that. let's call the next item. secretary silva places you on item number seven, the citizens advisory council report. we have no report. all right, moving on. yes, ma'am. places you on number item number eight, new or unfinished business by board members. directors. are there any new or unfinished business to report out then? okay. we do not have any next item. yes, ma'am. places you on item number nine. general public comment. members of the public may address the board of directors on matters that are within the board's jurisdiction and are not on today's calendar. i have a few

speaker cards. barry toronto sue trailing brian mcwilliams. really the benefit of going out? speaker thank you. thank you. christine silva i have to go in a few minutes. i appreciate you calling me first and you've done a great job. so i really enjoy working with you. i want to first say that the purpose of this agency is, is to not encourage more use of people's personal cars or even any cars on the street. however, i don't see that in practice. i see lots of tax, double parking everywhere, using taxi stands and also the waymo's blocking the cab stands, blocking the bus stops, blocking the intersections and nothing being done by or very little being

done by this agency. and remember one thing that i'll never forget, jeff tumlin said, was that we have a weapon, and that is to write lots of parking citations, and i don't know why it's not being done more. i'm not blaming the pcos. i'm blaming the leadership of not making it a priority, particularly in the evenings at major venues and a major events. and it's horribly done. i'm sorry, but i do want to give a shout out to a pco 390 who came quickly, very quickly, within within 15 minutes to the macy's cab stand on geary and gave a ticket because that person refused to move right away. so there are pco's out there that do care about making it easier for us to do our job as taxi drivers. but but the weapon you have to keep the streets clear and moving is not being used enough. and i think that's

that's kind of hypocritical of you if you're going to make it harder to drive. and if you do that, at least at least end the double parking practice, that's making it harder, especially on mission street. thank you for your time and happy holidays. merry christmas, happy hanukkah, happy kwanzaa, and have a great new year. thank you so much for your comment. happy holidays, mr. toronto. any additional comments? yeah. you too. okay. okay. hi there. my name is sue trailing. i've been a primary user of the bicycle for 24 years as my mode of transport in san francisco. i'm a pet care provider. through rove, i board dogs and visit kitties. my transport is extremely important for this role and also for other roles in my life. i appreciate

all the innovations to make bicycling more safe over the last decades. it's incredible, but i had an experience where our the new so-called speed bumps to prevent sideshows did not prove to be that for me, november 25th, i was leaving a kiddy family, turned off sacramento onto divisadero going south across california. i did not see the speed of the sideshow speed bump. it was. it was at night. it was wet on the ground. it was a little bit, you know, not the clearest night. it was not raining. i rode over it. it completely scuttled my e-bike. i went down, there were huge blood drops going into the water off my forehead from a cut. i fractured my scaphoid part of the thumb and the wrist fractured the right middle finger. bumps and bruises. rode to the er kaiser. i found

everything out through the diagnostics. the physician's assistant who treated who was treating my fracture, and my left hand said, i'm the second person who's come in with injuries from going a bicyclist, going over a sideshow speed bump. in my experience, it's not a speed bump because i go over speed bumps all the time, smoothly and carefully all over the city. i've ridden all over the city over the years, and these are more like little barriers, and it was completely scuttled me. it was devastating. and i think they they present an ongoing safety hazard for bicyclists. absolutely. for certain. is that my end of my time? it is, it is. thank you very much. thank you so much. next speaker, please. thank you very much. my name is alex landsburg. i'm a research and advocacy director with the san francisco electrical construction industry. congratulations to everybody who's been congratulated today to. me. just just a couple of

things. first, first off, it's fitting that you all are going to be talking about the budget later. and you mentioned 2026 and having to go out to the ballot and get more resources for this agency, because i think it's actually quite fitting with my comments. just to well, i only have a minute and a half left. so just let me quickly say a growing body of scientific and of international scientific and industry research has shown that the economic and operational and environmental superiority of battery assisted trolley busses, but that has not dissuaded mta staff from moving forward with its facility electrification or fleet electrification facility renewal program, or even changing course. in fact, sfmta is slated to purchase spend $118 million to purchase 94 diesel hybrid busses while mothballing 143 busses that you already own, electric trolley busses that you already own. i mean, this is

this ought to be considered irresponsible at the best of times. it is absolutely. it should be considered unacceptable right now when you are going to be going to the public asking for billions of dollars to fund these programs. and i just want to share the story of the san francisco public utilities commission that i, that i sort of worked on. 20 years ago. the public stopped them from getting money until they adjusted their capital program to reflect public needs. and i really hope that we don't get to the point in 2026 where we are being asked to subsidize a failing, a failing electrification program. when we have assets that we are wasting and letting rust. thank you. thank you so much for your comment. next speaker please. the honorable directors, thank you for being here and all the

effort you put into this. i was a commissioner here for many years, so i understand what your commitment is. my name is brian mcwilliams. i'm a native san franciscan, and i live three doors from the corner of france and moscow. and i have a problem i want to share with you that i don't know how to deal with. my sister lives with me, works as a bartender, gets home very late at night. so the options she has, i mean, i pay $108 a night to park in my own driveway that i've parked in for 50 years now and never had a problem where i have nine feet from my bumper to the curb, where many places in the city only need six feet for. i mean, they only are six feet. the sidewalks for safe egress and transportation issues. and her choice is to park way down

geneva and walk the park at night by herself, or for me to park in my driveway to try to give her a space. or on occasion. i've even driven to oakland to stay with friends so she could have a parking space. it's so intense. the problems are the same all over the city. i understand that we're not special, but in light of. now, nine spaces on the corner where we live being eliminated from because of different programs, the pressure in the community. it's a working class community. people go to work. they all. when i get up and get the newspaper at 630, there are 25 cars parked on the street illegally, but there's access. there's six feet of access everywhere. so when the first onslaught started at 630 in the morning, we got 25 tickets based on a complaint. so how does that

work? how does the system work? how do you pfizer that is your time? well, apologies, i, i understand i have part of a solution and part of more of a problem to explain, but i understand that there's a time limit and i'm not entitled to any more time. thank you, thank you. perhaps someone from staff victoria wise can connect with the gentleman. or actually we have some other. thank you so much, sir. i think he left. okay. thank you so much for connecting with them. thank you. all right. any additional comments? okay. do we have any accommodations? director? we do have one accommodation. speaker. you've been unmuted for general public comment. this is herbert weiner. one problem i have is the seniors and disabled are really being the stepchildren of the city. they are required to

walk up to a quarter of a mile to the bus stop. and really, we get bottom priority and bicyclists, not more favors than we do. and really, there should be more equity on the part of this board. i would really like to see better treatment of seniors in the disabled, and especially since they're required to walk up to a quarter of a mile of a bus stop. we need more bus stops to accommodate us, so that should be one of the priorities. next year. thank you. thank you. no other callers. thank you. that now concludes public comment on item nine. secretary, please call the next item directors that places you on item ten your consent calendar. these items are considered to be routine and will be acted upon by a single

vote, unless a member of the board or public wishes to consider an can. consider an item separately. for all speakers providing public comment, please identify which item number you are speaking to. item 10.1 approving various routine parking and traffic modifications and making environmental review findings for items listed under a through i in the agenda item 10.2 approving a roadway, shared spaces street closure for golden gate avenue between leavenworth and jones streets, monday, january 6th, 2025 through tuesday, january 6th, 2020 six, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily and making environmental review findings. item 10.3 applying sections of the california vehicle code cvc to west access road, a temporary, publicly accessible private street to be built as part of the hope s.f. sunnydale housing development to enable the sfmta to enforce parking restrictions for red zones, street cleaning regulations, double parking and other miscellaneous issues. this will support neighborhood

circulation and muni service, while construction temporarily closes adjacent streets as authorized by section two, one, one, 07.5 of the cvc and item 10.4 approving the equity in infrastructure project ip pledge and authorizing the director of transportation to sign the ip. that concludes your consent calendar. thank you, secretary silva. colleagues, do we have any clarifying questions on the consent calendar items? no. okay, great. we'll now open public comment on item nine. and this is the consent calendar item ten. sorry i don't number ten. thank you so much, secretary silva. so this is items on the consent calendar okay. i'm not seeing anybody come up. secretary silva, do we have any accommodations? no accommodations. okay. we'll now close public comment on item ten. colleagues, do i have a motion and a second to approve the consent calendar? so moved item. all right. i hear a motion

and a second. yeah. thank you, secretary silva, please call the roll on the motion to approve director chen. i chen i director heminger heminger. i director henderson. henderson. i director hines i. i director tarlov i tarlov i director cecchina i cecchina i thank you. the consent calendar is approved. please call the next item. secretary silva places you on item number 11, approving various parking and traffic modifications along beach street between van ness avenue and the embarcadero to improve transportation safety and connectivity, including the establishment of new class four separated bikeways as part of the beach street quick build project. all right. good afternoon, directors. my name is kimberly liang and i'm the local streets director. our team is really excited to be here today to present on the beach street quick build project. as we're working, looking at the network, we're looking to improve safety in san francisco, but we're also

looking for opportunities to fill critical gaps when it comes to bicycle and pedestrian improvements in san francisco. but while we're doing this, we're also trying to find opportunities to work really closely with the community. and this is exactly what this project does. so i'm excited today to introduce our project manager, ashley hong, who's going to walk you through this proposal for beach street. ashley, thank you. kimberly. good afternoon. vice chair kahina and directors. good afternoon, director tomlin. i'm ashley hong, a planner and livable streets and the project manager for the beach street quick build project. i'm happy to be here today to seek your approval of this project that is in the heart of the fisherman's wharf district and is home to so many iconic pieces of san francisco. over the past year and a half, we have worked closely with the community to design a project that aligns with community priorities. we want to promote fisherman's

wharf vitality, address key pedestrian and bicycle safety concerns, connect major landmarks by filling in gaps in the bicycle and pedestrian network, and provide opportunities for placemaking and activation. there are a few different reasons we are proposing this project. the first is to close a critical gap in the very popular and scenic active transportation route along the bay in san francisco. currently, people can walk or roll all the way from the golden gate bridge to the ferry building, hitting major destinations all along the way and all the way from vehicle traffic. beach street is a gap in the safe and connective network. this slide here shows the density of attractions that would be supported by a more walkable, bikeable, and activated beach street, including the heart of the fisherman's wharf area, which consists of tourists and maritime activity, commercial,

retail, offices and hotels. so the project is proposed along beach street from van ness avenue to the embarcadero. the project includes a diverse set of transportation options with the muni 19 poke, the f, fisherman's wharf streetcar, cable cars, private bike rentals, and bike and scooter share opportunities. beach street is an approximately 3500 average vehicles per day, with an average speed of 27mph. beach street also sees high pedestrian volumes in areas where there are major destinations, particularly at hyde and larkin, where we've seen over 3000 pedestrians during a summer weekend day. and despite a high volume of bicycle traffic, there is currently no bike facility along beach street. we're seeing over a thousand bicyclists over the course of a day between hyde and larkin. beach street, and many

of the neighboring streets are also on the high injury network. from 2019 to 2023, there have been 25 reported collisions on this segment of beach street that each resulted in at least one severe injury. eight of these collisions involved pedestrians, two of which resulted in a severe injury. four collisions involved a person on a bicycle, and one of which resulted in a severe injury. so community outreach began in 2023, where the project team interviewed 14 businesses and organizations and many internal stakeholders. interviewees included the fisherman's wharf community benefit district, pier 39, the national park service, swimming and rowing clubs, hotels, and more. at this point in time, the project team did not have any design concepts and we were studying the feasibility of bike infrastructure and just learning

about community needs. then, in march 2024, the project team held a virtual open house that included an online arcgis story map and survey. at this point, the project team presented an initial proposal that included a bike lane on beach street between larkin and powell. we received over 300 complete surveys and conducted door to door outreach, where the project team reached 47 different businesses. based on the feedback we received, the project team adjusted the proposed designs and scope of the project to better address the issues and concerns that were raised around things like parking and loading, and detailed and desired paths of travel. there has since been continued outreach throughout the summer, including field visits with a lot of community members. so the project team heard five key themes throughout our outreach process safety and enforcement, placemaking

