Transcripts For SFGTV Municipal 20240704

Item 4, approval of minutes for february 6, regular meeting. Directors, any changes to the february 6 Meeting Minutes . Seeing none, open Public Comment for item 4, february 6 Meeting Minutes and close Public Comment. Could i have a motion and second . So moved. Second. Please call the roll. Motion to approve the minutes, henderson aye. Hinze, aye. Tarlov, aye. Eaken, aye. Thank you. The minutes are approved. Places on item 5, communications. I have none. Moving to item 6, introduction of new or Unfinished Business by Board Members. Colleagues, any new or Unfinished Business on todays agenda . Seeing none, no need for Public Comment. Item 7, the directors report. Thank you. First i like to introduce transit director julie curshbalm for our staff recognition. Good afternoon. It is mytransit director, it is my profound pleasure to be recognizing miriam surel today. She will come up in a minute. But she is over there with family and staff to support. We are on a multiyear effort to better support transit operation staff. That includes our operators, our supervisors, our trainers and our controllers, and that involves everything from implementing Employee Recognition programs to creating performance plans, to building stronger career paths, and the most complicated piece of that . Has really been to create a performance feedback program. We initially rolled it out for our supervisors and our trainers and our controllers and then in the coming two year budget cycle well be rolling it out for our operators. So, thats our vision. Cool to have a vision, but if you dont have somebody to take that vision and turn it into a nuts and bolts program, then it is really just a piece of paper, so miriam really did that for us. Shes been at the agency for 13 years, but she spent most of that . Time on the street side doing things like, Transportation Demand management and working with livable streets, but she got a taste of transit during covid when she was working at our Operations Center and some little birdies kind of tweeted in her ear, hey, we love to have your skillset in transit. So she moved over to implement a program that had no rule book, new to everyone, needed every step of vetting and she basically built the boat, sailed the boat, made sure the boat didnt knock into everyone which we are so grateful for. Because of her, now we have 300 people that had never gotten consistent feedback on performance, now all had a initial meeting this summer so they knew what they were going to be evaluated on and to hear any concerns they had. We are now in the process of giving them all midyear checkins so they know how their first 6 months of performance has gone, where they are excelling and where they need to make adjustments in order to excel and at the end of the year they will receive their sort of First Official annual performance plan. In order to do that miriam needed to coordinate with everybody from our Labor Relations team, union partners, human resources, it because a lot of this is data based in order to be replicable and consistent across such a large group of employees. Strategic communications, technology, so a lot of key people had to Work Together in order to make this program work, but the other thing she did is she worked with all four senior managers in transit operations to really help them understand what was important criteria for them in order to evaluate their employees, and then to figure out how to turn that into a databased performance plan, and to also acknowledge that on the first run it isnt perfect. Not everything we can usually measure lines up with what we care about, but a lot of it does and having some feedback is better then no feedback. We also trained all of the managers that were going to be giving these evaluations in order to make sure they knew how to have these conversation they were equipping staff with information about career paths and it really was a partnership between a person giving the feedback and the employee receiving the feedback and now miriam is as she is getting through the push of the midyear evaluations, the next thing she will do is start feedback looping. What worked, what do we want to do differently and so, it is just taking thisi think aspiring but messy idea we had on paper and turned it into this program. The other reason that we started with the supervisors is they are going to be the ones that evaluate the operators and we didnt want a situation where we were holding operators accountable to something the people evaluating them hadnt also been held accountable to and hadnt experienced firsthand, so i am just beyond excited about this work. It is not as sexy as ridership or some things we talk about, but it is what i think is needed to really get our staff and our system to the next level and it could not have happened without miriam and i am so so grateful for her. [applause] thank you julie, and members of the board for having me today. I really appreciate that julie and my manager brent jones entrusted me with this work. As she mentioned i have been at the agency a long time and done a lot of Different Things but this was something new not just for the agency but for me. There no rule book, so i really appreciated the trust there and the opportunity i have been learning so much about how our transit operations work and also learning about Database Management and philosophical questions related to Performance Measurement and it has been a wonderful opportunity to learn so much while giving back and kind of figuring it all out and i really enjoyed my time. One thing i loved about working at this agency is the ability to work on so many Different Things. We reach so many people and touch so many things. Havent done it alone, i have been working with a number of different divisions and staff and i couldnt possibly list them all, but i wanted to quickly say im a small team. It is myself and my fellow here today, nicolas who is from the City Hall Program and the other team that has provided staffing support for me is the transit Performance Analysis team by simon and they is have been invaluable and realizing some of the parts of the vision more technical then my particular skillset. Thank you so much for listening and i hope to talk to you about the project more another time. Thank you so much and congratulations. I want to say so much director what you spoke about and miriam what you implemented resinates with me. I believe in feedback and model of improvement to grow and strive and you spoke about not being perfect the right time. I think that is the wrong goal. I think we dont take risk if we have to be perfect. [indiscernible] i know where i would land. Continuous feedback, cocreation ability to model these themes and they come up later today on a itemoon thugenda. Ability to make changes and evolve with the time because of course we work in a dynamic city and Dynamic Agency and world, it is so much more important so thank you uplifting and values feedback and Continuous Improvement and executing on the grand vision. Really appreciate your work. Thank you. Director tumlin. Several of you were able to join us valentines day when we dedicated cable car number 53 to tony bennett on valentines day. Just outside the fairmounts hotel where he first sang i left my heart in San Francisco. Car 53 was first built in 1907 for the now defunth ofarrel jones and hyde line. The ceremony was deeply moving to me. It was attended not only by the mayor and larry bare and all city dignitaries, but also susan bend deto who is Tony Bennetts widow who spoke about the impact her husband made on the world and on San Francisco. Because it was such a great event and also because of the phenomenal work Market Street railway who sponsored the event did putting the event together, reaching out to media we got a National News coverage. All local papers covered it and Heather Knight wrote about it in the new york time jz also highlighted how our attention to these details is in part driving the extraordinary ridership success muni is experiencing despite the fact San Francisco is one of the cities in the world with the greatest amount orphwork from home impacting the commute ridership, but so much of neighborhood ridership is breaking all records nationally. So, it was a great event. You can look for car 53 climbing half ray to the stars oen the california street line. Next up, as you all know, it is year of the dragon. The Lunar New Year started february 10 and there is a key point of not quite the end, but really the center piece of the season is chinatown new years parade february 24 this saturday. We have all hands on deck, rerouting buses, managing traffic and we will also have muni ambassadors out throughout the system in order to make sure that everyone not only knows where to go, but also feels safe. Safety and security is going to be a key theme for all of our work this year, and the Ambassador Program that will be spread throughout all of the downtown stations and chinatown. As you also know, we are continuing to provide two hours free parking at the portsmouth square garage throughout february. It is fantastic day for anyone out of town who is listening to come in to San Francisco not only for the parade, but to also explore San Franciscos extraordinary neighborhoods and neighborhood commercial districts free on muni all day long before the parade. Finally, i want to update you on progress of the eltaraval project. Last week the board of supervisors Budget Finance Committee voted to take 1 million that had been set aside for the apec and put towards grants to support merchants on taraval street and we are particularly grateful to supervisors engardio and melgar as well as the mayors support for allocating the funding. The board of supervisors as a whole will be voting on february 27 and if that passes successfully the office of Economic Workforce Development will be distributing the funds to merchant who have been impacted by the work on the taraval street corridor. As all you know, much of the infrastructure in the sunset district was built all at the same time and it is reaching the end of its useful life. Particularly the water and sewer mains are at or beyond the end of useful life and needed to be replaced. In addition the el taraval tracts were set on slabs of wood in shifting sand and it was time to replace the trackway. But digging up the street, particularly for the underground infrastructure is disrupted to the community so we are grateful for the support from the city. As of today, 95 percent of the sewer and water work is complete and about 80 percent of the rail instillation is complete. We are absolutely on time and on budget as things stand today. And that is my report. Thank you director tumlin. Directors, are there questions or comments on the directors report . Seeing none, i will just agree with you that the tony bennett dedication was a really special San Francisco moment. It reminded me what a small town we really live in. This one person, this one song could just live on and mean so much to so many people so thank you for staff dedicated that work. That was really lovely. No other comments from directors. I dont know if director cajina gets to comment on the director report but i open up for Public Comment on the directors report. We just concluded the directors report and not seeing any Public Comment. Well close Public Comment. We actually have two request for accommodation. Thank you. Go ahead, please. Going to unmute the first caller. Go ahead , caller. This is herbert winer. One question i have in respect to julie curshbalms report is how does this relate to the full restoration of service precovid . Is that part and parcel of a plan . I wasnt able to decern that. I would like clarification on that. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Thank you. I hope you can hear me chair eaken and members. [indiscernible] good report. [indiscernible] i like to see this cable car with tony bennett. I dont know much about the music of tony bennett. I guess that is my grandparents day, but i am looking forward seeing what that looks like, and im very interested in the free muni. I love the idea of offering free muni, especially when we will have the this parade and we want to make sure that we have the ambassadors out there to let them know how people can be empowered to use muni on that day. Hopefully we can build relationships, so people will want to come back and use muni again. I hope we can get the taraval work finished. I have not been on the bus shuttle to taraval, but i used to take the taraval l line every day and it is a very important high capacity line, and i want us to have the best running taraval that we can. Hearing about old ties and shifting town, we need a good rebuilt taraval line from west portal to where it ends at sloat and i believe i used that line in entirety. I am encouraged we are getting more ridership. I want to see people come back to muni and i think we can get to precovid ridership even with remote work. It will take changes. Hopefully people might be driving and park their cars at the city line and get on muni and not have to worry about parking in the city. This is good. Looking forward to it. Thank you. No further callers. Director henderson, you had a question . Yes. Jeff, when do you expect the 15 or 20 percent of the track work left to be completed . So, all of the work on the taraval corridor will be done this fall. We are right now actually planning doing the planning work for restoration of el taraval service along the length of the corridor and into the tunnel. And once that is done, do you anticipate there will be any kind ofsince this has been so much more a production then i think anticipated from what it sounds like, do you anticipate you will have some sort of reopening or an event around it or is it just there will be an event. Got it. Okay. We need to celebrate getting the work done andsuming we are on time and on budget this fall honoring that as well. Okay, thank you. We can move to the next item. Item 8, the Citizen Advisory Council report. No report. Places on item 9, general Public Comment. Members of the public may address the board of directors on matters within the board jurisdiction and not on todays calendar. Well open Public Comment for anyone in the room not on todays agenda. We can close Public Comment. We do have a request for accommodation. Great. Ill unmute the first caller. This is herbert winer. One thing im concerned about is raising of the muni fare. I dont see the restoration of service. I dont see the improvement of service, and the raising of the fares frankly is a insult. You have to find resources elsewhere for your claimed deficit, and im thinking that you should perhaps freeze projects that are contemplated. You should freeze management salaries over a hundred thousand a year. There are other economies you can take other then raising of the fares. It is really necessary to do that. This is really a imposition on the public and is frankly a insult to injury. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Thanks again chair eaken and members. [indiscernible] for the record. She and her with [indiscernible] representing [indiscernible] speak generally. I was in the area and did get to use muni again. Took it from stonestown through the tunnel and on to embarcadero and it was fine. I like subway that works. Reminds me of a system that is actually called a subway in new york city, perhaps some of you got to use it. I do speak generally and very freely. Yes, im a unrepentant user of autonomous vehicles. I use it three times one day to help me get around San Francisco. Along with using muni and bart and i think i used ac transit that day. I like having options in my toolbox. I am letting you know i speak respectfully to you and share my opinions though many may disagree. I do ask that we continue building a muni that is inclusive and welcoming to those who are different from you. I think it is okay to disagree, but we should never have disrespect. I want to be fully welcome on this system. The system i used since 2009. I named my electric bike muni years ago because i wanted to honor muni with the cable car that enjoy very much. I want us to make sure we really keep the cable cars go because they are truly a part of history and do offer credible commuting options to people. Not an Amusement Park ride, it is real transportation. We definitely want to work on the clipper because i see people coming to the cable cars and they are trying to figure how to pay for it, so we want to make that more user friendly because i want more people on muni. Thank you. Thank you. No additional callers. Please call the next item. Item 10, consent calendar. These items are considered routine and acted apain upon by a single vote unless a member of the board or public. Item 10. 1upon by a single vote unless a member of the board or public. Item 10. 1 10. 1. Appointing mina yu to the bond oversight committee, effective march 6, 2024. explanatory documents include a staff report and resolution. 10. 2. Amending transportation code, division ii, section 901 to expand the definition of powered scooter to allow devices that have a seat and footrests in place of the floorboard, to better meet the needs of a broader range of riders. explanatory documents include a staff report and resolution. 10. 3. Authorizing the director of transportation to execute modification no. 1 to sfmta contract no. 1318, woods facility rehabilitation bus wash systems replacement project, with air lube systems, inc. , to 1 add five Small Business enterprise subcontractors to the contract; 2 replace an existing 12inch underground chase determined to be a differing site condition; 3 extend the Contract Term for noncompensable delays by 307 days; and 4 adjust and finalize bid item quantities. Overall, the modification will close out the contract with a decrease of 58,257. 86 to the contract amount and an increase of 307 days to the substantial completion date. That concludes your consent calendar. Thank you. I like to open Public Comment for item 10, consent calendar. Any comments from anyone in the room . Any remote requests . One request. Please go ahead. You have been unmuted. Thanks again chair amanda eaken and members. Im going to talk about 10. 