opportunities, curb space improvements, traffic improvements, and bicycle and pedestrian improvements. some stakeholders saw a need for increased safety and enforcement, including enforcement of loading zones and just increasing eyes on the street. the community also shared placemaking aspirations, including street murals, shared spaces and temporary road closures and park activations. there's a lot of hotel and bus tours, tour bus activity in the area and just a need to rebalance the curb space, as well as desires for wayfinding and improving visibility at driveways and near parklets for pedestrian and bicycle improvements. the community shared a need for reducing bicycle and pedestrian conflicts, increasing pedestrian and bicycle visibility at intersections, and installing a safe east west bike connection. so this brings us to our proposal, which aims to address

what we heard from the community over the past year. the proposal falls into three main focus areas. one is bike improvements. we are proposing a class for two way separated bikeway on beach street between venice and columbus. this bikeway would go through the maritime park to help connect waterfront riders to the businesses and attractions on the west end of beach street, all the way to fort mason and to the existing bikeways on polk and north point. second is pedestrian safety improvements, which will be implemented at all the intersections between polk and the embarcadero. third is supporting future community initiated placemaking and activations such as temporary road closures for various events. additionally, we will be implementing parking and loading changes on beach and adjacent streets to balance the need for parking and loading for the visitors to the aquatic park, the maritime museum, swimming and rowing clubs, and local businesses. again, the proposal

includes pedestrian safety treatments, separated bikeway connections, and placemaking and activation support. this includes high visibility crosswalks, daylighting, painted safety zones, advanced limit lines and signal timing adjustments. a two way separated bike facility will be on the north side of beach street between venice and columbus. we are also coordinating with the national park service to allow for the shared use of path of the paths for cyclists and pedestrians to help strengthen the connections through the park. so the next few slides show the details of the plan broken up by block. first looking at venice to larkin. this is in front of the maritime museum and ghirardelli square. there is the two way separated bikeway. on the north side. you'll notice a wiggle in the bike path. here. the bikeway would be routed off street onto the national park service pathways to avoid the muni 19

polk bus stop and layover. we are working with the national park service to convert the paths on national park service property to shared use paths for cyclists and pedestrians, so that they would not have to dismount as they currently do. the project team worked closely with the transit team to consider alternate locations for the muni 19 polk, but it was determined that keeping the stop and layover location would be the least disruptive to the transit services and operations. we believe it will work well because the headways are long and it is a relatively low volume street. tourists are already meandering through the park paths here, and we anticipate that they will continue to do so. we aim to just clarify where to expect some mixing between bicyclists and pedestrians, and encourage bicyclists to use the new bike paths instead of the sidewalk signs, pavement markings and

posts will clearly indicate these new paths. this also allows for some curb space to keep a passenger loading zone close to the front door of the senior center. in order to make this work, we will be working with the national park service to add curb ramps on beach street to connect to these aquatic park paths, as well as wayfinding and signage. and we will, of course, assess and evaluate once this is in, to see how it's all working. moving east to the larkin to hide block. this is where there is interest in a future shared spaces permit for temporary closures to activate this new area between local businesses, ghirardelli square and aquatic park. the two way separated bikeway continues here to the north side, where there is currently metered parking at the beach and hyde intersection, there will be turn lane removals, more walking time and changes to the roadway striping to prioritize pedestrians, as

well as some signal timing considerations for the cable car operations. while turn lanes will be removed, there will not be any new turn restrictions. the parking configuration on the south side of beach street will be adjusted to allow for businesses with existing parklets and permits to remain as designed, and convert some of the parallel parking to angled parking to fit in a couple more spaces. additionally, we are reconfiguring hyde street between beach and jefferson. by removing the turn lane on hyde, we can add a few parking spaces on the east side of the street next to the argonaut hotel. we also worked with our taxi team to convert the taxi loading zone on the west side of hyde, to allow for parking between 5 and 9 a.m. for the rowing clubs, the taxi zone will remain as is the rest of the time. continuing east to beach street between hyde and columbus, the two way separated bikeway continues to

columbus and then transitions to a class three shared lane on columbus that connects to the existing bike lanes on north point and the shared lanes further south on columbus. there will be a new stop sign at beach and columbus to facilitate this transition and to address safety concerns raised by the community at this particular location, we will also be adding metered parking on beach street between leavenworth and jones to rebalance the parking needs in the area. so over the course of the project, we heard a lot of desire from the community to look at jefferson street, as it really is the natural path of travel for many tourists. so in a future effort, we will look into prioritizing jefferson street between hyde and powell as a family friendly and safe active transportation route for visitors. some things that could be included are traffic calming and pedestrian safety enhancements. working with the merchant community and the port to support temporary roadway

closures for any activations and events, and exploring potential bike connections on the eastern end of the jefferson beach corridors, which would create a continuous connection from the ferry building to the golden gate bridge through the fisherman's wharf area, and together with the beach street quick build, we can work towards closing this critical gap in the very popular and scenic active transportation route along the bay. so to conclude, this slide shows a snapshot of the project timeline since our kickoff back in the summer of 2023, we've done a lot of community outreach and design. construction is anticipated for the spring of 2025, and this has really been a multi-jurisdictional project, and we will continue working with our agency partners to implement this critical safety improvement project. and that concludes my presentation, and i'm happy to answer any questions. thank you. thank you

so much for your presentation, ashley. colleagues, are there any clarifying questions on this item? director chen thank you. chair. thank you for the presentation. the timing so is with the partnership with nps. is that national park service? are those changes already approved or that's anticipated to be approved. what's the what's the process there. yeah. so we are currently working with the national park service. the things are not approved on their end quite yet. but we do anticipate in the coming months to continue working with them to get that approved. and is that a blocker for the that that those approvals are necessary for, for the mta to start working, work on their side of the project? we can begin construction without their approvals. but there is that piece that goes onto national park service property that we are working with them on. okay. and then how, you know, post-project, how are we measuring compliance? you know, there's that jog that goes into

the land to try to accommodate the 19 pokestop, you know, what is what is the measurement? what are what are the tools that we're looking at to ensure that people are actually taking that path? yeah. great question. so for all of our quick builds, we do evaluations pre and post. so we collect data prior. so we have data for bike counts and kind of where they are on beach street currently. and we will recollect counts after the project goes in to kind of evaluate where cyclists are and general volumes as well. great. yes. as someone who's gone trying to get getting from downtown to the marina, going through that area is usually part of it. and it's a little can be a bit dicey. that part's dicey. and i'm actually really happy to see that, that that pedestrian path. there is a big sign that says walk your bicycle. and i see people who do not always walk their bicycle there. so, you know, i think it's like trying to conform with

with what's actually happening. and that's going to be a mixed use. is that the plan? yes. we hope that it will be a shared use path so that cyclists and pedestrians can share the path. it's i'm trying to think of how wide it is. it's something like maybe like six feet. it's about eight feet wide. okay, okay. and does the park service, do they have any plans to pavement or is there something in the long range plan that they might be amenable to? yes. so the national park service is actually working with a consultant currently, and they are working on developing and just active transportation network for their their area and the area surrounding their parks. and this is very much in alignment with those plans. great. and so i think this project seems good and it seems like a lot of stakeholder engagement. so, you know, i think all that is great. and i also know that as someone who's tried to make those bike connections, that that the challenges that the challenges

are almost like, you know, we mark columbus avenue, right, as a class three, i think as a as a narrow bike lane and north point. and i think those are the ways that we encourage people to come from the embarcadero and from downtown. and those are not always this. this is this is not this is not about the project. but i think it's just in general. right? it's tough. there's the there's the trolley, there's the cable car rails that i've had friends like wipe out on. and so you either have to choose to you either bike on the outside lane or you bike on the inside lane for columbus. and then coming from north point, you know, i think with car speeds it's the connection is the connection is hard i think right now. and it's i think it's very difficult for people, especially newer folks or folks who are less who are less confident on the road to really believe in that. so i really hope this is a good first step. and i'm really looking forward to the jefferson to the jefferson street part. and then hopefully and then that part from between powell and

embarcadero, hopefully, you know, part three. but it's you know, knowing that, you know we have lots of we it's a it's i was looking at the bay wheels usage map that the chronicle did. and there's a lot of people who use national park service and the marina and they use they use the rental bikes that the retail businesses there, they use the bay wheels. so i really hope that this is a great experience for both residents and also tourists. let's see. yeah. and i think yeah, the compliance compliance hopefully is good. and i really hope that this project is a good first start. so thank you very much. thank you. director chen, director tarloff, thank you chair. thank you so much for the presentation. i have one clarifying question and a couple of comments. one is or the question that i have is we received some correspondence from a member of the public who was concerned about disabled parking at the senior center. and i wonder if you could back

up a little bit and cover, cover that part of the plan, please? yeah, absolutely. so we will be relocating the two senior, the two ada parking spaces that are in front of the senior center currently, and we worked with our accessibility team to look at the closest alternative locations. so the locations that are proposed are the closest we could possibly get. and really currently we understand that they are farther away from the front door, but we will be bringing them up to the current code, as well as building ramps to facilitate that. so the correspondence indicated that there was a concern about the proposed location, that there would be too much of an incline. can you speak to that? yeah. so there's a lot of incline in kind of just this area. so this to in

order to get the accessible parking loading at the corner where they can get to the curb ramp easily, that really is the other closest location is right acrohe street. there is currently a blue zone across the street on the flat part as well, but there will be three ada loading parking spaces right in that in this intersection. right. and so the pedestrian loading you indicated that's going to still be at the senior center. could you just briefly talk about how that works. yeah. so we will be shifting the white loading zone a little bit further east. but it will still be relatively close to the front door of the senior center. we worked with the senior center leadership to kind of figure out the best location and priorities for that, and we will be building a curb ramp for that as well. so people who are being dropped off, it's they'll be

dropped off between the traffic lane and the bike lane, as am i understanding that correctly? ashley, if you wouldn't mind just pulling up slide ten. i think that that might be a good visual to walk us through. yes. so as you can see there, the white line which is right here is the new white loading zone. currently the zone is about right here where this path enters into the bikeway. so we are shifting it over east a little bit. so yes, they would have to cross over this area where the bikes do come off of national park service property and onto the on street bike

facility. but there this is where we will add like additional signage. there will be a lot of indicators that indicate this is a mixed, a mixed area with a lot of bikes and pedestrians kind of crossing. and we hope that bicyclists will be indicated to slow down through this area. thank you very much. i appreciate that additional detail. and then just regarding some comments about this, i, i am really appreciative of a project like this in an area that is so heavily used by people who may be unfamiliar with san francisco, who may, may or may not be regular cyclists in their in their regular life. i think that the experiences that a lot of visitors to san francisco have on bicycles are

really fun and a really important draw to the city for families and people, couples and people just traveling here. and. and you know that the infrastructure in an area like this needs to be extra safe to accommodate that variety of users. and i really appreciate that. and. i, i don't want to there may be members of the business community who who want to speak to this in the public comment section, but i would like to note that i have spoken with directly with at least one member of the leadership. and they've been they reported to me a real. you know, pleasure at how it was working and the, the

process and that was really a nice thing to hear. so thank you very much. thank you. thank you, director tomlin. yes. just in response to director tarlow's comment about engagement with the business community, working with the fisherman's wharf community benefit district has been such a pleasure. the merchants here absolutely understand the opportunity to rethink, particularly jefferson and its connections to the ferry building, to fort mason and to tunnel tops. they see the amazing energy that's happening at tunnel tops and fort mason, and the ways in which those venues are attracting families from san francisco and all over the region. and they want to connect to that with really families on bikes, on rental bikes, being able to explore the entire northern waterfront, being central to their vision. and i really want to compliment

the visionary leadership among the merchants in fisherman's wharf, as well as the really excellent partnership that we're getting from the port of san francisco that owns jefferson, and property north of jefferson, and other key institutions that are not a part of the cbd, like the owners of pier 39. i think that in the coming year, we're going to be able to do some spectacular work, closing one of the biggest gaps for a truly family friendly bikeway and rolling way serving the entire northern waterfront. thank you, director tomlin. director chen. sorry, one last question. i had just around the safety and the signaling around the contraflow bike lanes. so there's two intersections. i don't if you pull up slide 10 or 11 again. right. so at hyde is that there's no new signals. right. so is that is it like battery street where where the bicycles will go go on the walk signal.

yes. and this is where i may bring an engineer up here to answer the details of that question. but there will be some signal adjustments for the bikeway. hi, vice chair egan, members of the board. director tomlin, brian donohoe. it's not very tall person friendly, i think, but i'll work with it. brian donohoe, project engineer on the beach street quick build team. thank you all for all of your great comments so far and questions specifically at the hyde street intersection. we are going to do some signal changes. some of that involves upgrades for the cable car division. a flashing train coming signal will be added, which will help for safety both for the bicyclists, the cable car operators and also motor vehicles for bicyclists heading in the westbound direction. so that is going towards aquatic park on the north side of the street, going westbound, bicyclists will see a bike

signal, so they will see a far side and near side bike signal three head red, yellow, green. and that would be on a phase with the eastbound motor vehicles. and those eastbound motor vehicles right now have a left turn restriction, which would still apply in our proposed design. so that would prevent any maneuvers for a car or truck across the bike facility, which is how we are protecting the bicyclists there because it's completely phase separated. and then bicyclists in the eastbound direction. so heading away from aquatic park would have a bikes use pedestrian signal sign located next to the ped head, and that would allow them to cross at the same time as the westbound bikes. so both east and westbound bikes will be crossing, as well as the pedestrians on the north side of the intersection. so that's the intersection from like the argonaut and the cannery building to aquatic park. those

those modes will be crossing at the same time, and they're only parallel car movement will be the eastbound cars, which again, do not have a conflicting movement across the bike facility. does that help? i think so, and just to make sure i understand. so west so westbound auto traffic has a separate phase from we'll have a separate phase from the walking and the and the biking. correct. yeah. so right now there's three phases at that intersection. there's east and west car traffic. and then there is northbound car traffic and then southbound car traffic. so those two are split because of the cable cars staging on the hyde hill. and the issues with visibility with the cable cars just positioned up on that hill, i don't i don't know if you're familiar, but they tend to like hang out there before they get into the cable car turnaround point in aquatic park. so right now it's three phases and we would be changing it to four phases so that each direction of motor vehicle traffic goes on

its own. so they'll be east west, north, south, all all separated. and the bikes and then north side peds would be going with that eastbound motor vehicle traffic. okay. great. thank you. and i think in the report it said that you're also adding leading pedestrian indicators. is that intervals. is that right or am i am i making stuff up. yeah they'll be they'll be lpis for every direction. okay. yeah. great. thank you. and then for the intersection before that at columbus, there's a contraflow. there is a turn or when the contraflow lane is sort of like ends there. and i think the goal is that what's the movement for someone biking east is that is that they're they want to go with the crosswalks and then and then go over like, what's the or is it are they meant to turn left like and is there have we done that before in the city. sure. so for bicyclists i guess maybe we could pull up. i'm not sure what exactly. it's like 11 is the one after this one. 12. 12. thank you. awesome. so the

two way bike facility there on the north side would continue past that west side crosswalk. and then in the top of the t of that intersection is where bicyclists can exit and enter and then go onto the south side motor vehicle lanes there to continue down columbus. or if they're coming from columbus, going westward, they would enter into the bike facility kind of at the north part of the t, and then they would be in that protected lane through aquatic park and then the rest of our facilities. yeah. so right now it's like a three way intersection. and we would be adding a fourth way on the north side, but that would just be a bicycle facility. and right now that existing intersection is stop controlled only in the northbound columbus leg. and what we're proposing is stop controlling it in all directions. so bicyclists heading out over into that bike facility would be stop controlled, as well as motor

vehicles in the east and westbound directions. got it. mike. my concern is that i feel like without a road springing out of the north side, that people might not know that that's that's a that someone biking might make that left turn onto onto the travel lane onto beach. yeah. yeah. so we've we've done something like this before in san francisco. right. or have we, we, we have multiple examples of like sharrows to class for bike facilities that exist throughout the city. and we try to emphasize we'll try to emphasize this particular location with the use of green paint as we get close to the intersection. and that green paint, a lot of cyclists in the city see that and kind of go to it like honey. and we're hoping that tourists would get a similar idea, because we'll be continuing to use green paint near intersections and at decision points throughout this project corridor. yeah, i think the biking is good. sorry, i don't want to interrupt, but i

think the biking is good. yeah, i think that just making sure that driving, i'm just my worry is that maybe someone will be like, oh, well i just assumed someone's just going to cross the crosswalk or not. not kind of make this movement and then they'll, they'll make some other movement that they think is that is not interrupting. and then it actually is a potential collision point. gotcha. but it's keep an eye on it. it's probably i think the project is fine. keep an eye. that's that's my that's a that's a potential potential injury point that i, that i want to make sure that we that we look out for that that is definitely something that we will keep in mind and consider while we go through our evaluation point. we do expect there to be some learning curve with motorists as they get accustomed to a new environment in the area. and director chen, you may want to think about the intersection of third street and townsend, where there's a two way protected bikeway on one side of third street and a much more complex set of conditions. so as a way of imagining how this would work at a smaller, easier scale, but that one

signalized, i think, right? it signalized, but with a lot more motor vehicle volume, including lots of motor vehicle turning movements, which adds just a lot more complexity. great. okay. thank you. so of course. thank you sarah. absolutely. thank you. any additional comments on this? okay. thank you ashley and brian as well. okay. we will now open this item for public comment. this is public comment on item 11. i have a few speaker cards. harrison arnold, caitlyn thresher. okay. all right. well, my name is harrison arnold. i'm here on behalf of blazing saddles bike rental and tours. our legacy business is on beach street, where a lot of these proposed improvements are to be. we were in full support of these

changes as it will improve for pedestrians and cyclists alike, while still keeping in consideration cars, commercial delivery and also parking. we wanted to also let you know what an excellent job the sfmta and of course the project manager, ashley young or hong have been doing with events like the stakeholder outreach we are also looking forward to, of course, continuing the work with the sfmta to improve these or to integrate these improvements. my apologies on similar plans for jefferson street in the near future, and we would appreciate all of your support on these proposed improvements. thank you guys. again. thank you so much for your comment. next speaker please. good afternoon, directors, i'm caitlin thresher. i'm with the fisherman's wharf community benefit district,

ashley and the other team members that have been involved in this project have worked very closely with the business community and all of our stakeholders. they've taken our feedback and adjusted their plans numerous times to ensure that this project meets the needs of our community. we believe the proposed improvements will enhance the experience of both visitors and locals, and make much needed changes to the flow of traffic and safety on the streets in the wharf, our property owners and businesses urged the sfmta directors to approve the beach street quick build project, and we really appreciate the dedication the sfmta team has shown to supporting our businesses, and we look forward to continuing to work with you all in future projects like potentially jefferson street. thank you very much. thank you so much for your comment. i don't see any additional speakers. secretary silva, do we have any accommodations or maybe one? we do have one. speaker griffin lee here, resident of san francisco, pretty frequent visitor of the area. could you elaborate? the presenters on the

parking situation? you said there's going to be removal, but also additional what's the net new versus? taking away of parking? thank you for your comment. and then and then secondly, what's the project costs out of curiosity. thank you so much for your comments. i'm indifferent on this one right now. there's no site i'm necessarily taking, but do appreciate the feedback from those small business owners. that's important. that i'm hearing the community is really involved on this one. so unfortunately we can't give you that information from the dais. but project manager ashley fong hong can give you that information. say that again. project manager ashley hong can give you that information. thank you. thank you everyone. any additional comments on this item? okay. and no accommodations okay. we'll now close public comment on this

item. colleagues, i just want to congratulate. miss hong and. kimberly liang and brian donohoe for all the work that they have done with the community on this project. i do, you know, it's tough to we often hear about projects that, you know, miss the mark sometimes with community engagement and business engagement. and it's so beautiful to see that we're closing out the year with one that is not that. so thank you so much for that gift. and i just want to, you know, just celebrate that you're modeling just this new sort of engagement that we're doing with businesses. and it speaks volumes that we have representatives from the community benefits district here today that are incredibly supportive of this project. so thank you so much for all that hard work. colleagues, do. i have a motion and a second. thank you sir. we have a motion. do we have a second? second. all right. secretary silva, please

call the roll on the motion to approve director chen i chen i director heminger heminger. i director henderson. henderson. i director hines. i nci director tarlov i tarlov i director cecchina. hi. cecchina i thank you. that item is approved. thank you. secretary silva, please call the next item. places you on item number 12. presentation and discussion regarding the customer experience program. good afternoon. julie kirschbaum, transit director. with me is amy alvear. she is leading our customer experience work. and i, we are just at the beginning of a process, but it's a process that i think speaks deeply to the values of this

board. so i wanted you to have an opportunity to see where we're going with this work and to provide feedback up front. we will be coming multiple times throughout this process. as the transit director, i really only have two core responsibilities. we need to deliver safety and we need to deliver an amazing customer experience. and we have, i think, gotten much better at the customer experience while not compromising any of the safety, which i'm very proud of. but as we think about how we go from good to great, we really want to make sure that we have a robust roadmap that we know where are the strategic and most cost effective investments as we continue to make the service

fast, frequent, reliable, clean and safe. so this isn't starting from scratch. this is building on all of the good work that we've done, but it's trying to make sure as we're making all of these tough choices around the service that we're protecting some of that success and bringing it to the next level. so with that, it's my honor to introduce amy. mr. good afternoon, directors. thank you so much for having me today. my name is amy alvear, and i'm here to give a brief overview of the development of our customer experience program, where i'll be highlighting the progress that we've made so far and also what's coming up next. so but first, let's start by getting

acquainted with the customer experience champions who are driving this work forward. i think julie's already there okay. all right. so let's meet the team. there are three members from the customer experience team desmond miller, who is our management assistant who provides administrative support for the team. we have doris king, our team analyst, who assists with the evaluations of performance data and internal process improvements. and then there's myself, amy alvera, the project manager leading the development of the customer experience program alongside our consultants, transit cx and wsp. and of course, our core team, which consists of julie kirschbaum, brant jones, lita ibarra, sorry, lupita ibarra, i'm sorry, lupita, sean kennedy,

diana desantis, kristen holland and teresa scism. so now that we've met our dedicated team, let's dive into the work we're doing to enhance the customer experience. next slide please. so what is customer experience? customer experience is defined as the sum of all interactions that our customers have with us at every stage of their journey, whether they're planning their trip, waiting at a stop, or riding our system and arriving at their destination. but each of these moments contributes to how they feel about our service. if you can kindly direct your attention to the transit rider journey diagram displayed on the screen, and i just invite you to think about how our customers or what our customers experience at

each stage of their journey, what they are seeing, what they're hearing, what they're smelling and how they're feeling. so by understanding their pain points at these stages, we can identify opportunities to enhance their journey and create a more seamless and memorable experience. next slide please. and really, thanks to the hard work and dedication of sfmta staff, we have made significant strides in improving the customer experience. this year, we achieved a 72% customer satisfaction rating, our highest ever, and set a post-pandemic ridership record with more than half a million average daily boardings since february of 2020. it truly does reflect the hard work and commitment of everyone involved in delivering our services. shown on the screen are key contributing

projects and initiatives to these milestones, so projects that improve speed and reliability. we've established 75 miles of transit only lanes as part of the muni forward project, shown on the top left. we've reduced subway delays through focused infrastructure and maintenance effort that's shown at the bottom center. we've enhanced customer information center systems. that's shown on the top right, and we have initiatives to initiatives that enhance our cleanliness, where we have frequent cleaning of our vehicles, stations and platforms. that's shown on the bottom left and initiatives that increase our safety, which we've expanded. the muni transit ambassador program, also known as mtap, that's shown on the top center, an employee mentoring and additional security