2. Scooters. This is really really important. I have been waiting for this. Im a person with disabilities. Im a real veteran of Operation Desert Storm with Service Related disability and these scooters are very helpful to me, and i really feel that we need to expand the definition to include more people who where it is easier for them to sit on scooters. People sit on bikes all the time. Why not have scooters that people sit on . I like the idea of the basket so when people go to the store, they get their food and then they can go to a scooter and unlock it and put their food or other supplies in the basket and go where they need to go, whether it be home or go to a muni stop and use it as a trip to go to muni. We need this and this is long overdue and i want to see a lot of these scooters out there. I dont want to see it be a rare thing, because this will include more people and help us with our climate and congestion goals. I think we can have a 3wheeled seated scooter that is environmentally friendly and parked in a way that wont cause problems. 30 secondss. I ask you approve this to think of those of us with disabilities and those who dont where this will be a easier product to use. I want the best Scooter Program that we can have. Yes, im a unrepentant user of scooter s and not ashamed of it and ask for your approval. Thank you. Thank you. Public comment on the consent calendar. Directors, any clarifying questions . If not may i have a motion and second . Director tarlov. Thank you chair eaken. I just have two clarifying questions. One is for the mina appointment. Is there a term length for that . I didnt see that in the staff report. Can you remind me staff . Good afternoon. Manager programming and grants. Somewhat drenched but good to have the rain. Thank you for the question, there are no term limits for the bond oversight committee. Thank you. Thats all i wanted to know. Thank you very much. Thank you. If nothing else, is there a motion and second . Motion to approve. Second. Thank you. Please call the roll secretary silva. Motion to approve, henderson, aye. Hinze, aye. Tarlov, aye. Cajina, aye. Eaken, aye. Thank you. The consent caldener is approved. Thank you. Please call the next item. Item 11. Presentation and discussion on the San Francisco waterfront coastal flood study draft integrated feasibility report. Good afternoon chair eaken and members of the board. Sfmta. Im here to introduce a few folks who will talk about this very large project over a very long period of time, so just want to take a little moment to introduce a couple key elements we want to think about because i think we are used to looking at much more in our face whats happening now with the city and with our streets and Transit Systems. This is really a very different scale of time. Investment and set of needs by communities. The first is used to talking about ways in which we can prevent harm to the environment, prevent harm to impact Climate Change and really deal with what is happening in our environment right now. This is a chance for us to actually be in a more defensive mode to deal with the consequences of those actions. While we will be talking about very large scales of investment, which are due to a lot of harm, we have to keep remembering the actions we take every day can help to mitigate and make this less of a problem over the future. Those are really important day to day actions as well. The second thing in terms of thinking about the future is while we are in a defensive position and thinking how we can mitigate the damage, we also need to imagine if we are going to invest billions of dollars and a lot of time in the work along 7 miles of the waterfront, we dont want to build it back exactly as it is. We have a opportunity to get both community benefits, to potentially repair damage that is already done and also think about the future of the waterfront. This is a incredibly important economic and social part of our city. It is obviously an iconic part of the city so what can we imagine as a opportunity as well. We have port colleagues here. This has been going on a long time but will continue to go on for a long time. This is really a great opportunity for your moment of influence in a set of decisions that last long after we are all in the positions we are in. This is a moment where you can be on the record. This is a moment where you can be organized as a board on the record and so we are looking forward to hearing what your thoughts are on this big project. I want to introduce adam the Deputy Director of there Waterfront Resilience Program at the port and brad benson will be joining us and [indiscernible] speaking of the impacts of the project on our agency more specifically. Hand it over to adam. Good afternoon Board Members. Adam from port San Francisco. I will talk today about the Waterfront Resilience Program and flood study we just released our draft plan to the public and in a Public Comment window with army corp of engineers. I will give background on the flood study, the risks and hazard we are seeing, go through the draft plan and then talk through key policy considerations and then next steps and Public Outreach about how we are gathering feedback and engaging the public and Tim Dougherty is here. As we go through each geography or reach of the plan, tim will jump in from a mobility and transportation standspoint. The flood study was granted by the federal government in 2018 to analyze the impacts of coastal flood risk and Sea Level Rise along the city waterfront, specifically within the ports jurisdiction which runs from [indiscernible] bayview through Fishermans Wharf. This is a partnership between army corp of engineers and city of San Francisco with the port as the lead agency but we partner closely with our city Partner Agencies such as mta, public works, puc, Planning Department and others. This is really a moment in the planning process where we released a draft plan at a very high level of concept that will then inform future stages of how we Fund Projects and how we design and build them, so i cant emphasize enough, this isnt a design proposal, it is really a proposal about where and when to protect and defend the shoreline against Sea Level Rise and in a finding of a federal interest that the u. S. Government could help pay for. We identified again in a very high level preliminary cost estimate level a high level cost estimate of about 13 and 13 and a half billion. If we go through this process and we come up with a plan that is recommended to congress and Congress Authorizes that and approves , the federal government may pay up to 65 percent of the cost with the balance coming from state, local and other sources. Just to talk about what the risks are in the waterfront. We have a significant seismic risk and earthquake can happen any time. The waterfront is subject to ground shaking, liquefaction and lateral spreading which is where the earth sloughs off towards the bay, which is what you see on the lower right which is a actual photo of the embarcadero from the 1906 urkt quake. Ill let tim speak to mobility. Good afternoon Board Members. Thank you adam and mia for the introduction. I will integrate mobility into the presentation and couple points to start off. Our local regional and state Transportation System is reliant on a strong and resilient shoreline. That is because so many assets and corridors and facilities are directly along the shoreline. Those include creek, motor coach facility, muni metro east as well as the t line that crosses[indiscernible] Mission Creek bridge, connect the castro and Market Street to Fishermans Wharf and infrastructure that is less known such as folsom portal. This is a critical transition where the subway system comes up on the surface and heads to the ball park and a lot of the light rail vehicles maintained and serviced at metro east. Also we have a lot of regional and statewide infrastructure on the shoreline. The caltrain corridors ones adjacent to the channel. Bart has infrastructure that connect to the region and ferry landings at the ferry buildsings and touchdowns from the 280 near the ball park and also onramps to bay bridge. As you can see, it is a very integrated and comprehensive network on top of the shoreline, so it is really important which is why we partner closely with colleagues at the port and Army Corp Engineers. Another consideration is that critical pieces of our infrastructure are impacted by flooding today and some are on the slides. [indiscernible] Creek Facility on a historic wetland. We have a pretty high water table at this part of the city as much of mission bay, and when we see rain events such as we are see today and high tide we do have flooding on indiana and marine in front of our facility, so this is a important area for us to focus on and work through. But thats something we are keeping front and center for us. Also we do have overtopping of the embarcadero south of the Ferry Building that sometimes impact travel lanes so it is something that not huge issues for us today but when we look at projections for Sea Level Rise it makes us want to continue to partner with the port and Army Corp Engineers. The last thing you see a picture of the doubledecker emdark embarcadero. It is fairly dynamic and changed significantly even in the last couple decades so when we look at the loma prida 1989 quake and see how that shaped this part of the system it is important to keep that in mind just as framing as we look to the future and start to plan and reenvision a new Mobility System. Thanks tim. As tim mentioned, the shoreline is very susceptible to flooding today and this will get worse over time with Sea Level Rise. This map is showing a higher projected rate of Sea Level Rise over time by the end of the centurys in areas. You can see significant chunks of the city including mta infrastructure tim mentioned. We see by midcentury up to 500 structures and infrastructure assets would be vulnerable to flooding and by the end of the study period which is 2140 we see 23 billion in damages along the shoreline within the study area. This map is showing what that study area is. Again, from haren head park to aquatic park the city engaged in other efforts outside this study area on the morn and southern waterfronts and along ocean beach coast, but our study is particularly focused on the area urbanized industrial waterfront along the eastern and southeastern edge of the city. I will talk about what the flood study is. This is a general investigation, Feasibility Study and high Level Environmental review that runs through 2025. We just released the draft plan. Again there is partnership with the federal government Army Corp Engineers and we are getting Public Feedback on the draft plan and on the federal environmental document, the neapa Environment Impact statement. Right through the end of march as ill go into. This will lead the feedback and policy feedback we get will lead to us developing a recommended plan that will go before congress by the end of 2025 to be included in a authorization bill in 2026. From there we have a long road continuing where we will be doingm Detailed Design and engineering called the preconstruction Engineering Design phase and move into construction and this may be done in phases over many decades and different pieces of the waterfront are built out. It wont happen all at once. We advance projects as funding allows. This is a high level plan. We are looking at approximately where we build the flood defenses so we can look at approximately the existing shoreline moving inland or retreating in some areas or moving bayward and filling the bay and that is the level of detail we are at. We are also looking how high we want to build flood defenses and what level of flooding and Sea Level Rise are we building to at what times based on the level of risk in each area and how much space is needed. If you raise the shoreline we dont want 6 foot wall along the shoreline so we want to be thoughtful how to grade and terrace that back to the city while retaining use of the infrastructure there, but also keeping visual and physical access to the water. The design of that . Is not at that stage, but we want to give a sense of this is the overall space that may be needed. As i mentioned, caveat, this is not a Detailed Design for the flood structures, not Detailed Design fwr the waterfront for streets and open space, Historic District along the embarcadero. It isnt timing or sequencing construction plan and dont have a fully baked funding plan with local sources at this time. Those will all come in next stages t. Is a opportunity to think about the future of the waterfront and that is something we do want to be starting to think about and when we put it back what are we putting back on top on the surface. Tim will speak to this a little bit. How do we get to the plan . We had over 6 years Public Outreach and engagement with 150 events. Fall 2022, we put out to the public 7 draft strategies which illustrated different ways of adapting the waterfront that showed some of that . More retreat, more fill, different heights doing what is called a nonstructural looks which means not building flood defense, but trying to flood proof buildings and assets and took all that and with army corp help did a detailed cost and benefit analysis across multiple benefits and looked at Public Feedback and works with city Agency Partners and put together the draft plan and what we put out to the public this month. There is a detail cost and benefit analysis, so this is a fairly new arena for army corp of engineers traditionally and historically they would analyze plans based on the federal economic interest against the cost from a simple cost benefit ratio, but they more recently moved changed guidance and moved to a place where they look at comprehensive benefit including social and economic and environmental benefits and this has been a area where we had to build up these metric and how we measure these quantitatively, qualitatively against the National Interest as well so that unique and new to the stud a. We defended plan based on social and environmental benefits and we are very proud of that . And the army corp is too. I will go into the draft plan a little bit just as a preview. These are high level themes we heard from the public over the last several years. A really strong focus on life safety and Emergency Response. Wanting to note the needs of people. Keeping and maintaining and enhancing the city connection to the waterfront as well as the health and ecology of the bay and centering equitty Environmental Justice particularly in the southeast and issue of contamination and remediating contaminated sites. These are big picture feedback that helped us shape the plan. This is sort of a high level overview of the draft plan itself. What we are looking at here is the area of the plan from aquatic park to heron heads park. We divided into 4 gesography and the yellow ban is a elevated shoreline with seismically resilient structures and then along the shoreline there is a bit of flood proofing buildings that happens as well as adapting our historic waterfront and wharfs including the Ferry Building along embarcadero and nature based features where we can and looking to incorporate inland drainage improvements as well that go along with raising the shoreline. We dont want to create a bath tub effect where we trap storm water behind the elevated shoreline. Ill take this reach by reach. Starting with the Fishermans Wharf area. In this area we see a higher more protected ground already. There is also existing break water so we dont see the same level of flood damage in other areas so the area gets a different treatment. The army called non structural which is flood proofing buildings subject to flooding as well as short flood walls around the piers, opposed to building up the elevation of the entire shoreline in this area. Here you see about what that looks like. Flood proofing of the ground floor building to prevent water getting in during high tides or storm events, or to let water come in and out with minimal damage and the short flood wall around the piers being low two foot walls that extend the life of the piers and minimize flooding over time. Ultimately it would have to be elevated but we dont see the need for that coming for several decades at least. Just to add mobility flavor, in this reach in particular because there is a Higher Ground elevation and existing shoreline protection, it is unlikely to see large impacts on the multimodal system. There is probably not going to be as much impact to roadway or public right of way, but when flood proofing there could be impacts on the promenade so well used and loved by folks on foot and by bicycle and also possibly loading impacts, but again, fairly minimal impact on transportation perspective at this point in time. Okay, that was the least impact area. Now moving to the embarcadero where we have the biggest change. We are proposing to elevate the shoreline to defend up to 3 and a half feet of Sea Level Rise in contrast to lower level as we get into the southern reaches. The reason for this is we see this as a longer term protection. It isnt necessarily necessary right now but embarcadero being dense and space constrains with utility and transportation infrastructure we dont want to do multiple construction periods. We work would the army corp to agree to go to higher level elevation to start so we would raise the shoreline with gradual transition. Adding improvements to stabilize the shoreline structures and elevating the buildsings and wharfs which provide a extralayer of production to the land as well as adapting the Historic District so we elevate the wharfs and buildsings as well and add the flood walls around the piers. Let me walk through what this might look like. This is image showing the orange band. It is rebuilt and elevated sea wall sound with level of seismic soil ground improvements in the embarcadero behind it. We dont know how far that might need to extend