personnel shown at the bottom right. next slide please. and lastly, the safety equity equity initiative that prioritizes harassment prevention and ensures rider and operator safety remains at the forefront. so these achievements reflects how our efforts to improve the customer experience are paying off. and it's clear that prioritizing our riders needs is driving this recovery and increased satisfaction. and while our customers recognize that we're on the right path, there's always room to grow, which drives us to do more by keeping our customer's needs front and center. we'll build this momentum and work towards making muni the first choice of transportation for san francisco. next slide please. so to help build on our progress, the next step is to develop a

robust customer experience program. and what is a customer experience program. it is a systematic set of activities, techniques, practices and values to improve customer experiences. it's a strategic initiative focused on enhancing how our customers perceive and engage with muni. and as you're all well aware, our riders experiences shape their overall perception of our services and the customer experience program really aims to improve these experiences by addressing key touchpoints in their journey from their trip planning onboard interactions to arriving at their destinations shown on the screen. you see a list of 20 different workstreams that are grouped in four categories, and i'll walk them. i'll walk through them briefly. first one is identify and remedy customer

experience pain points where we have five different workstreams under this category. second, advancing customer experience culture where you'll see five different workstreams under this category. thirdly, designing great experiences where we have four different workstreams. and lastly, institutionalizing customer experience where you'll see six different workstreams. so our consultants wsp and transit cx presented this menu of workstreams for the core team to review. and after prioritizing them, the selected workstreams will then define our new customer experience program, a program that's geared to enhance rider satisfaction, build trust within our customers, and support long term ridership growth. next slide please. and how are we achieving this. so the consultants are

using a strategic planning and development process model made of key tasks. that's that's displayed on the screen. i'll walk through each deliverable. the first core meetings. these are monthly meetings with the core team who reviews, discusses, deliverables and provide guidance on the development of the customer experience program. second, the internal stakeholder interviews. so our consultants have conducted comprehensive interviews with key stakeholders across various divisions. these discussions focused on gaining personal insights into their definitions of customers and the range of customer experiences, as well as their key priorities for the customer experience program. third, the inventory assessment gap analysis of current listening posts. so the listening posts are the methods our agency employees to

understand and respond to customer needs. and our consultants have reviewed the processes and outcomes of existing feedback mechanisms, which includes customer surveys, complaints and comments, as well as social media feedback. fourth, our brownbag sessions. these are knowledge sessions to help familiarize and further educate staff on customer experience. and fifth workstreams id. this is the process of identifying suitable workstreams that will help shape the customer experience program. and lastly, 3 to 5 year roadmap. the goal is to create a strategic plan that unfolds over 3 to 5 years based on the selected workstreams. next slide please. we are near the completion of the project and here's a quick recap of our progress. so the blue color indicates what's been completed,

and the yellow indicates what still needs to be done. with the core meetings. we've had five of our six monthly meetings, with one more to go in january, where the consultants will present the final roadmap. second, our internal stakeholder interviews. we've completed 17 total stakeholder interviews. third, the inventory and assessment gap analysis of the listening posts. so this is also complete. the consultants have shared a matrix and the final listening post assessment report. fourth, the brown bag knowledge sessions. we have successfully completed all four monthly sessions. actually just last week. and fifth, the customer experience workstreams identification and roadmap. the workstreams that will help shape the customer experience program have been identified by the core team, and a draft of the roadmap is under review, which is scheduled to be finalized by the

consultants in january. and lastly, the roadmap presentations. the final roadmap will be presented by our consultants wsp and transit cx. in our last core meeting in january. next slide please. so as i've mentioned earlier, brownbag sessions are a great way to learn more and further elevate our knowledge of customer experience. as you can see on the timeline, we've held four hour long brownbag sessions and the dates and topics of each sessions are highlighted on the slide. so in september, we kicked off our brownbag session where we talked about the introduction to customer experience and the project scope. and then in october, we were privileged enough to have our peer agencies present their own customer experience units of their agencies from atlanta,

vancouver and portland. and then in november, we had a real robust discussion about the build out of our customer experience culture. and then just last week, we had a really great discussion about designing great experiences. so if you're interested in viewing any of the sessions, i'd be happy to share the links to the recordings. next slide please. it it really feels like it was just yesterday when we started this process in june, and now we're on time to deliver and receive the completed customer experience program nearing this month at the end of the month, and i am really both excited and truly humbled to be leading this effort with the incredible support of the core team and the customer experience team, because we truly do believe in this initiative and how important it is. this program

really goes beyond simply solving problems. it's really about reshaping how we how our customers experience our transit system, and we are committed to creating a space where every writer, regardless of their background or reason for using our transit system, feels genuinely valued and supported. so by being proactive and anticipating their needs, we aim to ensure that every journey with us is not only safe, clean, accessible and reliable, but truly memorable. so that wraps up my presentation today. thank you so much. thank you so much. tommy. and i believe director hines has some clarifying questions. okay. i don't have questions, but i do have a couple of comments. madam chair, if you want me to hold until

public comment is over. do you want me to go now? yeah, you can go now. that's perfect. okay. thank you. perfect. thank you for the presentation. and it was also great to meet yesterday and hear you're sort of sfmta's story. you also have a long, long history of service and family connections to this. and we appreciate that. the one sort of note that i would give you as you move forward is when you come back in january, we'll i would i think it would be helpful for my colleagues and i to see kind of a proposed budget for this, this, this work. we know it's going to be a tough budget. i say go ahead. but. it

it's always good to know what it would take to implement our, our full vision of this work because it is so important. and so having that as kind of a guidepost. and then we're going to just do their depending on what our, what our budget situation. but having a good idea of the budget would be helpful. i think when you come back, can i ask a clarifying question? we have been approaching this work really as much as possible in a in a cost neutral way. so we are we are aligning ftes and in some cases dollar amounts to this work, but with the assumption that it would have to come out of

existing resources. and we have also been very, very lean as much focused on what we might want to protect in a in a reduction environment. and rather than add if the board is also interested in what we think we could do with kind of additional resources or taking it to the next level, you know, we could also bring bring some of that as well. so i, i'd like a little bit of feedback. we've been approaching this in the kind of scrappiest and most barren of, of ways, just because we wanted to get the work started and we wanted to solidify the momentum and move it to a culture. if the board

would like to see more of a small, medium, large we could do that as well. yeah. and i and i appreciate that approach. and i yesterday i mean you did a great job of explaining that to me. and in fact, she had mentioned that she had come from a different position in the agency and is doing such a wonderful job in implementing this. and so i do i do appreciate that. and i think that that that's going to have, from a practical level, probably going to have to be what it is going forward. but i think at least for me, having some degree, having some sort of benchmark of about like what would it look like were we to

add positions dedicated to this so that people, some folks could go back to their committee, other positions would would be good. just just to have a look at what that would feel like, knowing that we're probably going to have to go back to the dew point use the default of what you're what you have been doing, which is sort of scrappy with what you would do with what we have kind of approach. but i think this is so important that looking at potentially how to scale it, even if not in this budget, but in future ones, at least from my perspective. i would like to see that. i don't know how my colleagues feel, and they can definitely weigh in with their thoughts. thank you for that feedback. it does also align with the muni funding working group because we are at

our last meeting going to look at a broad bucket of service enhancements, many of which are coming from ami's work and from the larger agency work around customer experience, because tackling things like security and cleanliness, we know are going to be very important as we build a coalition and head towards the ballot. thank you so much. thank you. director. director. heminger. thank you, madam chair. look, i hesitate to give you a hard time because it's jeff's last meeting, but i am somewhat puzzled about what this project actually is. and it seems to be almost a cause and effect issue where i think

something in there is in effect, when it's really a cause. i mean, as an example, you put up the, the, the picture of the, the signs at the bus stops that tell you when your bus is coming. did that come out of this project or is that something that we were doing anyway? so it seems to me that what you've presented us is a series of examples of things that we were doing anyway that have now been gathered under some umbrella, that that is the approach. so we're trying to get a systematic way of basically culminating of all these successes that we've had, but they have been done by, you know, different groups across the divisions of our agency. but i think this is a way to really just encompass them in one one section and highlighting our success. this project cost. so

okay, so the contract cost, it was a 139,000 139,000. okay. well so that's not a lot of money. no i'm not sure when we've got a $300 million budget staring us in the face that this one would have survived the ax, but i look i do worry. back to your point, julie, about the funding group. one of the, one of the things we're trying to pull off there is to tell folks, look, we've made all the reasonable reductions we can make, and what's left is the stuff that you don't want to do, which is which is reduce service. i don't know if we can make that case if we've got too many of these kinds of projects that really are just not going to get you a lot of bang for the buck. let me take that one. i

knew i'd get to them. so there is no better team anywhere for figuring out how to manage through the technical aspects of a major service disruption or crisis. when something breaks in the subway or out there on the surface, like this team goes into action. but in our diagnosed diagnostics around sort of post-event, one of the gaps that kept arising is our team's first instinct is to think about the system and safety and the mechanics. and it's not until we figure out the system that we start thinking about the customer. and from the very beginning of covid, one of the things that director julie kirschbaum insisted upon was that we don't overpromise and

underdeliver, and that at every step of the way, we focus on quality rather than quantity. and that is why, in our worst financial crisis ever, where we're still not running 12 muni lines that we did back in 2018, that we have the highest customer service rating ever. in order to win in 26, we need to figure out, regardless of where we're at in resources, we need to figure out how do we close that remaining gap so that we're always thinking about the customer, because it's through thinking about the customer that we win. and so this is one of the ways in which we have cut back on so many things. but there's been a couple of things that i've kept investing in. one is equity, both outside the agency and inside the agency. and that has paid huge dividends. the other is customer service. and so i want to make sure that we're prepared, whether we're growing or shrinking, that we never let go of our focus on the customer.

and this is a tiny investment in really concluding work that we've been doing for many years of just bridging that last gap around the customer. i agree with everything you've said. it's just the best thing we could do for the customer is to show up on time, right? isn't it? and we're doing that from a technical standpoint. the issue is when the tree falls down across the roadway or a switch breaks in the subway. we are masters at figuring out how to get around the technical problem. we can still use some improvement around getting the information out to the customer. when we're not able to get the bus around the town. that's a very it's a very timely point too, because there is a tree across the fiveaa, which is why i was late today. and so your point there is that it's not just showing up on time, it's telling people why you're late. that's right. when you have to be late. and we find this again

and again that san franciscans know that the system is full of vulnerabilities, and they forgive us when something goes wrong, but only if they know what should they be doing instead. and also why? like what happened? why? what are you doing to make sure that doesn't happen again? and if we can deliver that, then we truly build trust with our writers, particularly in a time of deepening financial crisis. yeah. and that's that's an example of a of a pain point. right. so the work that we were presenting are previous pain points that that we have closed, you know, like the busses were dirty and they were full of graffiti. and we closed that pain point through a combination of the design of the vehicles, the materials, the sight lines and the cleaning and body shop program. we still have, you know, 4 or 5 pretty low hanging

fruit pain points that we want to keep moving on. and so instead of us wanting to do everything all the time, this roadmap is going to it's going to narrow us and help us really focus in a strategic way. if i could, madam chair, just on the point that julie raised, because she keeps connecting this to the funding working group, and i agree with that connection. now that we're losing jeff, are you going to make the kind of personal commitment he made to that effort? because he was at every meeting and he was he was the voice of the mta is that you now? that's me. well, watch what you ask for. i am looking forward to the village coming together to get us where we need to go. okay. thank you. thank you, madam chair. thank you, thank you. any other comments?

colleagues, i do want to just surface. what i heard from my colleagues right now is just. there are i think there's an interest right now just to understand, as you approach these outcomes in a cost neutral way, and if there is a moment to expand or invest a little bit more, like just getting a window into that. but i think also what would be helpful is just prioritizing what you're seeing. right? so if you are analyzing or getting feedback on pain points, what are the ones that you know in a cost neutral way? we're going to prioritize amongst all the other pain points that we have. right. and just getting some more insights on that, i think, you know, just as a transit rider, if i were to say if you were to, you know, survey me right now, i would say yes, communications is probably like the top one. and exactly as you're saying in your example, director tomlin, of if something goes wrong that perhaps is not within our control. i imagine that some of the customer

experience may be solid because of things that are outside of our control. what how do we help folks do the right thing? and is it something that we can control? like is it a communication? is it a text? is it what? is it right? or is it working with perhaps some of our other sister agencies? and maybe it's not something that is fully in our house or in our lane to solve, but maybe something that we have to know, like, hey, we're hearing in this particular, this particular route, folks are having a lot of challenges and it's public safety. it's this it's whatever it is. right. and that's just like that triggers us to do some sort of collaborative work with some of our sister agencies. right. so definitely curious about the specifics of the outcome of this program, specifically on routes and just that prioritization and getting a little bit more of a sense of like, if there were a little bit more investment, it's a long shot, but if there were, what

would that look like to support this initiative a little bit more and bless you, julie. thank you. all right. and i'll now open this item to public comment. if there are any folks that would like to provide public comment on this item, please do so now. i'm not seeing anyone. directors secretary sorry, do we have any accommodations? we do have an accommodation. speaker. you've been unmuted. this is for item number 12, customer experience program. speaker. you've been unmuted. okay. he might have stepped away. okay, well, with that, we'll close public comment on this item. secretary silva, please call the next item. thank you. places you on item number 13, presentation and discussion regarding a financial update.

interesting. you should have been selling those years ago. jesus. there. that's what i was saying. yes, this is what i said. you get stopped on the street. so. i said this a long time ago. i said this a long time ago. yeah. sometimes you just gotta repeat. so where's our ugly sweater? good afternoon directors. my name is brian horta. i'm the cfo of the mta, and i'm here to give you a financial update. and one of my goals as cfo was to give you more frequent information and to increase transparency in general around the agency's finances. and i am now at a point where i can start giving those regular

updates. and so this is what i hope to be the first of many quarterly updates. the data is actually from october. that's because the timing the prior month closes on the 15th. and so i get october. i'm i'm doing the analysis for october data at the end of november. and with the holiday schedule. that brings us to kind of a mid-december meeting. i hope to improve the timeliness a little bit as this becomes more of a familiar process. does this one also work? it does okay for short people. we need different microphones. okay. so what we're going to talk about today is it's been a minute since we've talked about the budget. and for board member chen it'll be your first introduction. so i wanted to make sure that we didn't just drop you off with no additional information. i'll give you a financial update on where we are in the year relative to budget. and then i want to try to

connect for you our financial status with some of the priorities that you gave to us as an agency during the budget process. so as a reminder, we are an enterprise. the revenues that we bring in are either generated by our own activities and parking in transit, or one of our biggest sources of revenue is actually the general fund, which is really important to remember because it's a formula based transfer of funds from the general fund. when the general fund does well, we do well. and then significantly in this pie chart, you can see that there's a very large portion of our budget that is federal and state relief, 15%. and that money goes away. it'll be fully expended by june of 26. and that's why our deficit begins in 2006 27. on the expenditure side, you'll note that 60% of our budget is expended on salary and fringe. and that is, i think, normal for the type of

agency that we are. we deliver a service. that service is delivered by people significantly of our 6200 positions, 2500 are operators. so almost 50% of our positions are operators. those are the people who are out there in the community every day delivering service. so our budget is very largely driven by the number of operators, our our expenditure, our expenditure is very largely driven by the number of operators that we have. and the number of operators we have is directly related to the amount of quality service that we can provide. so i do want to spend a moment talking about our non-personnel budget. i think that when sometimes non-personnel kind of gets translated in the layman's parlance, into contracted services. and so there's kind of a perception that we contract out a vast portion of our budget. but in fact, non-personnel services actually

includes much more than contracted services. it includes our insurance. we've been talking a lot about our general liability risks. it also includes the legal judgments or the payments that we pay when we when we take on risks and we have to pay a settlement. it also includes our rent, our maintenance and our workers compensation. so many of these costs are actually completely unrelated to contracted services and are actually very related to the everyday costs associated with doing business. of those contracted services, the vast majority of our contracted services go out to services that are very specialized. for example, tracking of parking citations. that is a very specialized service that's done with a very specialized software. so we pay a company for access to that software and for their services. in adjusting that software to make it meet the needs of the mta. so as

another reminder, the mta passes its budget in april, and then the city's budget follows two months later in june. and so at the time that we are making our budget decisions, the city has not yet made its budget decisions, and it also has not yet made its final revenue projections for the budget cycle. so after the mta passed its and last year, this was additionally complicated by the fact that we were not yet complete on our labor negotiations at the time you all passed the budget, so following the passage of the budget by the mta, we lost about $15 million worth of revenue over the course of the two years because of reductions in general fund projections. and also our labor negotiations turned out to be a little bit more expensive than we had anticipated that they would be when we presented to you in april. so both of those things combined have created

some current year pressure in the budget. we got notice of both of these things about 72 hours before the budget closed, and so we didn't have the opportunity to come back to you to ask for guidance on how you wanted to react to these changes. and so what that has meant is that we have less resources in actuality than are assumed in the budget. and we're going to talk about what the implications of that is in the next slide or in the coming slides. i would say. so the i think at the big picture level, we are exactly on budget, and that is both good and bad. when i started at the mta two years ago, and i looked at our budget versus actuals for the first time, what i immediately noted was that we were over $60 million under projected for revenue, and that is not good. so the fact that we are now only

negative ten from revenue, i think, shows that we've gotten a lot better at understanding what our projected revenues are and making sure that we're going to meet target so that we don't have to make current year adjustments. on the expenditure side, when i first joined, we were also hundreds of millions of dollars under expended on our labor. and what that meant was that we weren't hiring fast enough so that we had a lot of vacancies. so the good news is, we have done a great job of filling the vacancies that we have the money to fill. we still do have a very large number of vacancies because of our assumed vacancy levels, but we've gotten much faster at filling our positions. but that also means we've gotten much more expensive. and so the fact that we are very close to fully expending our budget reflects, in a good way, the increased resources available in the system. but it's also because we

are so close. it's a little bit of a cautionary tale because we're so early in the fiscal year. this only reflects four months of actuals, and a lot can happen in the remaining eight months of the year. so i think when i look at these numbers overall, i see good, good news in that we're very close to our projected revenue and that we're doing a good job of spending the resources that we have. on the other hand, i also see a moment for caution because it's so early in the fiscal year, there can be a lot of unexpected expenditure at the end of the fiscal year, and we still don't know what's going to happen with revenue. the city hasn't yet released any of its revenue projections for the current year. that should happen in the next couple of weeks. so talking a little bit more about actuals, i think the what you'll note in this table is that transit fares are actually above budget. and

what that means is that we're making more on transit revenues than we had expected. and i think that's very consistent with the increased passenger and ridership that we've seen since the end of the pandemic. and what it means is we're doing even better than we thought that we would during the budget development cycle. on the flip side, parking and other revenues are we're doing worse than we anticipated at the time that we built the budget. and what that tells me is that all of the trends that we are seeing are even more so. transit was growing. it's continuing to grow, parking was shrinking, and it's continuing to shrink more than we thought it would, consistent with the hollowing out of the downtown core, the slight under-recovery in other revenue is mostly related to the services that we perform for other departments, and under and under recovery of those services. and then there have

been on the operating grant side, some decreases in assumptions about how much revenue we're going to get from the state through our operating grants. on the transit side, i do want to note that not only is the pattern around increased ridership, continuing the pattern in the shift from monthly passes to single rides is continuing as well. we incorporated it into our budget assumptions, assumptions that there would be fewer monthly passes and more single ride passes that has come to fruition, even more so than we projected in the budget. so i think it just shows kind of, you know, a, a, a, a trend that is continuing in the same way and a change in the way people are traveling or paying to travel, i should say, on the parking side, this data shows us that most of our parking weakness is actually in parking garages. and that makes sense because as we know

from the news coverage, people are not driving downtown and they are not parking in parking garages. and you can really see that in the next slide. i think the numbers here are less significant than the differences between the blue and orange bars. you can see in the blue. the blue bar represents how much revenue was generated by a particular garage in 1819, and the orange bar shows how much revenue was generated in 2324. and this is illustrative of the fact that our biggest decreases are at sutter stockton, which is right outside of union square fifth, and mission, which is on the other side of the westfield, and then ellis and o'farrell, which is kind of somewhere between the two. and so really what we're seeing here is a reflection of the fact that when activity around downtown is less, our parking activity is less. and you can see that directly in our garage revenues. so i talked a little bit about what some of the revenue risks are and how important general

fund transfers are to our budget. so this slide shows the adjustments in general fund projections since mid-pandemic. and what you can see, because the controller adjusts its projections of general fund revenue every six months. and what you can see is that every six months, for the last three years, those projections have decreased. they've gotten amount of money that we anticipate getting gets smaller and smaller each year. and i say that because there is a risk in the current year that the same could happen, which would mean that we had less resources than we planned in the current year. and so this is mostly just to remind everyone that the budget is a plan and that the real world happens around us. and when the real world changes, we have to adjust to it. so on the expenditure side, you can see that we're doing very well at

hiring our positions and expanding our labor authority. we are essentially at budget. we're a little bit spending, a little bit more than we had anticipated in materials and supplies at this time of the year, but i think at a four and four months, that's not a lot of data under your belt yet. and purchasing for materials and supplies can be very lumpy. like, for example, this year we're doing a large overhaul of the lrb brakes. and so i think the trend line at the four months is not that strong. but what we can generally say is we're a little bit overextended, our material supplies, but we've made up the difference by under expending our non-personnel services and our salary and fringe. but as a reminder, non-personnel services include things that are outside of our control, like worker's comp claims and litigation settlements, so that the fact that we're under expended at this time of the year is there's still eight months of the year

to go, and there's a lot of things that are outside of our control. so i look at this number as sort of like i'm holding my breath. it looks good, but i'm i'm cautiously optimistic. so overall revenues are generally consistent with the budget, and they continue to reflect all of the trends that we've seen post pandemic. on the expenditure side, we are generally consistent with budget, but we are very close to being at our budgeted level of expenditure, and so we have to really work hard on our internal controls. and to director hemingers point, make sure that every dollar that we spend is being spent to its absolute highest possible use. and as i've mentioned a couple of times, the margin for error with a $20 million difference, the margin for error is very small, and we still have eight months of the year to go. so let's let's talk about how the budget

connects to the priorities that you all expressed to me. so one of the things that the board expressed an interest in, and particularly director kahina, was actively marketing our discount fares in conjunction with the fare increase that's planned to happen in early january. the board was very interested that we improve fare compliance, gave strong direction, that we should be aligning the service that we provide with our available resources, and that we should be thinking really hard about how to solve that year three problem. so i'm going to give you an update on those four things. so on the discount fare programs. as a reminder, our transit fares are anticipated to increase on january 1st, and we've done a lot of work around our discount fare outreach. we did some great how to videos for signing up for lifeline. it's amazing what one staff person can do with an iphone. he he

literally had one person record him on his phone signing up for lifeline, and they did it in under two minutes. so lifeline i think we've we've made great strides in understanding how to make lifeline the easiest possible to sign up. you can submit all of your verification data online with your phone. and we've also been coordinating really closely with hrsa to make sure that we have touchpoints with people who are already receiving services from the city of san francisco, and we've been closely partnering with the tenderloin neighborhood development corporation. on the compliance side, you may remember that we added about 30. i think it was 36 transit fare inspectors in the budget. that was the only expansion of staff that we had in the budget. and the results that we've seen between having additional staff and thinking differently about

the way we deploy staff has really made a remarkable difference. they those tfis performed over 60,000 inspections in october. that is more that is the highest month for inspections on record. and again, i want to emphasize that these inspections are not intended to be punitive. and they're not about raising transit fare revenue. what they're about is connecting people, making sure that people who can afford to pay pay, and connecting people who cannot afford to pay to the appropriate discount service, and perhaps most importantly, to director tomlin's point, increasing the public's perception of our competence around a safe system which includes paying your fair share. and so the just even the perception of people seeing the fees ask people for their proof of payment goes a long way