and grad ual transition back to city grade. We dont know exactly how long how far across the roadway that takes or what the design of that . Is. But the idea is to keep that visual and physical access there. Along with that we would look at raising up the wharf elevations as well. The wharfs are the pier structures parallel to the shore that have the historic bulkhead buildsings shown there. We elevate that as well on the same treatment for the Ferry Building itself and the piers themselves, the ones perpendicular and stick out to n to the bay would not be elevated or adapted and get a 2 foot flood wall so there is a transition down to those and that is shown in blue. This is a area where we see potentially significant changes to the roadway, the fline and bike and pedestrian structure along the waterfront so if is something we will be following very closely. The good thing is, we were recently awarded a caltrans Planning Grant from caltrans and that came before you recently on consent. This will stand between the middle of 24 out to 28. The largest award caltrans awarded a local city so great for mta and partner s to move forward. This hopefully allows us to protect, connect and improve mobility in this project area that spans from van ness and hyde street pier to the ball park and Mission Creek which is where we have a lot of critical mobility infrastructure. It also allows toads vance a responsible next step that reduce impact on businesses and people using the network and identify strategic investment. This allows us to renew a very vibrant economic center. It is very adjacent to the financial district and sets up a strong economic recovery both for San Francisco and for the region because this is where we really connect to the rest of the region with bart and our ferry system. Moving to the southern reaches of the study area in the south beach and mission bay area. We propose to elevate the shoreline to defend up to 1 and a half feet of Sea Level Rise and this is built in stages because there is more space to adapt over time where you have waterfront open spaces and so we can monitor and see how fast Sea Level Rise is happening and make adjustments over time and more flexible adaptable approach. This area we see a combination of sea wall along the south beach and ball park portions as well as birms or levies along the banks of the creek and outer edge of mission bay. We will be aid to nature based features along the creek edges and where we have natural shorelines and otherwise similar to the embarcadero, but i wanted to point out one other feature which is a closeier structure on the bridges, so in this scenario the bridges themselves are not elevated at first, so what that means is they are a low point where water can get into the system into the city so these closure structures are structures that can be deployed and would close off water from getting into the city during extreme storms or high tides. You can see a image of that . I believe from the Sacramento Delta area what that might look like, but what that also means is during periods thot that those are closed that cuts off access to the bridges including the muni light rail across the 4th street bridge. We expect the closure highly infreak wnlt, less then once a year fwr several decades until the bridges need to be rebuilt and elevated themselves, but that isnt include d in the plan at this time so i want to be Crystal Clear about that. Building upon the temporary closure structures, obvious wlae the 4th street bij bridge is critical for all the light rail vehicles including the tline to the bayview and muni metro east for service and maintenance. Even temporary closure structure will be impactful for those using the light rail system city wide, but we recognize it is probably very infrequent incident and probably out in the midcentury, 2050, 2060 time period. That is when we think the fourkt street bridge reaches useful life so our hope is coordinate with public works who managing the bridge to elevate and improve it and replace it prior to that. That being said, just a bridge replacement project would have transit implications, because it is reliant on getting across that channel. It is definitely something we identified in a Impact Assessment we recently did. This is vulnerable spot for the system and we started to look at high level concepts to provide more redundant and different ways for us to access this part of the city and not be so reliant just on a sole bridge. That is something important to consider in the years ahead and we are coordinated with public works and the port. Moving into the creek bayview portion of the study area. Similar to Mission Creek we are looking to elevate the shoreline to defend against up to 1 and a half feet of Sea Level Rise. This could be adapted and more flexible approach that could be built over time because we see the opportunity to have more space smin of the Big Industrial areas and around the creek channel. With a combination of flood walls around the port maritime cargo facilities and birms along the natural edges and opportunities to expand natural wetland approaches around warm water cove and pier 94 wetlands. This is a example of what those birms could look like. They can serve both the habitat and ecological function and recreational function with walking and bike paths. Im sure tim will pick up on this, but as you probably know, in this case we have the closure structures on illinois street bridge built at a lower elevation but as you know, the third street bridge is subject to public works project to rebuild that bridge. It would already through that project be elevated to adapt to Sea Level Rise. Just following up with considerations. This part of the city is critical because of a number facilities along the shoreline. [indiscernible] north shore, muni metro east and the burke facility on the other side of the bridge on the Southern Side so really critical for daily operations of our entire Transit System and where a lot of coworkers work every single day so making sure they have safe, dry Work Locations is priority for us. We [indiscernible] adaptation strategy and that identified a number of strategies that need to be implemented in order for us to avoid ponding and water accumulation we see at the intersection of marin and indiana so that is something we focus with colleagues at the sfp uc. The bridge over the creek is planning to move into construction between 2026 and 2028 lead by public works and then the illinois street bridge is a followup project that needs to be elevated in the years ahead but probably closer to midcentury time period. To close out with policy considerations. One thing we are thinking about is phasing of this construction, both from a risk standpoint. Where are the low points, where are areas more prone to flooding sooner as well as equity standpoint. Opportunities to build on existing City Projects or Public Private partnerships and other factors that will lead to series of first actions and how that will be sequenced over time. And we covered i think through tims presentation a number of mobility considerations as well. Just to leave you with this thought that this is a need for more resilient shoreline in San Francisco, something we need to address based on the risks and hazards we see. It is also a opportunity and really once in a century opportunity. The city sea wall was built over a hundred years ago. This is our opportunity to rebuild it and rethink how we want to interact with the waterfront and what type of waterfront and services along that waterfront San Francisco wants to see, but we see it as a big opportunity and excited for the next stages and grateful for Army Corp Engineers and other city agencies. This is Public Comment period where you can comment on the draft plan and neapa document and there are multiple ways to do that listed here. We scr a number of outreach events coming up next week. Walking tours, workshops and more and there is a number of ways to provide written comment via email via mail and visiting our website at sfport. Com. With that, im available for questions. I wanted to acknowledge the director of the Waterfront Resilience Program brad benson is also here for questions. Thank you. Before i open up for the board or the public, maybe i can ask the presenters just to come back up and let us know, what type of feedback or input are you interested in hearing from this board . Great question. We are open to all feedback at this point and a little on the mechanics that how to gather the feedback is you can share with us today verbally and we could come back before you some time in march with a item perhaps on consent calendar where we share the feedback we heard today and perhaps bring it back as a resolution and then that would becould be transmitted in our staff comments that we would send back the corp and porlt. Port. That is one option to share that. Ill leave it at that, but i say we are open to all feedback. I will also say, happy to help coordinate getting all of you to some of the Public Outreach events and helping see which might be most appropriate for certain parts of the city where you live. Happy to be a liaison so that invitation is there so you can get on the waterfront and see great outreach planned and that could be a forum to provide feedback as well. Thank you. Great suggestion. I wanted to add, i think this is a really great opportunity to set the bar of what the expectations are and to orcinize organize priorities so we highlightedthe area of embarcadero are really substantial changes. We are talking about picking the Ferry Building up a story in height so imagine the disruption that happens in front of that . Related to downtown and chinatown and district 3, north beach. We are talking substantial bridge replacements. We also have other major transit infrastructure, dtx, second transbay tube. All is a lot happening in the below Market Street as well as well as everything a we are experiencing in facilities now, so i would say highlighting the things you are most thinking about relative to our system and Key Facilities and Access Points and vulnerabilities. What are things that stand out for you we need to make sure and particularly as staff working on this all the time to continue to hit the bar of what is expected. Might i add to that . I want to point out, we will be putting together as mentioned in a 60 day comment period. There will be a city comment letter that goes in a formal comment letter so we will put that together. Brad will be leading that effort with all the city agencies and directors to try to get the city comments. We also as part of the draft report included something called views of the non federal sponsor where we aurlds outlined a number of things we wanted to see. We are very pleased with the plan and pleased with the partnership but there was a number additional items not able to get in there. Those could similar items could end up in the city comment letter so well take your feedback and use that to help craft that letter. That is very helpful. Colleagues, do you have clarifying questions or comments or can we go to Public Comment real quick . I like to do that. Any comment in the room on this item . Please go ahead and come to the podium. Thank you. Secretary silva, do we have accommodation requests . Okay, thank you. I wasnt planning to comment on this. My name is [indiscernible] a former mta employee and sat on a working group for the active transportation plan. The reason im commenting on the item, i used to work when i was doing under grad at berkeley at Malcolm X Academy and taught 4th graders to do planning. They taught me actually. I hope that through this process you find ways to build partnerships. I know the mta does a number of internships every summer at Different Levels from high school to post baccalaureate so looking how to partner with schools in the bayview that would probably like to be a part of this, so they can be a part of shaping what the waterfront looks like. I guess that also goes for district 3 schools like galileo on the wharf and such. And when you look at redundancy, thinking about how that could improve the system. The extension from 30th to balboa park was a system redundancy move because the system couldnt move trains to the Green Division when there were obstructions in the twin peaks tunnel so it is important to look at redundancy to build out the system and also with the raising of the sea wall, really thinking aboutthere isnt a lot of service on the waterfront other then the s and the service along sampson and battery was serious reduced when the [indiscernible] and now there isnt a 10 townsend so looking at the service plan to existwhen there is flooding now the s buses cant run in the promenade and thank you. Thank you for your comment. Anybody else like to address item 11, the flood plan . Okay. Well close comment in the room. No one wanting to comment remotely . Okay. Great. Director cajina. Thank you chair eaken and thank you so much for the presentation. Director hinze and i did get a preview of this at policy Governance Committee a few months ago, so i had a little leg up on the rest of us. It is very scary and very real information of gosh our city is in danger and need to do something now and lot of investment we need to think about and plan for, so i know that when director hinze and i first saw the information we are like completely floored. Mouths open completely squared about what is the future of our city if these things dont get addressed. Anything from like any sort of shipping needs or tourism needs. All housing, all these Different Things are implicate so i appreciate this is coming to full board and we are all seeing this and public is seeing this and grateful for the presentation. I do have sometons of questions but ill try to keep them as brief as possible. I think wei think staff 13. 5 billion the study would cost so 65 percent would come from congress hopefully. Just elberate what is that process like . Where are we at with that . Who pays for the other 35 percent of that . Good afternoon. Brad benson. Thanks for hearing this item today. So, the way the federal process works on the federal funding side is congress has to authorize the project first and then they can start appropriating funds first for design and then later for construction. We looked at other cities around the country. It is very infrequent project sponsors get full federal funded. It is [indiscernible] out over time, and on the local side, the 35 percent is too big for the city Capital Budget now. This is a major concern of director forbes at the port thinking from the Capital Planning committee perspective. We got to develop a range of local, regional and state sources. There is a possibility that federal sources could be counted as match, but only if they are authorized that way. There was predecessor work that was done in 2017 that lead to the bond proposition a, the sea wall earthquake safety bond lead to the recommendation to do this study and so we are going back and looking at those financial recommendations and ultimately director forbes wants to engage a city conversation about how we fund that local 35 percent in a way that doesnt totally overwhelm the other critical Capital Needs that the city has all the time. It isnt for that 35 percent being funded by the port through all these different measures, what happens then . Do we notdo we go to this differently . How does this impact what we can do to address the issue . Just on the point of the port, this project dwarfs the port budget. The port can not handle funding this particular project so what we have seen in other jurisdictions is state and local government sharing the cost of the project because these projects are just too big for local entities to pursue. Go bond funding is a critical tool and thats the initial bond we got and there is a reg ural rotation. You know that well and compete for those pressure dollars as well. The final piece is the phasing piece i think you are talking about. We are not able to afford this all at once so how do we spread the investment in a smart way over time stow it is affordable for the city looking at those areas very high risk first and thinking how we differ investment where it isnt going to cause a problem. Thank you for that and so it does seem like well need the public support. [indiscernible] to be able to execute and any of these plans, so ias i think about the outreach Engagement Process i think this is something that needs to be instilled in the Community Understanding the real risk of not addressing this. Im going to pivot to the outreach engagement piece. That is near and dear to my heart so ill focus on that a bit. I read the staff report. Thank you for preparing that. It said in the staff report that we reached out to hundred Community Based organizations. Just wanted to give folks a chance to talk how many of those hundred touch points were successful in the sense that we had briefings made with those folks, that folks were able to share concrete ideas in those briefings. Just trying to understand out of the hundred are we at 50 percent there or . Not sure i can give a statistic now. We have heard back from a good percentage of those. We also had cbo focus groups with representatives and paid stipends for cbo particularly in the southeastern communities to send a representative and join the focus Group Conversations to weigh in on the previous version of the draft strategy, so we have done that but i would be happy to get a list of who weve reached out to and who we have been fallowed up with and had conversations with. Who is respondsing. They are not all along the waterfront. Some is city wide. The bond measure as you point out you need city wide support and city wide infrastructure so trying to make a point this impacts everybody and not only if you work along the waterfront. I would love that information. Just capture what our efforts have been and any ways i can support staff with that. Also in the staff report it did mention that staff will be hosting two inperson workshops one in chinese and one in spanish. That was concerning, because a lot of the