towards preparing us for success. at the november 26th ballot. on the subject of aligning service with available resources, as i mentioned, we got some bad news at the end of the budget cycle last year, and so we have a little bit less resources than we had anticipated at the time of the budget, and that is going to necessitate some service reductions, both in the current fiscal year, which ends on june 30th of 2025 and again in the next fiscal year, which begins on july 1st, 2025. so what you can expect to see is some modest decreases in early february. and then in the beginning of the year, we're going to be starting our outreach for potential service reductions in the summer of 2025 on the street side, because of the delivery and service. in the way that streets operations runs, we don't stop

performing a service because the service is so essential to pedestrian and street safety, but it takes us longer to when we hire fewer staff, it takes us longer to get there. so we anticipate that our responses to sign and pay requests and 311 calls are going to be slower. it's going to take more time to implement 20 mile an hour speed limit and slow streets, and there's going to be delays in repair and preventative maintenance at 220 intersections. so on the transit side, there'll be an actual reduction in service. and on the street side, there'll be a delay in the timeline in which services are provided. so the last and perhaps the most long term priority is closing the 2627 deficit. as a reminder, the muni funding working group is looking at four types of solutions efficiency improvements and service cuts. we've had meetings about

proposing a variety of ideas in both of those categories, and because no one wants to cut service, but that is the only option that we are left with. if we don't increase revenue. perhaps our most important meeting is happening in january, where we'll be talking about ways to increase revenue, and then we'll be talking about service enhancements that could potentially put us in a better position for a success at the november 2026 ballot. and the comptroller will be releasing a report in march. and following the release of that report, we plan to orient a lot of the mtb workshop in march around keeping you giving, keeping you informed about the outcomes of the muni funding working group and then soliciting your feedback as early direction for the budget. in response to the muni funding working group. i think regardless of what happens, this is going to be a really challenging budget cycle and we

need to start really, really early in order to have the time to give you policy options so that you can choose between things. so our goal is to update you on the muni funding working group, which will essentially provide you a list of all of the options, and then sort of the temperature of the group, which is a cross section of stakeholders from a variety of different groups in the city on what is their temperature on each of these solutions, so that we can then take your temperature on the solutions come back to you with different packages of proposals about ways that we might close the budget deficit and get your early feedback. in the summer of 2025. and so that we kind of have a baseline, a directional baseline for where you want us to go when we do the budget development in the fall, and then the regional revenue measure, of course, is a critical part of our long term

funding plan. we most mtc just took a vote last week where we had a number of different options that were approved to be potentially submitted to the legislature in the new year, and also got approval to start doing some polling on these options so that we can understand where the public is in response to the variety of options that have been presented. so in summary, one of your priorities was to actively market discount fares. we've done that by coordinating with hsa and the tenderloin neighborhood development corporation. your one of your other directives was to improve fare compliance. we had 60,000 inspections in october, more than we've had in any other month since the program started to align service with available resources, you'll see some modest service reductions in february, and we'll start the outreach process for more significant reductions in the summer of 2025. and street

services will be delayed, and the muni funding working group and the regional revenue measure will be brought to you as part of the board workshop in march to start getting your feedback. and just i think overall, my general sense of where the agency is i am cautiously optimistic. we are very close to budget, but given the challenges that we're facing, i think that's honestly the best that we could expect in at this challenging time. and i'm happy to answer questions. thank you so much for your presentation, bri. colleagues, do you have any clarifying questions? director chen? thank you chair. thank you. thank you so much for that. quick. do we have an idea for summer of 2625? what the what? the rough service plan might be?

is that is that still in discussion? it's still under discussion, but we're talking about the neighborhood of 3 to 4% of current service reductions, 3 to 4% reductions of current service. and then if compared to 2019 service hours, i think we're currently at like 80. percent. so. it really depends on your metrics, you know. so as director tomlin said, we have 12 lines that we have not restored. we also have a lot of lines that have a lot more service than they had pre-covid, particularly in the middle of the day, because we didn't have to serve a really intense 8 to 830 and, you know, 5 to 530. we've been able to redistribute it. so our bus miles are basically back to where we were during covid, and

our rail service is probably about two thirds are our midday service is exactly where it was at, but we're just not running a peak rail schedule because we don't have the demand. okay. so in terms and because also we've done the efficiency improvements, right, even in terms of we're getting more service per service hour currently. so in terms of and so if i were to repeat what i heard, we were about the same pre-covid in terms of bus miles, service miles delivered about two thirds for rail. okay. thank you. that's all my questions. thank you. okay. thank you. director chen, director heminger. thank you, madam chair. i've got several questions on slide eight. if you could go to that one. brea. yes.

transit fares. as i recall, they were about 200 million a year pre-pandemic. and we're still at half of that. although we've recovered 75% of our ridership. so i think the last time i asked this question, the answer was the delta. there is if not fare evasion, it's not collecting the fares that were owed. correct or not. i think there's a little bit of nuance there because there are. we've also as part of our response to covid, we significantly increased the types of discounted fares that we provide. for example, free muni for youth was not was was implemented during covid. so that is a significant piece of fares that that have been lost. i believe in the last four years

they weren't caused by covid, but they were at the same time. the timing was similar. yes. right. and the i think the slide you showed about the fare inspectors was about how many inspections they made, what were after, of course, bottom line is the money they owe us. so is the 4 million extra that we've got for transit fares. is there a way to connect that? well to that we've got a greater deterrent effect happening out there, which means more people are paying their fares. well, i will say that site transit citation revenue is double what it was relative to last year. so there there is an there is a positive impact on transit citation revenue. however, i want to emphasize that the purpose of the program is not to generate money by issuing citations. the purpose of the program, to your point, is to increase people paying fares. i think we have any way of knowing

that. are you is there a way to track it? what we've been trying to do. so it's difficult to tease out how much of the additional monies is related to increased ridership and how much is related to increased payment. but i will say we looked at the citation data, and we noted that the vast majority, like over 90% of people, get one transit citation. they are not cited multiple times for the same offense. so receiving a citation is, we think, positively correlated with future payment. and we've tried to do some kind of econometric analysis to parse out the difference between fare, the increase in passenger fare versus the increase related to evasion. and we're not quite

there yet, but it is something that's that we are actively looking at numerically. okay, going back to the slide, the next question was about the operating grants. that's mostly the money you get from mtc. in this case, about $4 million of the reduction is due to a reduction in sta revenue, which does come from mtc. and the other $4 million is related to the nuance of a lafa grant, which is for taxis and transit for differently abled people that we booked. because of the way the grant revenue came in, we booked two years worth of revenue. but i know because it's a reimbursement grant, we're not going to have enough expenditure to recover the full amount. so it's but but those big numbers, there are 200 million each in the budget and projected. that's majority from mtc. there's a lot

of sales tax money in that too right. so is that another way of saying that the regional economy is also sort of recovering slowly? the state economy? yes. yeah. not just us. i mean, we were booming when everyone else wasn't. and now we're all in the i think the state complete the sentence. the state is also is also growing. we are very fortunate in california that we have experienced many years of lots of growth. and so projections are always based on history. so projections assumed that our luck would continue. and we are just not quite as lucky as we now as we were in the past. right. and then finally, i want to go to the bottom one. and i've been on this board a long time now, and i still am mystified about how you deal with the fund balance,

because you've got 114 million budgeted, 39 million projected, and no difference between the two numbers. it is a challenge. the carry forward is largely around. for example, we have an inventory system that automatically, you know, if you order 50 tires and then you use four and then you use four again and use four again, you get down to 20. and then the system automatically reorders to 30. we also have a lot of like long lead time items that are like specialized equipment that we have encumbered them in one year, and then we follow them forward to the next year. but the, the, the care. so the carry forward shows up in this row down here. but when it's when it's spent it shows up in actuals. so the carry forward comes with a cost that it's going to pay for. it's yeah it's

kind of an in and out. but what about the fund balance. the fund balance in least in my recent memory has sort of been whatever you needed it to be to clear the budget year. if so, in this and at some point you run out of money. correct. and our fund balance right now is very low. we budgeted 39. we outside of the carry forward, we budgeted $39 million in fund balance to pay for one time expenditures in the current year. i'm a big believer in one time source, one time use. so for example, we budgeted non-revenue vehicles which are which have not traditionally been part an expense that we've been planning for. but i'm trying to move us towards a place where we're on an active replacement program for our non-revenue vehicles. but but just as a matter of mathematics, i mean, why don't you show like, $80 million

deficit in the far right column for this item? because that's the amount that the projected actuals are below the revised budget, right. well, i think because i mean, every other every other row in this chart is you're comparing, you know, one, two and three because the, the ultimately what will happen if a carry forward is not spent is that it will it will fall to fund balance. it won't be kind of part of our revenue versus actual. but i mean, point well taken. i can think about a way. it's just it swings the numbers considerably. i mean, otherwise this thing says, hey, you're pretty close on actuals, when in fact we're 80 million to the wrong way. point well taken. let me think about a way to make it a little bit more clear. yeah,

maybe at least just tearing apart the fund balance in the carry forward into two separate items. but i suspect it's more than that, too. thank you, madam chair. thank you. director heminger. director tarlov. thank you. chair. thank you, director emminger for. looking at slide eight. i had all the same questions. so looking at our labor and fringe budget, 60% of our expenditures, by my calculations, that's $913 million. so if we are looking for an area where we can find money to flow to the bottom line, that just seems like a very good place to look to me. and so i am curious about. what

we're what we're doing around that. you know, i have a great deal of faith that we have worked really, really hard to, to understand our needs for, for staff and to hire smartly and to, to be, you know, very careful with, with that budget. but recently i, i learned or i believe what i heard was that, for example, with our transit operators, about a quarter of those folks are not on the job at any given moment. and so they are. you know, perhaps on leave,

perhaps out on work comp, you know, various reasons. so, you know, when we have a and i and i believe i heard you say that the operators are the largest group within our, within our, our labor pool. and so i would be very interested to learn more about how that breaks down and what are the various reasons and what what is the bulk of what's going on. and what i'm getting at is that, you know, absenteeism is an issue in every industry, it's a it's a source of a tremendous amount of stress for certainly the financials within an organization. but and, but it's

really important to note that it's an important source of stress for, for our, our workforce, you know, having to cover for people who are not there, having to hire in addition to what is needed to, you know, adapt to a larger absenteeism situation, is difficult. so i would i'd be very interested for two reasons. one is that, you know, i believe there could be some, you know, ways that we might be able to find to reduce that number. maybe it's through, you know, better work safety so that we can reduce, you know, the number of people that are out on work comp or, you know, other, other

ways of, you know, promoting a culture where being being present at work is prioritized for, for our employees and, and then also just to avoid a situation where we spiral and that there's morale issues and that could create, you know, an even deeper problem. so that's something that i would be interested to learn more about how how we think about that and what we're doing about that. because, you know, by my calculations, any, you know, 1% that we could of improvement that we could find is like 9 or $10 million, which we sorely need right now. and so that that would be a piece of feedback that i would give. so i have a

couple of other thoughts, but do you is there anything i don't want to i think two things. there are a couple different financial impacts of leave. in some cases, leave is unpaid leave, in which case you are you are a person that is on the books, but you're not being paid and you're not receiving benefits. so the financial impact there is limited to the administrative cost of, you know, administering the leave. but there are some forms of leave that are paid and some forms of forms of leave that are paid and legally mandated, like maternity, paternity, disability, sick, long term sick leave. so i think there is some merit in breaking down that number and understanding it more. and then i would also note that we do have a light duty program, which is to kind of

address what you were saying about how someone may have had an injury at work and they're not able to do their assigned job, but they are able to do a job that is consistent with their ability at the time post-injury until they get themselves back up to fighting shape. so those are that is also one of the ways that we manage our leave program. right. and i and i do want to be careful in highlighting this that, you know, i think there's something to be proud of in that we have a workforce where people are able to take leave to, you know, care for a baby or an elderly parent or a family member or, or themselves. and these are state mandated leaves. and, and that's, that's something very important. but it's just a quarter just seems like an awful

lot. so that's one thing that i wanted to touch on. i one of the comments that has come through a number of times from one particular frequent commenter and is the idea of freezing salaries over $100,000 and i not as a way of advocating for that. i, i just was curious what what your thoughts are about that idea. well, i would say, first of all, san francisco is a very expensive place to live. so salaries that may seem high numerically are actually make it challenging to live, you know, to pay the basics in the bay area. but as i noted, our transit operators are our our

highest classification and our second highest classification is pcos. and both of those jobs are budgeted at about $95,000. so the our basic workers doing the basic function of the agency are very, very close to that limit. so i think $100,000 is not quite as much as it sounds like when you say the word out loud. and but and, and those are, you know, very skilled, complex professional jobs. and so and i would note that we compete. right. you know some we said are are part of the labor negotiation process is a survey of similar situated jobs in a similar geographic area. and if we there are many other transit agencies that need operators and we need to pay a wage that is

consistent with attracting talented operators, like the amazing person who was recognized at the beginning of today's meeting. right. and i don't think that this public commenter is thinking about those folks. so i really appreciate you highlighting that. that is, you know, that's where we're coming in for those very critical roles. what about more managerial roles? senior senior level roles? i think that's more what what this person is, is driving at. so the charter limits us to 2.75% of our budgeted positions can be managerial. so by definition, nearly 97% of our positions have to be non managerial positions. and then i would also note that our our way many of our

classifications salaries are actually negotiated citywide. so that an accountant at the mta makes the same as an accountant at any other city department. and so there are ripple effects. you know, it's a we call it the city family for a reason. we are all impacted by the actions that the others take. and so there is negotiating wages. is a is a product that's undertaken by the city as a whole. okay. thank you. that is, you know, very, very helpful. and i hope that i. taken. and in a similar vein on the public comment i've heard in a number of different areas here in the hearing room through

public comment, you know, just in the general media and at the muni funding working group, an idea that we should be seeking revenue through some kind of fee or licensing of bicyclists and maybe other, you know, alternative riders. have you have you heard that suggestion, and what are your thoughts about if that would be something to think about or explore? so i, i have frequently yes, heard that suggestion as well. and in fact, director rice and i were talking about it earlier today. and in fact, the state passed a law in 2022 that prohibited requiring bicycle permits to ride a bike. okay, i'm glad to just have

those questions from the public answered, and i really appreciate that. and that concludes my questions. thank you very much. thank you so much, director henderson. thank you. i have a i think maybe this is just kind of a basic question, but it's along the lines of the. revenue conversation that director tarloff was just having with you. i, you know, i see over the past year have learned that we are sort of at we're very, very dependent on the general fund. and so when it's up, we're up. and when it's not, you know, we're where we are today. and so i guess my question is, aside from it's sort of like a, i guess a maybe a meta question like aside from the general obligation bonds, is there a way for us to have a substantial revenue source? that is not the

bonds and not that that allows us to not be so dependent on the general fund? i think that is the primary theme of both the muni funding working group and the regional revenue measure. the regional revenue measure, for example, is contemplating putting a sales tax on the ballot, which would increase the sales tax in depending on the final outcome in counties to play to pay for transportation across the region. also being considered as potentially a parcel tax. we at the muni funding working group are going to be talking about some revenues that are within our control. yes, potentially what we might some of these ideas are, are things that you have heard in the past, sending an evening, you know, extending meter hours, sunday parking. where in the city do we charge for parking. how much do we charge for parking? you know,

themes that we talked a lot about in the last budget cycle are now, i think, very, very we the state relief bought us two years to get our act together to come up with a plan. and we've spent the last two years identifying new revenue sources that will replace the federal and state relief when it's fully expended. i think i counted this morning. i think we have 20 ideas, and those 20 ideas are going to be presented to the muni funding working group in january. we're going to take the political temperature on those ideas with the our labor partners, the members of the board of supervisors, the sfcta, two of your members, community groups. we're going to try to understand how people feel about those ideas. what it yes, no, or maybe kind of like that, but not so much, you know, like where on the dial. how far, how far are we willing to go. and that's what we're going to bring to you

in march to then layer on what is your impact,our thoughts about those ideas. so we are going to be talking a lot about new revenue ideas in march. great. that's i will be sure to be tuned in to the to the muni funding working group and all the other meetings, of course. and then i think my last sort of just clarification on that is when you say some options that are within our control, that's within this board's control, or is that within the city's control without having to, let's say, go to the ballot? both, both we are all options are on the table. we are looking at some options that are within our control, some options that are within our control. but we would need a state legislative change, some options that are in our control, but would require a vote of the board of supervisors. some options that require a vote of the people. you know, we really are trying

to put everything on the table so that we can pile up all the different ideas. and i think no one idea is going to solve the problem. we're going to have to pile up a lot of small ideas. yeah, that's sort of i think that that's sort of what i was trying to figure out is, you know, set aside the bonds. how many of the 20 do we have to get, or do we have to use to get to filling the gap? well, if the general fund continues to perform the way it is, for context, the regional revenue measure at a half cent sales tax in its current thinking, the mta would get about $90 million, so 90 of the 322 could be solved by a half cent sales tax. that leaves us a pretty far way to go. we have talked about extended meter hours and sunday meters in the past. those are

somewhere between 15 and 20 million. so now we just solved $100 million of the problem with two ideas, and we have 222 to go. and most ideas i think are around, you know, depending on the idea. but a lot of the ideas are around $20 million. so okay, at five ideas per 100 million, we're looking at about at about probably around 15 ideas. okay. and these are all going to require a lot of bravery on the part of everyone in this room, everyone in this building and every citizen walking the streets, biking, riding muni, all the things. and there are, i think, as the reminder that we heard earlier, there are going to be some trade offs. but i think obviously some significant benefits to cobbling together the right tapestry of solutions.

so thank you, i will i really do want to hear more about the, the 20 ideas or hopefully there are some more that are maybe $50 million a piece that come up. given that we need probably 15, the even even the 20. yeah yeah, yeah. thank you. thank you, madam chair. thank you so much, directors. brea, just to thank you so much for this presentation and understanding that you're really just working off of a quarter's worth of data and quarter and change. so i understand that it can be quite, you know, ambitious to try to bring numbers to us and forecast with just having a few data or many data sets. but it's still very early on in the fiscal year in terms of where we're going to be at the next time we talk about this in march. right. at that point, we would have like around seven months or so of

monthly closes to really understand, like what are the trends and to inform the trends. do you think within that time some of these foreign initiatives that you named, like you'll have enough data to understand this was effective? this was not effective, you know, like this was worth our time. this was not worth our time, i think. so, you know, one of the things that i've been really focusing on this year is internal control, so that i can understand the pace at which we're spending money and what we're spending it on. and those controls have been kind of implemented in this first part of the year. and i'm looking to see what, what data that, you know, we'll see the fruits of our labor probably starting in january. got it. okay. and i say this because like i imagine some of this stuff takes time to write. so especially if we're doing outreach campaigns for our subsidized fare programs, that takes time to have touchpoints.

and sometimes you need 2 or 3, sometimes five touchpoints until somebody actually engages in the service. right. and so just wanted curious if i'm not sure if you're, you know, more about this or someone else on the team that might but what is the strategy for that and how do we envision that by march we would have those those five touch points with folks to really, truly assess was this effective or not effective? well, what i do think is exciting is that we recently finished an onboard survey. and so i think that is going to yield a lot of really, you know, what? we're actually able to talk to individuals and understand what is their demographic profile and who and how. how did they pay to ride. so i'm really looking forward to digging into that data and making those connections. right. and i say all this because once we get to the point of, you

know, looking at trade offs, of course, like my, my hope is that we've exhausted all sorts of efforts to make those trade offs. right. and so, you know, did we reach out to like, our immigrant community members? did we reach out to like our monolingual folks, like, did we, you know, like all those different things? because if we get to a point where we do have to make a trade off, i just want to make sure it is fully informed and that we do have, you know, we've exhausted our all our comprehensive strategies to try to reach a solution there. and we really are saying like, this is the one like this will have to be the trade off. and especially as it relates to fares, that is one that i'm i'm personally concerned about and i just don't, i'm afraid right now of just like what the impacts will be on people's lives, if that is something that we have to start making trade offs on. and just as a reminder, bri, how

is free muni for youth paid for? like, how is that? how is that subsidy work? so we that is generally funded by. well, the way that muni the way our budget works is different colors of money have different things that they can be spent on. and i sort of put them all in the pot and then sort of dividing them into smaller pots of this can pay for that, and this can pay for that. and what pays for all of our, the majority of our discount programs, we do subsidize with some general operating dollars is an lc top grant, which is a grant that is targeted towards low income riders. and serving low income riders in a way that reduces our carbon footprint. so the nexus for this program seem for this grant is really good. i will say, though, that there was

a trade off made to do that in the past when the operating budget was in better shape. we used to just forego the revenue because we had enough revenue to cover our expenses, and we used that money on capital projects that served low income communities that decreased our carbon footprint post pandemic. those are the kinds of choices that we've had to make. we can invest less in those long term capital improvements because we want to continue to provide those subsidies. so even though it's a grant, nothing is free, right? we still had to we didn't do something else because we chose the money to spend the money in this way. but we did. you know, these discount programs are part of our core values. and we really felt that was just the highest, best use of those funds. so there, just to make sure i'm tracking, there is a grant, the lc top grant that is underwriting the

subsidized programs and our free fare programs right now. but that funding source is flexible so that we can apply it to different uses that still fulfill that goal of engaging and supporting marginalized communities. yes. that's correct. thank you. perfect. that's it for me. but i don't see any other questions from my colleagues. so we will now open up public comment on this item. thank you. brea. hi. thank you. director and board members dillon faber, san francisco transit riders i wanted to say that the deficit cannot be balanced on the backs of transit riders. as we just saw, riders are already facing minor cuts in february with even more larger cuts over the summer. and while we appreciate

the intent of the agency to begin outreach on the next round of cuts early, including to the muni equity working group, i want to be clear that no service cuts are equitable. any service cut also hurts a lot of the agency's other goals. and while some might be more or less equitable than others, at the end of the day, it will make it harder for people to get around and harder for san francisco to meet our climate mobility vision zero goals. i also wanted to remind the board that parking meter hour extensions to weekends and evenings has already been approved by this board and planned out by staff. even so, why are we looking at more service cuts next year, when there are still other mechanisms that the sfmta can still use to address next year's deficit? i get doing the outreach around parking meter extensions, but then why are service cuts the default budget solution? why do all these other revenue options need to go through months? and in this case, years of feedback while service cuts are just pursued as

part of the status quo? previous sfmta estimates from last year showed parking meter extensions could bring in 25 to 35 million each year, which is more than enough to address next year's service cuts. so i hope the agency can move forward on that and on other revenue options to prevent service cuts. i also am glad to see polling on the regional measure. i hope there's also some polling to see what it would look like for voters. if two measures are going up. in the case that the mtc measure doesn't fully address mta's need, as may be the case here. so thanks so much. thank you so much for your comment. any additional speakers? all right. secretary silva, do we have any accommodations? we do have one accommodation. speaker, you've been unmuted. this is herbert weiner. now, one thing i've been advocating is that managers salaries of hundred thousand dollars should be frozen.