neighborhoods have very desverse populations and somebody of [indiscernible] may not have the same concerns as someone in the bayview and might be able to contribute to the project in a very different way. I do want to make sure that thats something that we are sensitive to as we are pursuing a more Robust Community outreach Engagement Process that that is something we factor in and i appreciate the staff report that we are trying to frame our outreach and engagement [indiscernible] harmed by our processes and systems of the past or have not been included in these conversations, and so because of that . Ic there is a little extra effort that has to be made to gain trust and bring folks to the table so i want a sense from the team how prepared we are to do that and is thatwe know that will be a challenge but we have a plan to address the challenge. I think i can address generally. We have done a significant amount of additional outreach, particularly to the southeast community, bayview and Hunters Point and African American populations there primarily. Public housing outreach, merchant outreach, resident walks just additional Public Meetings and outreach to Community Based organizations and that was reflected in the demographics of the people we were seeing at meetings and getting comment back and we realize there was a gap. When we looked at who we were getting there were gaps and the latinx and chinese american it communities were a gap so we are putting more effort in this round so holding language workshops to each of those communities with our consultant leading that and so we are trying to fill some of the gaps. There were other gaps we wanted to do focus groups on as well. One being youth, one being Senior Citizens and so we are trying to address some of the gaps we have seen. We are looking at information and demographic whose has come to the meeting, who is missing and trying to reach out to the groups. We had a pretty robust outreach engagement budget and it is really priority for the program. We see it as a city wide priority and also people most impacted along the waterfront who live or work or need to get through the waterfront to get to daily needs. This is a project that will hit multiple generations of san franciscans and so i do appreciate the Public Comment we heard from mr. Walker today of engaging schools and engaging youth in particular, because this is somethingi think if there is a way to instill the sense of urgency these are [indiscernible] to safeguard our city, if we start early i think it pays dividends so i encourage the team not only to focus on the adults in the space, not just the Small Business owners, also the Family Resource centers and also schools in particular that would be effected by any sort of projects we have along this area. It is so critical that we make sure that this isthe reason we are here doesnt get lost on folk jz why it is so important for us to not just be part thof solution as we are understanding how we got here too. And my last question will bethere are two more. [laughter] second to last question. On the 4th street bridge replacement. So, i feel encouraged to hear that we have a hope of coordinated with dpw on this piece, but what is the plan to make that hope more concrete realty . I wanted a sense of the pathway towards that. Is it a mou with public works . What are the mechanics so we can understand is this on the radar already . Does our agency need to start supporting with that work there . Just trying to get a better sense of that . Not go toog answer that, but i wanted to point out we have a very Robust Partnership with the School District so done a number of youth workshops, Curriculum Development and partner with the exploratorium. I will let my mta colleague take the other one. We take a lot of steps to get to the point where a bridge is replaced and that is at least a 10 year process, so we have to start setting the priority. There are a lot of other things happening in that area at the same time so one thing we need to make sure is the phasing is done properly. Dtx will cause disruption but temporary. When we are having problems with that bridge right now, when it opens and can open for any craft that wants to get into access of Mission Creek, it may take 8 hour tuesday close again. There are a variety of timings and issue of concern, but note we want to make sure this doesnt happen in a way super disruptive when the bridge is replaced. I think that is a 5 year window. It will take i think 2 and a half years to replace that bridge but that is happening in a shorter time so we need to plan for that as a capital change within a 10 year period of time. I dont know tim if you have other comments but it is not only prepared to do the bridge but talking big timeframes and scheduling so it doesnt cause double disruption everything happening. In a broader sense, are we aligned with public works we need to coordinate on this . Is that high level piece or something that both agencies are aligned in and we know that will happen so that i guess we are not working on separate timelines . I can say affirmatively yes and so glad to have carla short as the permanent director of public works as well as Elaine Forbes at the port. We had i think a very positive experience rethinking the parameters for the third street bridge at islais creek includesing undesignated the [indiscernible] as a federal waterway that clipper ships need to sail up in order to allow for a very different construction approach that has saved a lot of money and will help improve reliability of that . Corridor for decades to come. Building upon that partnership we are looking at Mission Creek bridges and a systemic way and again, i couldnt be happier to have such Strong Partners in those two departments. It is very hard to do a lot of big scale multijurisdictional work in San Francisco and i say this is a great example. The port has been leading bringing together the agencies at director level, deputy level, staff level. There is a deep investment which isnt just about this project i say, it is going to unfold over time to make these things possible. It has been a great leadership model. Thank you for that. That definitely gives me some hope here. I was like are we hoping this is happening or do we knee it will happen . The last question is around parallel processes. We heard Public Comment around redundancy and plan for redundsancy in the network to make sure we are creating some sort of safeguards for disruption in the system. Just talking about parallel processes got me thinking about all the other plans that may have a touch point with this project, specifically the active Community Plan and other projects that intersect with the timeline jz goals and perhaps strategies we have on some projects we have here. I wanted to give staff[indiscernible] someone an opportunity to talk about that piece of if and what we are doing to build redundancy, start incorporating this project and some active projects we have now along the corridors and just making sure this isnt something living in a siloed way, we are taking advantage oof the touch points with the community to make sure this is [indiscernible] i appreciate that comment. That is definite ly something we are aiming to do and i can tell you it is something we are doing now because my colleagues are doing it. We are looking at embarcadero project that built amazing bike infrastructure in front of the Ferry Building. Just one of many projects in the project area and active Community Plan you mentioned. We dont want to burden communities with additional outreach and engage. We want to streamline and sync up with residents and businesses so it is more efficient and look at the network opportunities. How can we make one Capital Investment that really aligns with this future Mobility System we need to start planning, so that is definitely happening within mta and will be a ongoing process in the years ahead but something we are aware of and something we realize. Speaking of partnership opportunities, i want to thank michelle the executive director of caltrain a Strong Partner helping us think about their rail yards and grade crossing studies as opportunities to provide greater redundancy into both mission bay as well as bayview. Mission bay and bayview because of rail infrastructure, the bay and the creeks are among the neighborhoods in San Francisco with the least amount of mobility redundancy and i think all of the leaders who touch various parts of the neighborhoods understand how important that is and think about ways of improving connectivity. Alsothese opportunities as well when we engage the community it is important to let folks know what Decision Making power they have and what ends happening because of the very real issue. As we are talking to folks about active communities or other projects that intersect, it is important to understand that we may be limited in the suite of options we give the public because we actually have to make real changes here to address Environmental Concerns or increasingly becoming expotentially worse over the years, so thatsi just do hope thats something we are being very forthcoming with community about. There is yes you can help us design and put a [indiscernible] whatever it is, but there is certain key elements as a project that are non negotiable because we have to address a very real issue. Thank you. [indiscernible] if you want to weigh in director hinze. Thank you madam chair. Pleased to see the project presented here at the full board and [indiscernible] staff presentation was detailed and i second a lot of director cajinas questions and observations and comments. I did have a couple questions. One for the port and onewell, maybe both for the port. One is sort of along the lines of director cajinas questions, but specifically around Small Business. [indiscernible] about Small Business and how our projects impact Small Business now. I know for some of your tenants you have a landlord tenant relationship with them at the port, so thinking is this how you try to minimize disruption in the community . Also to reduce impact on Small Businesses and tourism and [indiscernible] how are we thinking about that and also, we talk a lot about various departments. Is oewd involved in this at all . Thank you for that question. The issue about construction disruption and impact to port tenants and Small Businesses is top of mind for director forbes. The port relies on our maritime tenants and real estate tenants for all of the port operating revenue or most of our operating revenue and we have longterm relationships with those folks. The baseline director forbes has given to staff is, as we are thinking about the implementation of this project, the waterfront serves so many different constituency whether visitor serving, maritime function, industrial uses in the southern waterfront we have think how to keep the waterfront open during this construction period, and also mention we have commissioner leon the Port Commission who is very focused on Small Business and a question he raised in the presentation we gave about this. We are not at the stage of design where we can get into the specifics of how this project is going to effect a business at this or that location, but we have the policy direction and so it is a primary goal for how we would go about phasing and doing construction sequencing in a way to minimize that impact and your suggestion about oewd, we have given updates periodly to the office of economic and workforce development, but i think your point is a good one. Well get them more involved in the conversation and thinking anytime their outreach tools when we are a liting little closer to it because we want to make this a thing that adds value to the waterfront, allow businesses to keep [indiscernible] thank you for that. With regard to seismic resiliency, to the extent this project addresses seismic, which im hoping it does, for those buildings that are not owned by the city, are theyare they going to be responsible for doing seismic improvements to their buildsings and foundations, or how will that work, because i do think the seismic resiliency is going to be a important part of this project given we are in earthquake country. Good question. This project is really improving seismic reliability of the form making seismic improvements related to coastal flood built. That is authorized under Army Corp Engineer authorization. They are seismically resilient structures. Rebuilding the sea wall or wharfs it has to be seismically sound so that will eliminate deficiency that exists today so that is helpful to the city from a seismic perspective, but the program isnt going further and say, these buildings that are on the city side that are on Public Ownership or private ownership, the city has tools incentives and programs to address through the Capital Planning committee and capital plan. It isnt part of this program. I will mention we do have the proposition a general obligation bond, the Embarcadero Sea wall bonds is and working early action projects that address seismic risks that exist along the shoreline today that goes beyond what is included in the flood study and implemented sooner. Seismic retrofit of pier build ings and substructures are included in that. Thank you. Lastly madam chair, and i think this is mostly for your and our consideration to give direction. I do like the idea of creating a resolution that summarizes ourstaff creating a resolution that summarizing our discussion today and we can put our stamp on so to speak at the meeting. Just as we move forward and ill close with that. Thank you director hinze. I like that idea too. Director henderson, please. Thank you chair. I am particularly interested in this project. I think it is huge and so impactful and i think as Public Servants part of our job is make sure we are doing the best we can for today, but really preparing the city to be safe, enjoyable healthy place for families and individuals to live for the next century or more hopefully and so, i think that thisi too was really struck by how critical this is and how on a day like today we can have what may be just a little of rain, but it can lead to from what the images were on the screen incredible flooding and damage to the infrastructure that we have. I think it would be pri have a couple questions and i know i provided them to staff already, but i think it would be helpful to hear in addition to the locations of certain mta infrastructure or facilities what that impact would be if for example we had some catastrophic incident and one of the sites were taken out . I think the cost, the actual monitary cost of losing those facilities is really important to telling the story and to helping educate the public about what we need to do in the difficult decisions that well have to come to. I know everything will be a tradeoff so in addition to some of the information or the an icdotes i think it is helpful to seeor even the cost today of what it cost to make sure that the Creek Facility isnt flooded just on regular rains sore Something Like that. I think that is really helpful and could be helpful information to get support from the public during the Public Comment period, so that is one thing i wanted to bring up. Also, i heard you say and this may be tied back to director hinzes point, but i heard you say flood proofing of the ground floor and i cant remember what slide it was. Are you only talking about publicly owned sites and if so, whatif there privately owned parcels or whatever along the waterfront, what are those private owners expecting from the government whether federal or local and what is their contribution or the expectation we have of them . Great questions. The flood proofing of buildings is limited to a handsful of buildings in Fishermans Wharf so not extensive throughout the study area. That is part of the project cost so subject to that same 65 35 split so 65 percent of that . Cost would come from the federal government and then we can work to figure out the other 35 percent. There are some kind of leases and properties on private land impacted either by the flooding, but by the study itself by the project and so we have to do detailed work with those Property Owners for example, there are couple buildings around the creek that currently in the plan show as demolished and couple others and pier 7 0 and 68 and a couple with easements. Once we have a final plan we have to do more detailed work with those Property Owners and have a agreement in place so there a lot of work before we figure that out, but it is something project funded. I did want to address your earlier point about the information. I think it is a really good point and maybe summarize for public consumption. The information we do have was part of the detailed cost benefit analysis so we looked at a number of different transportation metrics, including for example transit delay and value of that . In a monetary sense, and compare that against the cost of no action versus the cost of different projects and then what the benefits will be or reduce damaged would be so that information at detailed level does exist. I think we have work to do to pull that up into something that the public can digest. As you may have seen in the report, there are thousands of pages in the exnomic appendix where a lot of the information is detailed and how to summarize for the public to make the point of the benefit of this project are. That would be helpful i think and i think piggy backing on that, the idea that we would need the federal government to first authorize the project, which is going to be a feat, and then appropriate funds for it, if there is a roll that the public can play and advocating for the authorization and then the subsequent appropriation, i do think it is helpful to have some kinds of Financial Impact so people can really easily say, if we dont do this, it will cost San Francisco this. Whatever the number is in billions, because it seems like thats howthats the stakes at this point. I would like to know if there is a way for the regular every day [indiscernible] to be able to be able to influence this, because i think it is just so big. I like the slide that shows the other projects. We are surrounded all sides by water, soand i think that where we need our federal partners to kick in and really foret support the city and growth and survival of the city, it is helpful to have a strong number for us to be able to equip our regular folks with so they can do some of the advocacy for us. I can speak to that and something i looked at today and speaks to partnerships we are striving to build here, partly with the region, the metropolitan Transportation Commission and bay conversation and development commission. We are part of a regional Sea Level Rise investment Framework Project that has a relationship with plan bay area, which is a trillion dollar regional effort to improve transportation infrastructure arounds the 9 county region so this work is tied in with plan bay area. It is also we have done a lot of work to try tealivate to elevate with state partners. We recently had our planning work along the water fronts included in a state transportation resilience plan so we are trying to partner and those can be met forums where the public can continue to elevate how important this is to your earlier point, but i saw numbers today but the cost if we dont do anything and that is a important thing to not lose sight of. Thank you. Maybe ill wrap it up because i think we have a long rest of the agenda. I did want to mention since im on themaybe i have a couple things to mention. I did want to mention, since im on the train control upgrade project committee, i was hoping that you all would be able to speak quickly about how that might be impacted . I know we havent quite figured out the extent of that . That or the cost but i worry we do all this upgrade work and we have to work around it or undo it with this. How are you factoring that into the work with the study and what you have planned . Great question. We have a team within mta i rely upon on the day to day level to integrate climate work into all our decisions so we are trying to do that comprehensively and it is Risk Management in a way. How do we make sound Financial Decisions for the agency now that accommodate a future that might look different so we are trying to do that withi have been work ing finance colleagues and project management so this is institutionalized for lack of better word so we dont make investment today and have to pull it out. Our electrical infrastructure, our system is electric in the years ahead and heavily reliant on a power system too and the electrical grid, it can withstand sp amount of water today and we dpoo have water that gets into our underground system. Bart pumps out a large amount of ground water and do take water out of embarcadero system so the system gets wet underground today and can withstand a little bit but salt water we dont want connecting with electrical or communication infrastructure. We need a dry flood proofed system. Okay. I guess then what i wonder is howdo you sort ofmy concern is just that we are having to move so many large projects and substantial projects forward because we have needs today and then what happens if there is some sort of earthquake or in the middle of this then how do you insure that that is notthat there is a flexibility to the plan that allows some just some changes . This seems it is out over such a long time and so thinking about just the [indiscernible] and having all of the work done capital wise on upgrading that system and then potentiallya foot and a half raising the sea wall, so seems like there is a foot and a half of water, sitting on the street today from a rain like today, so i wonder how do you really plan to build in flexibility so we can make sure that those decisions we are making today are not going to cost us and add to the 13 and half billion of this project . Great question. The other thing i can offer up is office of resilience Capital Planning in city hall under the City Administrator Office has the Sea Level Rise guidance check list are that requires all projects over 5 million roughly in the project area go through a fairly rigorous check list that forced the project manager to contemplate future scenarios you are bringing up and it gets at the integrating climate risk into the capital Decision Making. So, that mechanism is in place. I have done that for a lot of projects that come through the 5 year Capital Improvement program. I havent done it on the current one because that budget is still working through the process, but that is mechanism we use so to make sure that we are seeing this fully and making wise decisions. Thats helpful to know. I think it sounds comprehensive and i just some of these things are like, these decisions are so impactful today, but have so many longterm impacts both from the social and community perspective, but also just from the Capital Budget. I think that couple ofmaybe two months ago we had a presentation of the brief presentation of the capital items and that budget or the number was 250 million or some large number and so it just makes mei just want to make sure that we have considered all of the sort of longterm what ifs or hiccups and prepare for that as much as we can, because it seems like the cost is so great if we have to undo our redo something. The infrastructure it seems just so critical. Then my last point and before i wrap it up, for the sfmta specific cost that will be part of 35 percent, are those included in any numbers we have today or do we have to add them on to the budget that we have seen so far . Thats a great question. At this point in time, mta has not been asked because this is still a draft plan and dontthe city and port doesnt have enough detail on what the future project will look like. Okay. Furthermore, within mta, we dont have a clear picture of what a capital contribution would look like from sfmta, so we can definitely keep all you on the board appraised as those details come together. It is probably going to be a couple years out. I would say how that will probably manifest itself for all of you is through the 20 year capital plan, which did come before you the end of 2023. That is our long range forecasting tool that looks at Capital Needs but out to 20 years and for this year, we did not put it in in part because we didnt have enough detail yet about what those costs would be to facilities, to train control system, to our actual maintenance of way infrastructure, so no financial details have started to clearly emember of the emerge at this point for us to put fl to our capital plan, and i think what we are hearing from colleagues at the port is a funding plan needs to be developed to help determine where that local match comes from. Got it. At this point the 35 percent is a city family cost and not necessarily correct. I think it is probably likely to be even broader then just city family. It might involve regional and state funds. We will extend to our family in sacramento and regional partners also. That is my sense of it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you chair. So manyy wonderful questions from colleagues so my list was reduced but really curious about the public Engagement Process and how you are able tool lead members of the public in understanding the risks that are trying to be addressed through this plan, and the magnitude of the investment that is being made and potential disruptions and how do you manage that process in order to number one, engage the public in a way that is meaningful to the public and number two, solicit feedback that will be truly valuable to you and help you come up with a better plan in the long run. I just want to hear more about that if possible. Good question. I will say it is a very challenging topic to understand the magnitude and scale and complexity of the project like this as well as the sort of future risks and trying to not freak out the public, trying not to overscare the public but also have understanding of the magnitude we are dealing with and it is coming and not tomorrow but it is soon and gets worse over time so all those are challenges with the communications and messaging so the public can understand that the challenge and what our proposal is to address that challenge and provide meaningful feedback on it. We have a number of years of experience trying to work through this. We have done a number of interactive activities and trying to get about the public values. What do they care about on the waterfront, what do they love about the waterfront and want to see changed, but also trying to understand that no action is not really an option here. Evefen the action is to retreat, there is a lot of action that come along with it, but if we build something, if we are going to make different moves and do stuff structural or non structural, people to have folks understand that type of item is very hard. We have done a lot of walking tours and think that can be very beneficial and done with Agency Partners with mta and puc in particular, so people for example will take people out to the creek and you can see the creek, you can see the mta facility right there, you see the bridges, you can see the port facilities and that can be illuminate ing. We partnered with the exploratorium on the royal tide or king tide tours. There was one last week. I saw the images the public is there and water is crashing over the side of the embarcadero so there are ways to visualize. We are trying to do more activation and engagement working with some of our waterfront activation and economic Recovery Partners to try to visualization of where Sea Level Rise will be. We did a activity with the School District where we had stencils that were painted on the sidewalk approved by public works. It was washable chalk, but you could go out and they had students had maps and find the place on the map and say this is where bay water will be in 2040 and paint a stencil and they loved it because it was legal graffiti on the sidewalk, so there are different engagement tools we can use to try and engage the public around this message and get their feedback. We acknowledge this is so big. We want to be accessible as we can be. One example is, the remember army corp gets Public Comment through its process through the neapa process, and so this is formal Public Comment with a Court Reporter at a meeting. We have been in dialogue with army corp to say, that kind of process is not really going to illicit meaningful comment. You just present the plan and ask people to walk up to a microphone. You may get some Public Comment, but others may find that intimidating so we will have boards around the room for each of the events staffed where people can come and ask questions about just to get a little more of a understanding of the project at a more granular one on one level, and we want to make ourselves available for people who want to brainstorm how they can comment, so we are making that offer to people. If they need help from us to talk about what is important theme and how they put together a comment that addresses that issue, we are trying to do that as well. I then i will close and just say the opportunities for comment on Something Like this is not just this 60 day period, it is going through ceqa and subsequent neapa analysis, we will go through design where we have to engage the community how the design is happening in their neighborhood and so we want to make clear that this is a great opportunity to weigh in and there are many others down the road. Sorry for the long answer. [microphone not on] as the details of the design start to come in, i imagine or sure intensity of the feedback will increase and so it will be interesting to see how that unfolds. Im curious about a couple other things that just as we were talking about this. Are there assets city assets maintenance yards or things like that that have potentially been identified that could more easily or cost effectively be moved out of harms way . Is that something that has been considered . We did have a strategy. One of the draft strategies that did involve a certain amount of what is called retreat. Removal and relocation of facilities and assets, including around the islais creek and Mission Creek and bay area. It will be removing the land and use and systems on top of that . Including a lot of mta infrastructure and where we landed does want have any of that . With exception of the port facilities along the piers which are not really included beyond two foot flood walls. I do think that is something that as tim mention said through the Sea Level Rise Capital Planning through the city each agency has to understand with the flood study project we are talking about today, whats the residual risk and the risk tolerance keeping that risk in place or thinking longterm systems and where the mere resilient places or retrofits of building and infrastructure in specific places that need to happen. For example, the mta yard. Even with a flood study project you still have flooding from ground water, storm water and may be improvements you need to make there as well and that is a mta specific discussion but as the draft plan stands now, it is defending coastal flooding at the shoreline. Right. So, this is something we at the mta looked at. We have about 10 city blocks of land in the Central Waterfront that is at risk. Unfortunately the needs we have are for flat land above Sea Level Rise in San Francisco of which there is none, so in order to relocate these facilities we need to acquire land that had a current use demolish the current use and then flatten the land. Just like the u. S. Army corp of engineers did their own cost benefit assessment that said, the value of San Francisco land that is at risk, that value exceeds the cost of protecting it. The same was essentially true for our own facilities. The cost of moving facilities is greater then the cost of protecting facilities and that is the analysis we have been doing all along. Thank you very much. What im understanding from this is that, the infrastructure that exists along this stretch of the waterfront is so integrated and essential that there really isnt a lot of room or perhaps any room to just move some of these assets away. The reason i ask and perhaps this is naive, i feel like i was lucky and all of us were lucky to see what happened when christy field was allowed to return to its wetland state and the estuary that developed and the wildlife and so i guess the main thing i like to get across is that, here in the presentation there was a little of talk about incorporation of nature based features in the ultimate design, and i think that thats a direction i like to hear more about as we go along and if there are any opportunities to even on a very small scale see some of the kind of restoration of the original waterfront, it would be lovely. I think it would be very cool. That was absolutely a key theme of the design work and taking a lot of inspiration from the work of the dutch. Amsterdam is two meters below sea level and the way the dutch manage their infrastructure and the shoreline accommodates both human and industrial uses as well as nature at the same time and in fact, the systems are deeply compatible. Nature based solutions regardless where you put the edge and nature based Edge Solution will be more resilient because it is selfadapting and those are lessens we will keep referencing as we go to the next level of design. I just wanted to mention in a discussion how we plan for the future that there is this balance and this is a conversation with port colleagues around projects that shift from being city responsibility or port responsibility to transportation responsibility and we have our own money and grants coming and potentially projects in the future. We need to just be careful to not take as just resilience projects. I think anything we do needs to meet this new standard. In the central water front in particular there are a number private Development Agreements we have pier 70, potrero power station, mission rock. Mission rock is a good example of a project building up to this higher level elevation. Things we do need to meet standard. At the same time we want to make sure we are not shifting responsibility and money between city and transportation alone and using the transportation funding where we need it for other things. One other thing we are keeping our eyes on which i have seen in other cities for very big projects when the public starts to understand especially private property Something Big is coming, they stop investing in it and im concerned we need to make surethis is very long range so we need to continue to do projects we are doing, meet needs oof communities, now, be prepared for other things beyond this, but meeting new stanards when we do this work but we cant under invest. Particularly in this part of the city there is a lot of harm and under investment in times past so we need to be meeting both goals. Thank you director tarlov. Great. I just want to say really really appreciate this presentation and making this space. I think sharing the big picture thinking where are we going. It is comfortable to know you are all thinking about this and planning for this at the same time tarifying and glad you are going to work every day thinking about the issues and this has a lot of excitement and engagement from the board so kudos bringing it to us and i love mta continuing to share this high level big picture thinking with the public and allowing the public to engage. I see that piece about once in a Century Investment opportunity and to me that makes me think how do we think about this as the best version of the city we want to be in a hundred years . Thats what we want to be designing the space for. I am hoping we are on this Continuous Improvement pathway as a agency, as a city and culture and society and world and what are the best version of what the space looks like in a hundred years and how do we design for that now . I love director tarlov brought up chrisy fields because i want to think about the essence, the feeling of the public spaces in San Francisco that we can really delight in and feel pride in and think this is our waterfront. If anything this should evoke that same feeling of like, tunnel tops where you just go, yes thank you government for figuring out we should connect people to the waterfront over the freeway and make a beautiful space. Thats wonderful. Jfk promenade. Great highway. These are world class destinations that help strengthen the economy we all feel sense of pride, world class public spaces and i just hope that as i know that is how director tumlin is thinking because that is how he thinks, i hope that is how all you are thinking about this space, we envision and allow ourselves to dream about the best most inspiring elevated version of this public space and i love what william said in the Public Comment about tap nothing to youth to help design this space because this will be their city, their space. Sooner then we know it. Just the educational opportunities, the opportunity to educate about science and Climate Change and the waterfront is and Natural Resources and resilience. It feels there are so many beautiful visions of what this linear park creating open spaces for parts of the city that dont have as much open space, educational corridor. I envision as a multimodal corridor that is very safe and intuitive and resolves scooter bike pedestrian conflicktd in the design and i think of course about the vancouver sea wall. The way that space you just without any planning you just can walk on that waterfront and just have a perfect day. It is just designed and facilitate enjoyment of the city and i hope that same sort of eethoes is in all our minds of just creating a space that is so intuitive and joyful and pleasant that it is a place we can all delight in and feel a lotf opride in. Yes to the active communities plan. William im glad you raised that. Yes to the all ages and communities network. I just hope the next time we see Something Like this that is a vision that we are really aspiring to for the space because it just needs to be world class. With this level of investment it needs to be a fabulous public space that elevates every member of the city. Thank you for your work and want to second director hinzes concept which is have this board weigh in through a resolution recognizing the themes and interests sparked ahmong colleagues see i look to you drebter tumlin and director small to think of language and timing but i like that idea very much. Thank you all very much and with that i think we can move to our next item. That places on item twerfbl. Presentation discussion and possible direction regarding the midvalencia Pilot Project including update and findings from 3 month evaluation period. I think we have paulvalencia project manager here to present. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is paul, the project manager of the midvalencia bikeway project. It is my pleasure to present the results of the Pilot Project three month evaluation this afternoon. Today we will cover the project background including the factors that lead to the selecting bikeway for the pilot on valencia. Three month evaluation results will talk about what we heard since implementation and next steps. So, first i would like to discuss a little about how the project background and how we made it to today. There are three project goal frz valencia and include improving safety for all who travel on valencia street. Preserve Economic Vitality of valencia corridor and insure the Safe Movement and access of goods and people along the street. Before the prepilot cushions are discussed i want to provide a brief transportation history of valencia. 25 years ago the first bike lanes were striped oen the street fallowed in 2010 of sidewalk widening. At the direction of the mayor in 2019 a bikeway implemented between market and 15th street and extension of those side running lanes from 15th street to cesar chavez proposed in 2020 but postponed due to covid. During covid shared spaced played a Important Role in the economic boost and recovery to the corridor and when the project team reengaged with the project in 2022 we relize the share spaced play a Important Role and remain so. A Center Runway bike way approved in 2023 and installed in august and we are evaluated the pilot engaging merchants and Community Groups. I want to talk about the conditions on valencia street. One was Traffic Safety and the other was limited curb space. Valencia is a major connector street. It is relatively flat especially compared to streets to the west including guerrero and focus Mission Street. Additionally valencia has shop restaurants and bars attracted to many including all those who pass through the corridor. It is destination for many folks in one of the very best streets in the city. We realize due to high concentration of businesses, there were a very large volume and concentration of commercial leadsing activity, including uber and lyft, taxi and passenger loading competing for space along the corridor. We found that before covid 67 percent of all loading activity was double parking and 40 percent occurred in the bike lane. These are examples of what you encounter on valencia if you are ride agbike and due to loadjug bike lane ride agbikeoon valencia was very challenging and ciotic and unpredictable that lead to exposure to dooring sideswipeic and forced cyclist to merj into the travel lane. When we picked up the projecktd in 2020 we thought a side running bikeway was the best option, however once we got out of covid we realize that design had challenges with the way that the street had changed. Some of the designs and constraints are related and intertwined. That constrains the roadway width for that section of valencia and contrains a width for Emergency Response and shared spaces assisting with covid economic recovery. There is also competition between commercial and passenger loading needs and safe comfortable passage for cyclists along the corridor. Ats the same time we heard clearly when we picked up the project that after covid that merchants that shared spaces and parklets were vital to covid economic recovery and needed to stay at the curb to minimize parklet Construction Cost and accessibility concerns. We heard many parking loading spaces needed to accommodate changes in Customer Behavior including increase in ondemand food delivery, increase for uber and lyfts, but also needed to maintain Parking Spaces for customers who drove to the corridor. Considering all the competition for space we need adbetter bikeway and encourage recovery of the corridor due to covid and a Center Running bikeway was recommended between 15th and 23rd. 3 Main Elements including sener running bikeway, indicated by the a on the graphic. Pedestrian improvements, b and curb Side Management plan maintaining as many parklets as possible indicated by c. The Pilot Project retained more parking and loading compared to a side running bikeway design maintain parklet against the curb and provide dedicated [indiscernible] three months is a very early time to start understanding how behaviors permanently change around a new project. Our best practice and Evaluation Team indicated 6 to 12 months is the benchmark when behavior fully changed and focused picture and effect of a project can be realized. With that said, we did collect data at the three month park and i want to set the framework for that discussion. So, we selected industry standards to evaluate the pilot meeting goals improving Traffic Safety and sharing movement of people and goods. Following our own safe streets evaluation handbook, the metric fell into three main categories, which measured safe behavior, effective design and mobility. When we collect data we collected predata so that was collectsed in october 2022 and then three month Data Collected in october of last year. So, letsi want to provide high level summary of the evaluation findings. Right away we can focus on safety for people who bike s. More comfortable cycling experience. The two major conflicts from class 2 bikeways was constant blockage from vehicles using as a loading zone and interact with moving vehicles in the travel lane or pulling into the bikeway to load. Secondly, the old bikelane positions on the road between the vehicle and parking lane and people had to constantly interact with people opening doors. We have found out that with the Center Running bikeway, these conflict points have been significantly reduced and much more predictable. Under the pilot conditions we seen huge improvement. The loading zones are tailored and regulations better match the actual measured activity on the street. Finally, there are a lot of positive outcomes with this project. But the evaluation at three month mark did uncover new conflicts. A year ago vehicle bicycle conflicts were seen both at the intersection and midblock, but now they are eliminated midblock but we are seeing emergence of crash patterns at the intersections. Double parking reduced overall, we are seeing emerging conflicts at the intersections. For both of these points well talk more and get into details as the presentation progresss. Same number of people are cycling on valencia. It is slightly up by 3 percent but that is within the realm of variance based on daily commuting and weather conditions. The same time, pedestrian volumes decreased slightly so decrease by 5 percent and again this is generally within our accepted realm of variance for day to day activities. So, moving on to daily vehicle volume. We saw about 26 percent decrease in daily vehicle volumes and while the vehicle volumes have gone down, we have seen that loading events have increased by 27 percent and when we take a deeper look to loading data for passenger dropoff it increased by 126 percent. When we look at the loading event changes between preand post pilot, pasen injure vehicles and pick up trucks increases around 13 percent. Overall there is a increase in passenger dropoffs and pickups. Also we looked at good pickups and drop offs which could be related to uber eats, door dash Food Delivery Services and from this we saw 43 percent fl increase in loading activity. The last mobility metric is change in vehicle congestion especially on parallel streets. There were initial concerns from stakeholders that the pilot design could divert traffic to neighbor streets to measure this we looked at change in vehicle speeds and travel time, flow of vehicles as a matter of density and speed, meaning more cars on the road, slower people will move. So, when we compare the pre and post vehicle speeds and travel times we found little to no change. If we look at guerrero or mission, the vehicle volumes remained the same compared to year earlier. Travel times are similar. We measured certain corridors between different streets and they are essentially the same before the pilot and during the pilot. Now we move into effective Design Metric and the first is review of traffic collisions. One thing to consider when looking at traffic collisions is looking at factors that played into the collisions pre and post implementation. The main crash factser before the pilot was door and side swipes. The first few months of the Pilot Project none of the collisions occurred along the projeblth corridor. What we have seen is crashes are mainly due to vehicle making illegal left or illegal uturn. There are design adjustments we can make in coordination with the Police Department for enforcement to mitigate factors. From the post implementation collision data, pedestrian collisions are not necessarily attributesed to pilot design but outside what we attribute to the pilot. For example, one collision occurred because a pedestrian was in the active roadway outside a crosswalk and another one the motorist failed to yield to a pedestren, so another was due to vehicles proceeding and backing up and not taking safe enough measures and backed up into a person. Not necessarily attributed to the actual project itself. We know that it takes time for people to adjust to a new roadway and many cases see slight increase in crashes after a new roadway is implemented. We see around 612 month mark we see readjustment to the actual roadway and behavior becomes permanent. We saw this exact thing happen in between market and 15th street when we implemented the side running bike design. What we saw was a steady crash rate increase in the crash rate right after the project was implemented and then reduction in the crash rate after that 612 month window. That is similar to what we see between 15th and 23rd street on valencia. If we want to get into that we can. We see very similar pattern. Have a very consistants crash pattern and jumps up to the three month mark and now we see what happens between the 612 month window. One thing we notice is there were no bicycle involved crashes attributed to dooring or side swipes thin first 5 months of the pilot. Illegal left or uturn acontributed attributed to [indiscernible] factor increased to 30 percent over the first 5 month ozf the pilot, so i want to note that we are looking at 5 years of crash data compared to 150 days of crash data, so that is very large sample size compared to a very small sample size. I did want to talk about some of the pedestrian involved crashes and bike involved crashes. The map you see a legend representing 3 modes. The circle icon represent collisions involving bike or scooter, the squares are the collisions pedestrian involved and the triangle are where vehicle only collisions happen. This map represents the first 5 months of crash data available, which is from august to december of last year and thats all we had available at this time. As mentioned previously, the main crash factor that involve cyclist is due to making illegal left and uturns at intersections or midblock location. We see high concentration been between 17th and 18th street sicka more. For pedestrian related crashes, half were attributesed to pedestrian not yielding outside the cross walk and 25 percent each were attributed to vehicle backing up and vehicle failing to yield at the cross walk. At this point, i am going to turn it over to shada who will talk about the parking and loading results. Thank you. Thanks paul. Good afternoon esteemed members of the sfmta board of directors. Im a transportation planner at the sfmta and worked on the e curb Management Plan element of the pilot. Also involved is [indiscernible] i will discuss three month findings related to vehicle loading. Given the double parking was one of the main drivers of the pilot, double parking was also one of the primary metric evaluating the curb planagement plan. Double parking occur because there wasnt enough space for vehicles to pull up to the curb and this happened because the curb was fully occupied by parked cars and parklets or because the available curb space was not long enough for variety of vehicle types [indiscernible] commercial vehicles that load on valencia street to easily and quickly pull in and out of the curb. Considering the new right of way configuration associated with the pilot, we knew we had to free curb space because double parked vehicle would either halt traffic in one direction or cause vehicles to encroach in the bikeway in order to maneuver around the double parked vehicle. To address the demand, we reallocated the curb both physically in terms of installing longer loading zones and temp oralally by applying loading zone regulations so different type of loading could be accommodated at different times of the day. Of the total loading events observed three months into the pilot, we saw a 77 percent reduction in double parking and now 87 percent of loading is done at the curb. That is a 164 percent improvement from prepilot conditions. Only 33 percent of loading happened at the curb. We have seen reduction in double parking, we are also seeing it does still happen and occurs most commonly in the evening hours. We also want to see whether and how the curb Management Plan impacted loading activity. We saw no impact on the distribution of loading events throughout the day. Loading was consistently observed to occur from morning tonight at the same rates across all time periods before and three monthinize to the pilot. We also saw commercial loading stayed relatively the same. As paul mentioned, among ondemand Transportation Service like uber or lyft or door dash, amazon, uber eats, we saw 23 percent overall increase in goods and passenger pickups and dropoffs. Both rile hailjug corier service made up majority of evening loading activity observed. This is why our loading zones ended late into the evenings. We also noticed a change in dwell times which looks how long it takes for vehicles to load. Before the pilot all most a third of loading took more then 5 minutes. That number dropped down to 8 percent three months into the pilot. Now 92 percent of loading takes less then 5 minutes. Which reflects the trend towards increased on demand subs like ride hailing or food deliveries. [indiscernible] as part of dual use loading zones or as a stand alone curb regulation as part of the curb Management Plan. Finally, we looked at loader instances at the individual block level. As shown on the graph, each of the observed blocks along the area functions as its own ecosystem in terms of the loading it deals with. The block between 19th and 20th street saw increase in loading instances while the block between 21 and 22 stayed roughly the same. This is also why every block along valencia in the pilot area has varying curb regulations because each block has a different type of loading activity. So, again, while double parking significantly decreased, double parking is still occurring on every block. We are optimistic about the continued positive impacts the curb Management Plan will have on the pilot and we look forward to making continued tweaks as we collaborate with the Merchant Community and other stakeholders. The curb managem team will be available to answer questions following this presentation and ill hand it back to paul to talk about changes around vehicle encroachment in the bikeway. Thanks. Thanks shada. So, i wanted to talk about vehicle encroachment. Prepilot data showed 67 percent of loading activity was double parking and loading in the bike lane was 40 percent of all loading activities, so