second, like what you should do is put a hold on. projects that have not been funded yet. you should not you should freeze on that. thirdly, any money going to the bicycle coalition should be frozen. bicyclists paying their fair share of licenses and parking. and thirdly, walk san francisco should be transferred to the police department and the traffic division. now daniel lupi is only taking a dollar a year for summary management of mta to fund police by freezing their salaries. so these are measures are very necessary to balance the budget. the public is making all the sacrifices. muni managements is making none. and actually muni management is

partly responsible for this present budget crisis. they should have had busses that they should have expanded the fleet long ago, which they didn't do. now there's less busses, you know, to provide service. and so the mess that muni management really has a responsibility to account for, and that's up to the. okay. i think that's the end of comment. no other callers. thank you. secretary silva, director heminger, madam chair, i apologize for double dipping, but it's in furtherance of the point you were raising. i think these discount programs are going to be the focus of a lot of attention in our discussions in the working group, and i think if we haven't already been provided it, it would be helpful to have just

sort of some bullet points on each program when it started, how it's funded. are there other ways of skinning the cat so that we're fully informed? and when we have that debate, which is i can feel it coming. yeah. yes, sir. thank you, thank you. and i do cosign on that. i think it'd be important to get that information. just so our discussion is informed geographic information. right. to the extent we have it right. and i don't know if it's free or who would be holding that work. but just if you can note that that would be great, right. thank you ma'am. thank you. all right. so i will now close public comment on item 13. thank you, colleagues, for the robust discussion. and secretary silva, please call the next item. actually, before i read the next item, i did want to announce that closed session item four will no longer be heard by the board today. thank you.

secretary silva places you on item 14 discussion and vote pursuant to admin code section 67.10, b and d as to whether to invoke the attorney client privilege and conduct a closed session conference with legal counsel. we will now open public comment for item 14. if there's any public comments on our closed session. seeing none. secretary silva, do you have any accommodations? no accommodations will now close public comment. may i have a motion and a second to go into closed session? so moved. thank you. director chen, do i have a second? thank you, director tarloff. secretary silva, please call the roll on the motion to go into closed session. director chen chen i director heminger heminger i director henderson. henderson i director hines i director tarloff i tarlov i director kahina i kahina i thank you. the board will now go into closed session.

okay, director. now we are back. ready? thank you, secretary silva. let's see. item 15. thank you. sorry. i'm scrolling. yeah. no worries. all right. is that your part, though? yep. okay. go ahead. item 15, announcement of closed session. so the board did meet in closed session. voted to approve item three. a took no action on three b and did not hear item four. places un item number 16. motion to disclose or not disclose the information discussed in closed session. may i have a motion and a second to disclose or not disclose? move to not disclose. second secretary silva, please call the roll on the motion to not disclose. director chen. hi, jen. i director hemminger high

hemminger i director henderson. henderson. i director hinsey. i director tarloff. i tarlov i director cajina. i cajina i thank you that motion passes and concludes the business before you today and this year. thank you. colleagues, staff and members of the public. and happy holidays to all. we are now adjourned. our first meeting next year will be on january 21st, 2025. thank you. thank you.

welcome to san francisco's new revitalized qatar valline this is not just an upgrade is a community transformation. taraval street under a complete make over from 10 feet below the street to 30 feet above.

>> it is part of the taraval improve am project to impprove transit performance and make the streets safer for all who use them. completed on time and on budget, this multiagency construction project is a once in a generation investment to bring safer, more reliable train service, increased accessibility. beautiful corridor, refresh roadway and reliable water and sewer systems for decades to come. >> safety is at the forefront of this transformation. new train boarding platforms are a game changer for safety am before the project 5 people per year were hit by vehicles gettinga or off trains we add 22 new or extended boarding plat forms on the route. riders no long are exit on the street along side traffic.

when my kids were young it was heard they want to plunge off the train straight in the street. up on the h stop now we have the platform that is broader when they are excited get off the trin and get home i feel better about them jumping off the train. >> having island where hay step on to is a giant improvement. >> these disability crosswalks look good and improve safety by making it noticeable to drivers. >> sidewalk extensions at intersection corners shorten the distance needed to cross the street and slow downturning vehicles. these and other safety treatments are proven tools to reduce the risk of collisions make the taraval corridor safer and inviting for people walking and driving. another key part was replace being two miles of train track

for thes first time in almost 50 years. the old tie and balist track was built for muni oldt cc streetcars and old are light trail trains not today's modern vehicles and it was noise and he prone to vibration. >> these new rails will make for a smoother, quieter ride and require less maintenance. it is much quieter with the new impresumes i livid here the entire time and plays earthquake or municipal when he it came by now we don't have to play anymore >> before when the streetcar went by i would stop talk the street cars would rumble past now i share that confirmation. i like the fact well is not a 3.4 quake every time they go by now. it is quiet temperature feels like sliding on glass. >> this project is more than

rails and concrete it is people earngaging with their community. >> local residents and merchants have told us when their community need and had than i want in their neighborhood. a quieter reliable train roadway and safer streets for people walk. gi think it is essential. i'm excited and wonderful to have a safe way it get to work i work on embarcadero i take it to the end of the line every day >> through open house, public meetings and surveys members helped shape where the stops should go to the curb plan and selecting trees and art work for the corridor. >> we relied on community feedback during construction of the project. with voting held to choose where to stow construction materials and how to sekwenls the construction. >> as a result the project was split in two segments to reduce impacts to the community. access ability is at the

forefront of the design. new features ensure people all abilities enjoy seamless travel on the taraval. these platforms and key locations have a raised boarding area level with the train to help people with walking aids or strollers board more easily. >> warning lights are flashing. >> pedestrian signal announcements assist with visual impairment its cross the street. new curb ramps are essential in providing accessible path of travel on to and off of sidewalks. the sunset district has long been shaped by transand i the qatar valcontinues linking past to present. on the heels of a new tunnelful muni tear van line opened as a shuttle from westportal to 33rd

avenue in 1919. it was not until a few years later the trains used the tunnel sparking a population boom. previously, riders transfer to the circumstance line to go east of what is today known the westportal neighborhood. by 1923, passengers could catch a one seat read on the taraval between downtown and 48th avenue. for the first time, san franciscans had a connection from the bay to the ocean tide. the taraval street cars brought development people could access the south western neighborhoods. homes and buildings sprung up from the once empty dunes. this vielth east/west corridor is the spine the neighborhood carrying over 30,000 daily riders when service last ran the

route in 2019. today, it is a bustling local business that give this area its flavor fr. cafes to quirky but teaks the taraval connects tout best of san francisco's small business scene. >> i lost fact it is not a money on cultural it is multicult rar. korean, chinese. vietnamese. french. italian. we got irish. we got a lot of good mix on this street of restaurants and businesses in those cultural veins and good ole american. helping local line help our small businesses because this is again a small community. and the traffic here is not if you have to generate big revenue. with the l train from other parts of the city to this area

has help us the small merchants as well to generate more business. >> taraval street is a reflection of the outer sunset's unique character. >> this two mile stretch of transit is not just getting from a to b it is reimagining how we move through our city to shop, dine and experience more in the places we live. >> i live in the suburbs i have to take a car or a bus that was an experience i never did again as a teen. now my kids can visit their friends cross the establishment it is a huge increase in their freedom and independent. one of the reasons we chose to raise a family in san francisco. >> it is wonderful to have a safe, clean reliable way to get to work for the neighborhood i'm excite body what it means to bring others back to our neighborhood. we have, let of interesting shops and restaurants and i'm excited to see how things become

when it is easier to get here. >> a lot know each actively it is a close knit community. in my shop i know customers by name i know what they'll order and i have it ready for them. >> what i'm most excite body the street is now unified, we have new paved roads and new rails. and new lighting. new boarding island. >> today, your new street features newrism upgrade water and sewer pipes. 5 new priority signals that hold green lights when trains approach. sidewalk extensions to make pedestrian crossing safer. high visibility crosswalks and ramps. safe boarding islands and platforms. new trees, landscaping and art. is it time you responsiblesed this corridor to the end of the

line? with great food, walks on the beach and san francisco's new add upon ventures a ride away now the sunset district is more accessible than ever.

>> shop and dine in the 49 promotes local businesses and challenges residents to do their business in the 49 square files of san francisco. we help san francisco remain unique, successful and right vi. so where will you shop and dine in the 49? >> i'm one of three owners here in san francisco and we provide mostly live music entertainment and we have food, the type of food that we have a mexican food and it's not a big menu, but we did it with love. like ribeye tacos and quesadillas and fries. for latinos, it brings families together and if we can bring that family to your business, you're gold. tonight we have russelling for e

community. >> we have a ten-person limb elimination match. we have a full-size ring with barside food and drink. we ended up getting wrestling here with puoillo del mar. we're hope og get families to join us. we've done a drag queen bingo and we're trying to be a diverse kind of club, trying different things. this is a great part of town and there's a bunch of shops, a variety of stores and ethnic restaurants. there's a popular little shop that all of the kids like to hang out at. we have a great breakfast spot call brick fast at tiffanies. some of the older businesses are refurbished and newer businesses

are coming in and it's exciting. >> we even have our own brewery for fdr, ferment, drink repeat. it's in the san francisco garden district and four beautiful murals. >> it's important to shop local because it's kind of like a circle of life, if you will. we hire local people. local people spend their money at our businesses and those local people will spend their money as well. i hope people shop locally. [ ♪♪♪ ] >> ♪♪]

♪♪ we are definitely pioneers in airport concession world a world of nationally if not entirely or internationally >> everybody is cop us right now. >> the people that were in charge of the retail this is where that began. >> i didn't think we would have a location at the airport. >> we've set the bar higher with the customer commerce. >> telling me about the operator and how you go about finding them and they get from being in the city to being in the airport. >> so first, we actually find a table and once we know what we want a sit-down we go to the neighborhoods in san francisco and other people seminary of the

retail let us know about the rain water and are excited to have the local operators in the airport. >> we have to go going through the conceive selective process and they award a lease to the restaurant. >> they are planning on extending. >> we that you could out the china and the length evens and the travel serve and fourth your minds and it's all good. >> how long for a vendor to move through the process. >> i would say it could take 80 up to a year from the time we go out to bid until they actually open a restaurant. >> i don't know what we signed up for but the airport is happy to have us here. and, you know, even taking out the track simple things there's

a learning curve >> with once we're here they are helpful. >> it's an award-winning program. >> we're prude of your awards we have won 11 awards the latest for the best overall food address beverage program and . >> like the oscars (laughter). >> the professional world. >> tell me about the future food. >> all the sb national leases are xooirz and we're hoping to bring newer concepts out in san francisco and what your passengers want. >> well, i look forward to the future (laughter) air are we look fo >> i finish 11 times.

i don't wish no one to be shot, but it is something that i never get over. the wrap around program really changed my life and they was there for me day one and i thank them so much. i couldn't do it without them. >> wrap around formed as a result of understanding early on in my career that what i was doing as a trauma surgeon was not enough. i needed help. i needed the community that was impacted the most by violence to direct me to understanding what was necessary to be more comprehensive in creating

care for patients and to really change people's life course. >> the number of people coming into the hospital were youth. we wrap our arms around the people who come through so we try to equip with not only services, but just love and you know, we really try to meet their needs. >> we helped support them with services after recovery or while they are here, they need services anywhere from housing to basic needs, clothing, employment. we link to those services in hopes that we don't ever have to see them come back. >> my biggest wish and goal for the future of the wrap around

project is that it wouldn't have to exist. that we wouldn't have anymore violently injured people that our job is trauma surgeons would be defunth. >> to see them start walking again, to see them laughing and being happy, to feel like you know what, this happened to me, but i'm going to make it, you know? i think no amount of money can ever pay us for that. >> it is rewarding to intercede and you know [indiscernible] change the trajectory of a child's life is awesome. we want to give them tools to be productive members of society, and give them a chance to have a future.

>> it gives me joy to be able to be a part of a young person's life and help them map out what their future looks like. you know, you can never get over trauma, but you can live with good amazing life after it and learn how to manage it and stuff like that,

so we hope do that with them. >> mike, you know what, i am a manager now at this job. the job you hooked me up, that is impact. that is a heartfelt, you know what, me work want in vain. that work is unmatched so to speak. >> they like family. they help, they check in, call me, see how i'm doing, you know? and i'm very thankful. they have that good at mosphere where you don't have to be scared, you don't

have to feel you all by yourself, because they there and they have been there.