pretty high. Post implementation conditions the loading and bikeway is down to 10th percent so dramatic reduction in loading in bikeway compared to a year earlier. We also looked at events without stoppage time which means a vehicle entering the bikeway to potentially pass a double parked vehicle and then going back to the vehicle travel lane and what we have seen is estimate 1 percent of vehicles or 3 to 4 encroach in the bikeway on a regular basis. In some cases because there is a uturn and some cases as mentioned someone is going around a double parked vehicle. We know encroachment is less frequent shorter in duration and because of design with the rubber curb vehicles must slow down before if they were going to enter the bikeway. What we hope is that encroachment is less frequently at lower speeds. We also looked at bike positioning so observing where people on bikes are on the street and this is important indicator of bikeway design and comfort. In prepilot conditions about 11 percent of the psycholss traveled down the vehicle travel lane and that is now down to about 3 percent. More people are traveling in the Center Running bikeway compared to the bike lanes there a year ago and what we have seen is increase from 89 percent to 96 percent. We also looked at user compliance with thedriver compliance with left turn restrictions and also traffic signals. So, what we found is in prepilot conditions left turns represented about 8 percent of all through traffic or all traffic on valencia. What we see is that reduced to 1 percent and 1 percent is great, but we want that lower, especially there are left turn restrictions off valencia. We also look ed at bike and vehicle signal compliance. Bike compliance is 79 percent which is lower then our city average of 85, but for vehicles their compliance with vehicle signals is 98 percent compared to city wide average of around 90. We also looked at change in vehicle speeds and while vehicle speeds did slightly decrease by 1 mile per hour, majority of vehicles are already traveling at or below the posted speed limit, so that is a good finding so that is good because we know vehicle speeding is number one violation for severe traffic collisions in San Francisco. We also measured conflict points at the intersections and how it relates to people riding bikes and people walking. We estimate that 5 percent of pedestrians per hour crossing the intersection will interact on some level with a bicycle and some cases this is simply a quick stop by a cyclist and some cases it is pedestrian yielding to the cyclist and then a very small amount of those interactions result in one or the other moving very quickly out of the way to avoid a collision. With that, i wanted to just summarize again what we have seen from our three month evaluation findings. The cycling experience as we measured right now has less conflict more comfortable and more predictable compare today a year ago. Midblock vehicle interaction are significantly fewer and fewer interactions compared to a year ago. Loading zones and new regulation better match supply and demand and create desired outcome of reduced parking and more loading at the curb. With that, i want to move to what we heard because we have been doing a lot of talking to the community and there are lots of opinions on valencia so i want to highlight what we have been hearing from folks since it went in. The first thing that we have heard loud and clear is businesses and Small Businesses along valencia are struggling and since Small Businesses are the backbone of San Francisco and especially the experience on valencia making it an amazing destination, we acknowledge that and want to help those Small Businesses. At the same time we heard it is confusing how to park. We heard confusing where and when and who can park along the corridor and the instructions are not always clear. We also heard there are too many commercial loading zones and not enough metered parking. We also heard that some businesses use personal vehicles for commercial deliveries. They use to run tos costco or target and there isnt the flexibility in the system. We also heard that the ability to double park has changed and much harder under current conditions. We heard the turn restrictions for motorists are confusing and just really lend itself to a lot of challenges with navigating valencia if you are driving. We heard opinions about the bikeway. Some feel it is more predictable and comfortable while others feel it is less safe, especially when that center lane is used by police and fire in emergency services. Additionally we heard preference from some Business Owner tuesday return to precovid bikeway configuration and that allow some more flexibility into the roadway space. So, what are we doing about what we heard . A lot. We are constantly tweaking our design in San Francisco and valencia is no exception to that. We are addressing not only what we heard but what we have seen from the three month evaluation results. In november we rolled back the number of commercial loading zone spaces implemented at the start. We think we may have implemented too many so in november we rolled back hours at some locations and allowed for more general metered parking when it seemed applicable. Afternoon or after 6 p. M. There are now more personal spaces for personal vehicles compared to august and september and october last year. We also heard that knowing whenwho with what type of vehicle can park in certain spaces and part is attributed to the current multispace meter layout, so you may have one kiosk that providesyou can pay for 8 or 9 different Parking Spaces and it isnt always clear if the parking restrictions for one space is the same as the adjacent one, so we are reinstalling a parking meter for each single space along the corridor. That will clarify who can park with what type of vehicle at what time of day. Eliminateic some of the confusion. We also design posters and decals for parking along valencia, simplifying the loading hours and when you can park there and also director people to to the two sfmta garages at 16th and 21 street. These garages are often cheaper and have more Available Spaces then the metered spaces. We are continuing merchant outreach and Stakeholder Engagement as the Pilot Project continues. Thats what we are doing right now with the current design, but we are also looking at some potential options for a medium term. What that really comes down to is our project team examining how a side running bikeway can be designed between 15th and 23 street. Before we develop a Detailed Design for a side running bikeway option there are a lot of Big Questions that we need answered. These include how do parklets fit into side running design and trade off between parking and parklet spaces and also have to talk about emergency access with partners at Fire Department, Police Department, we also have to discuss and talk overhead wires between the block of the project corridor, but really the big factor we have to talkwe have been talking to parklet owners is, what do we do with the parklets . How are they treated in a side running bike design and the few options include do we keep them on the side next to the sidewalk . Do we move to a floating position . Is the priority changed for some parklet owner jz they dont need a parklet anymore . We started last week talking to parklet owners to understand on a individual basis how merchants treat their parklets now. We started that engagement already. I did want to talk about parklet question because i think it is important and it is very valuable for any sort of consideration with the side running bikeway design. Right now i just want to talk about how they are treated with a Center Running bikeway which is the green rectangle in the middle of the street. The parklets which are labeled a are against the curb and that allows for parking and loading immediately on either side of a parklet so you maximize the curb side space for as much parking and loading you can fit. Like i mentioned earlier, this allowed for us to retain 95 percent of all parking and loading space with a Center Running bikeway option. If we move to a side running bikeway design, but we keep the parklets against the curb, that means we have to slalom away from the curb. What that means is some level of parking and loading removal on both sides of the parklet. That is a very critical point we are talking to folks about right now. The other option is moving that parklet to a floating location and what that means is pushing it away from the curb and allowing the bikeway to run in between a parklet and parking and loading and the sidewalk and what we have seen is this implemented in a few locations, especially manhattan and oakland on Telegraph Hill so we have been talking to department of transportation there to understand what they see with a floating parklet design. This alternative would also allow more parking and loading because you could squeeze parking and loading on both sides of a parklet. There would be no transition and run straight through. There is also a raised crossing between the sidewalk and the parklet and that prioritize employees servers customers and force cyclist to slow down over the raised crossing. At the same time, if parklets were to be moved or reconstructed to floating location, we acknowledge that there would be some cost associated with that. If you relocate or reconstructing a parklet, we know that would cost money. I did want to provide a few visuals what a floating parklet looks like and these are from oakland. As you can see on the right, there is that elevated crossing and if you are a cyclist you go up and slow down, there is a single point where people cross and if you are riding bike you have to slow down to go up and go over and that is hopefully would be the main interaction point between people trying to get to the parklet and cyclist. We have talked to oakland. This generally seems to work well there. There is a clear preference by Business Owners to have single point of access and that is the raised crossing that is indicated by those yellow chevrons. There are a lot of tradeoffs with any sort of side running design, especially in this case. As mentioned earl y side running design has issue and tradeoffs. We started working with the parklet owners and understanding how they use them now. We also need to talk to other people in the city family, so the Fire Department about their emergency access. We also have to consider the intersection design, so as mentioned earl y valencia has a lot oof compact space but the intersections are really important so we need to investigate, is a there enough space in the existing signal infrastructure to do a signal separation and enough roadway to do a phased separation between turning vehicles and cyclists . Is a protected intersection a better fit based on all the things just mentioned . Those are Big Questions that are Engineering Team is already looking into just to be prepared if we are structed to pivot to side running bikeway. We also like mentioned need to coordinate with muni anytime the overhead wires between 16th and 17th street and then just making sure there is no conflict with the wires with any side running design. Finally, we are also thinking about much longer term plans. Capital project that require a lot of money and doesnt have funding identified now. While the Center Running bikeway address the immediate needs of safety for all users, a longterm Capital Project asks what do we want valencia to look like in the future and how can it become a Better Destination . We started three studies this year that begin to examine that question and focus on traffic circulation, public life and public space and curb management. These studies examine longterm alternatives for valencia and include many opportunities for Public Engagement and input starting later this year. Funding isnt identified and any longterm Capital Project will require a few years to develop. That is all i had. I did want to acknowledge that this is a very complex project and has a lot of staff working on it. I think any time there is somewhere between 10 to 20 staff depending what is going on and they are all very important. They have been working very hard on this, nights, weekdayss, vacations and holidays so i want to recognize this is a big commitment from staff and we are fully engaged with it. Thank you. Thank you for your presentations. I also just want to say, it is abundantly clear to this board how much work has gone into this, how many datsa there is to poor through and try to make sense of, how you are ernestly trying both to understand what is happening from this pilot and also to share that data transparntly with the public and help the public and board to understand and learn together. This is genuinely feels like a pilot and we are learning and adjusting real time. I want to say thank you what we heard slide. I feel it is very important to just repeat back what we are hearing and make sure to share that out and make sure everybody understands the themes are noticed and the problems staff are working to resolve. This is our item colleagues so we can have clarifying questions from this board, go to Public Comment and i want a sense of discussion and potential direction from this board for staff Going Forward. Do you have a preference . Maybe i will look to vice chair cajina how we structure . I want to value the community time. They came out to discuss the item so i rather give them the floor first, hear from them and then we can react. Everyone okay with that . Lets open up Public Comment. I have a couple speaker cards. William walker, Shirly Johnson. Hi. William walker and i wanted to try to suggest transformational change and i know that is more longterm. There is already a restriction driving northbound on Mission Street so meaning if you are in the mission and in a car you can only go through on Mission Going southbound so i say making cars only went northboun on valencia and look whatever changes you are bringing to revitalize businesses on valencia thatd you do the same for businesses on Mission Street. Whatever happens on valencia there needs to be a different road treatment for the bike space so that folks treat it differently when people see fire trucks and emergency vehicles in the lane, when there is no one patrolling they they think they have a right to be in the lane and i have seen cars breemp the lane which feels unsafe as a cyclist. I think having a oneway alternative might allow for this double parking and if we know it is behavior happening then continue toog have a single lane of traffic doesnt solve that problem. Valencia also shouldnt be considered in a vack uum. There is Mission Street and used to take cap street and now you cant go through on cap street so looking at the whole piece holistically. I donts know anyone that uses the places where uber drivers are told to pick folks up on the side street and there are not waiting zones for that on the side streets and they en bloc muni when they are picking up on the side streets and folks with mobility challenges have had a hard time engaging with valencia since the bus was eliminated. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Im Shirly Johnson and i live on 17th street less then a block from valencia and ride by bike on valencia a lot. I am one of the people who wrote to you before the pilot and said please dont do it. I am now a person who was a convert. I love the Center Running bike lane. I didnt think ied with like it so went in with negativity but i love it and the reason i love it is it is safer for me and pedestrians and motorist. A motorist doesnt see me when im behind parked cars and i cant see motorist so neither can adjust. At 14th street i pop out from behind parked cars on my bike to cross that right turn lane, super dangerous for motorists suddenly im in their field of view, they may have to slam on the are break, get rearendsed. Bad for motorist, bad for pedestrians. They often for no apparent reason step in the bike lane. I have to watch all the time. I dont know who is going to suddenly step into the bike lane. Maybe they are going for the food truck which is analogous having a parklet. They step in front of me. Im constantly watching pedestrians. There is also a lot of garbage i have to swirfb around endangering bikealist. When i get in the center lane, i feel safer, secure, not going to hit a pedestrian, there is nobody in the bike lane, it is just a wonderful feeling and i applaud staff for Going Forward with this and i applaud you for proceeding with it as well. I think it is absolutely wonderful. I hope that it can continue the entire length of valencia. I love to see that. Safety as a top priority, safety is far better as you saw with the data and as i personally experience with the Center Running bike lane. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your perspective. [read ing speaker cards] good afternoon. Robin levt and i want to second the previous speaker. She said everything i wanted to say. First, i thank you so much for undertaking this project. It is thinking outside the box and i think it is really terrific. The Center Running bike lanes are terrific. I bicycle everywhere in the city. I have been biking in cities since i was 14 years old and i used to work on valencia, so i used to bike it every single day, and then the double parking started to ramp up and ramp up and ramp up and ieven though i grew up in detroit, the worst place you can think of bicycling and i used to bike everywhere and im a fearless bike rider, but it became dangerous for me with all the double parking. I finally stopped biking on valencia when i asked a driver, please donts park in the drive lane and what did she do . Slammed her door into me and then chased me down the street all most ran me over, so i said thats enough. Now i can ride on valencia street and i feel perfectly safe. I really think you should keep the Pilot Project going, study more, i know there are some issues but i like to see the Center Running bike lanes from Market Street, past cesar chavez to Mission Street. The side running bike lanes, all things mentioned are problems. The garbage, the glass, the irregular pavement, the sewer grates, the man hole covers. A day like today when it rains it is flooded along the curbside, so pedestrians stepping out, cars coming from side streets, cars making right turns, you are invisible. The Center Running bike lanes are the best thing since slice bred. Please keep them. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. My name is [indiscernible] i have been cycling in San Francisco for a decade and love the bike lanes on valencia. They feel more safe with the old lanes got every time i was riding down valencia had to weave in and out of traffic and since [indiscernible] not had to do that once. Even a couple times encountered a vehicle in the bike lane been able foogo around still safe in the center lanes. The intersections are more complicated but well signed and feel so much better. Glad we heard so much about parklets. The city embrace of shared spaces is a positive thing from the pandemic. Happy prepandemic bike lanes are considered and glad that is reconsidering. I say from personal experience the telegraph strategy of floating parklets is bit ridiculous. No one wants a active bike lane cutting through a active restaurant. Servers carrying plates or [indiscernible] is a mess. Valencia center lanes with [indiscernible] imagine as a cyclist slowing down to avoid [indiscernible] would be a step backwards. I look forward to further pedestrian of valencia. Guerrero and van ness are fine streets for getting across town and need to continue [indiscernible] treating cars more specialized visitors the same way mission prioritize walking and bus riding. I love when valencia blocked off for cars. It was nice to wander and dine in the street and hope to see more of that . In the longterm plan of the street. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon. My name is Christopher White thebefore the pilot installed the conditions on valencia become dangerous. To meet the city goals to decrease our [indiscernible] people using transportation need to feel and be safer and face fewer conflicts with people in cars. The city must insure human scale modes have their own space rather then asking people to share space. The Center Running bike lane does that. True, it isnt perfect. There are a lot of kinks to work out and improvements to be made but that should be the point of a pilot. In the coming months the San Francisco Bike Coalition will demand a visionary commitment for a city wide interconnected network for car free and people prioritized mobility corridors. Anyone should be able to leave their front dpoor with bike or scooter to be on the corridor within 5 minutes and get to any neighborhoods in the city without terrified to share the road. To achieve that goal, the sfmta board needs to have vision and show leadership but that isnt necessarily anytime getting it perfect every time. It is about encouraging staff to try things. See what works. Learn from what doesnt and iterate. But we must keep our eyes on that larger goal if we are going to get there. So, lets start with valencia. Lets finish out the pilot and learn everything we can about the design and lets also be ready to pivot. We like to call on the board to direct staff over the second half of this pilot to develop a design for curb side parking protected bikelanes so if the iterations on valencia dont improve comfort and safety we can immediately begin implementing new design. But we echo what sfmta staff said. It is absolutely clear we cannot go back to the dangerous situation that we had before. Finally i want to say thank you to chair eaken and Board Members for having this important hearing and thank you to sfmta staff for collecting such robust data and reporting it out. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comment. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon chair eaken and directors. [indiscernible] walk San Francisco. Walk San Francisco office is located in the mission, so i regularly walk and bike on valencia. It is vibrant corridor from coffee shops to book stores and restaurants and lively bars to the Mission Playground where kids and families play. Many live on valencia as well including dear friends of mine. This corridor is dear to me personally and deeply concerned about Pedestrian Safety. Therefore, what i want to insure is that the left turn restriction imp l. Ed as a partf othe current design remain regardless of the changes. Consider a whole 40 percent of pedestrian fatalities in 2019 were a result of left turn collisions. The city put people first instituteing the left turn restrictions as a part and that must not be taken away but committed to and enhanced. The sign is often not enough and more must be done to stop drivers turning left on valencia. What we want to hear is commitment to keeping restrictions in tact and enhanced Going Forward. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Next speak, please. [reading speaker card names] im glad the agency is prioritizing bike safety by not going back to the previous unprotected lane. Knowing we had two pedestrian deaths in San Francisco this year, i urge you to also keep the Pedestrian Safety improvements particularly the left turn restrictions evan mentioned. The Center Running lane has mostly worked for commute several times a week, but i am farther from the sidewalk and it isnt as easy or safe. It is highway for bikes. I understand from the ride hail and delivery data the pilot design hasnt been worse for businesses, but i also wonder can it be better [indiscernible] could shine as a destination even more. With your cars we can hear the music and smell the coffee persumes and [indiscernible] and be more places to sit. Real public space. So, while acknowledging the need today to get in and out quickly by all modes, i also support the agency work towards a future valencia where we encourage people to stay and shop and stroll. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Madam chair, board, director tumlin, my name is mark. I live in the mission. I bike in the mission for decade nearly every day on the valencia bike lane, and i want to say how thrilled i am to be here to have a city extremely supportive of bike safety. It has been quite a change over the last 10 or 15 years and i personally really appreciate it, so thank you for your commitment. I love being in a protected bike lane. Whether it runs down the center of the street, whether it is a one way street with two bike lanes on the side, i love the fact we have done this as a city and as a community and i really appreciate it. I think that relatively agnostic as to the final design, but what we have done here to keep cars parking in our lane, veering into the lane feels important and lot calmer on a bike. Left hand turns tend to be a problem with oncoming traffic at busy times but seems to work wem in the center. I just want to express my thanks and support what you are doing here. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. My name is gus preston, i lived in the neighborhood for about 27 years and i have been commuting up and down valencia street for 15. I really appreciate all the work that everyone put into this and all the data and think it is very well compiled and well considered and actually until september 19 i didnt have a problem with the center bike lane, but i was one of the people hit by a car going left, and myi think it can work. I think that all the great ideas that have come up we can work and appreciate being in a city that does this, but i do not think it will work without the assistance of the Police Department. The mission Police Department station i dont think it is willing to enforce any of the left turn lanes at all and i think they absolutely have to. They should be here. Someone should be here. So, thats just my take. I dont think it will work by just putting a sign up. I think they have to enforce it. Thats me. Thank you for sharing your experience with us. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon board of directors. My name is claire [indiscernible] director of advocacy at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and waiting for the mta Evaluation Data to be shared we thought direction from our members on how the pilot is going and what should happen next on february 7 we distributed a member only survey about the pilot and received over 1200 responses in a week. Here are key take aways from the survey and a Member Meeting hosted last tuesday. Our members generally feel safe in the center runic bike lane and improvement from the previous unprotected design. The biggest issues for peachal on bikes are needing sturdier materials rkss feeling unsafe using the bike boxes and drivers making illegal turns. One top 3 members to use the bike lane is visit businesses. They generally support Small Businesses along valencia street, want to see them succeed and have ideas how to better support them. Lastly, the largest percentage prefer protected side running bike lanes with curb side parklets as the near term design. These results ran forth our position that sfmta staff must do the following first, iterate design as promised by staff in the board last april and keep in place until the 12 months are up. Second, simultaneously complete draft plans for side running bike lanes and third, once the pilot is over, immediately install side runx bike lanes with curb side parklets unless comfort and safety improve to warrant the Center Running bike lane. Thank you. Everyone here loves valencia street. We want people on active transportation to feel safe while ridejug Small Business to thrive and we know these can coexist. We look forward working with you. Thank you next speaker, please. Coming late. My [indiscernible] lived in the mission 16 years and did read the report online today so very exciting and just want to mirror what a lot of folks said already. I have been shopping and riding and walking and driving up and down valencia 16 years and thought the improvements made to more accessible access to the street and to the neighborhood in general is awesome and i want to see more. The center runic bike lane is along that direction and rightfully so, there could be improvements. It sounds you are planning, which is awesome and i love it. If we can move to more accessible version of valencia with side runic bike lanes and curb protected that will be even awesomeer. Thank you for giving us a space to speak and excited to see what you do next. Thank you so much. Thank you for your comment. Next speaker, please mpts good afternoon directors. Zack liptin, friends of valencia. Safety must the number one priority and that isnt just a opinion, that is city policy and the law. The Center Running design has done a great job addressing the dooring and double parking t. Is safer before but it doesnt live up to safety goals. 3 to 4 [indiscernible] and death of 80 year old neighbor in september isnt vision zero and need to address immediately. I appreciate all the efforts paul and kimberley and the whole team put into the project. The outreach they have done and fully support staff moving forward with the side running protected bike lane design. There are few points of direction i think the board might give that insure this design is safe and successful. First of all, mix ing zones are dangerous. Not safe for kids and dont belong on valencia street. The board should direct staff to pursue protected or signal separated intersections that will be safe for everyone on the street. Secondly, pursue curb side parklets rather then sacrificing safety instead of floating parklets and staff needs and deserves the time to get this right but the current configuration is unsafe so outreach process shouldants be allowed to drag on indefinitely. We need a date when the decision will be made. I believe there is bolder visions possible for valencia both safe for people and outstanding for business vitality. We saw this first hand with beach blocks and number of people who came out last fall to shop and dine in the people first space. We are city that wants to innovate and try new things so prioritize use within valencia limited greometry staff neets resource tuesday do the pilot within a pilot as the brored directed last year. We look forward working with everyone as we seek to create a safe vibrant valencia for everyone. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker, please. Hello. My name [indiscernible] live in lower haight and bike on valencia a lot. Im agnostic on the Center Running lanes. Director tumlin asked us to trust him when they pushed the option over the planned sides running lanes in 2019. I was willing to. [indiscernible] in the current configuration is unintuitive and can feel dangerous. To the concern of businesses [indiscernible] harder for bikers to stop and shop at stores. 70 percent of people shopping do not come by car. Going forward we need to encourage vitality. [indiscernible] people enjoy the space without feeling at risk and we cannot give up at the intersection given how dangerous mixing zones are. Since pedestrianization seems not in the range and immediate term im supportive of side running lanes and believe they are compatible with pedestrianization. Givethen police are uninterested enforcing laws we need to build selfenforcing infrastructure that means concrete and diverts and bike lanes curb level. These are problems many cities around the world solved and places in San Francisco we solved as well and look forward when we solve them on valencia. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker, please. Nice to be back in person. Martin, i get around walking or muni but with changes i love to shift more to biking as it is more flexible and convenient. Right now it is not safe on most streets in San Francisco including valencia. I want to thank the aerjs and board taking on this challenge. Thinking back in the Proposal Center runic bike lane i was optimistic a 24 7 pilot block could be tried to show the community and merchants what is possible on valencia. In a time of budges crunches i understand the difficulty trying new things. Keeping the difficult position in mind it is baffles me we spent so much time and money for so many constituents to feel unheard unsafe or confused. Imagine the difference if mta used the quick build approach to pilot [indiscernible] merchant always complain when parking is in question and that is a given. I rather they complain about something truly transformative that works versus trying untested and dangerous experiment with bikers and pedestrian lives i might add. If mta had gone with side running protected lanes from the get go i doubt we would be here today. The lessen is mta needs to go big or International Best practice instead of trying to please everyone and pleasing very few. I think the Center Running bike lanes are better and can never gee back, but the configuration doesnt provide [speaker speaking too fast] which we have seen become a critical issue with the Center Running design. It allows bikers to stop at businesses. This seems the [indiscernible] however i do think this does not preclude pedestrianization which is ultimate goal. Also, quick sidenote, enforcement should not be the goal, it should be physical infrastructure. Thank you. Getting through that quickly. Next speaker, please. Hi, Board Members. I urge you to direct staff to finalize and propose the curb side protected bike lane with curb side parklets and approve design for instillation immediately in order to help merchants along valencia increase safety for all people and help shift to walking biking and scooting which reduce car traffic and make parking easier helping the city take action to address the climate crisis. The Better Valencia Campaign calls for precktded bike lanes and i launched before you approved the Center Bikeway has more thaen 1300 supporters that continue to urge you to direct staff to propose curb protected bike lanes with parklets and approve instillation oof that design immediately. 15 years ago washington dc installed a center bike way on pennsylvania avenue. The years fallowed the city saw crashes increase intersections and midblock and made tweaks to design only to continue to see crashes. Now 15 years later washington dc is plan toog remove the bikeway likely with curb protected bike lanes. Today you heard staff talk about crashes midblock and suggest making miner tweaks to design to address the issue. Sound familiar . Additionally, the total number of crashes and injuries increased with the Center Bikeway on per month basis. A man was killed within 60 days of the Center Bikeway being installed. You have a opportunity to change course for the sake of businesses People Safety and the planet. The curb side protected bikelane between market and 15 result in 50 percent increase in people biking compared to no increase with the Center Bikeway. You are positioned to take action for future of valencia our city and the planet. I urge you to direct staff to propose curb side protected design [indiscernible] thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon board. I want to thank the agency for the report that demonstrate the dedication to better use of road space. I want to ask that we dont just let this pilot sit there for another 6 months. The agency look to implement now additional safety improvements to the Center Running bike lane. The study and data shows we need more uturn and left turn protection, 50 percent of the incidents involved uturns and left turns. We need protection at each intersection of thesoft flex hit post help discourage cars entering that lane in the Fire Department could still run over it any time they need to. Third, bike boxes remain scary and dont work when you are riding in groups. Many use valencia we go out to a destination and will be riding with one or two other riders 6789. It is difficult to use a bike box to turn off when you are in that mode. The mixing zones continue to be problematic and need additional refinement. They are not safe even if no one is hit yet. I want to say, dont rely on sfpd who isnt going to solve this. We need infrastructure. The future is about being data oriented and goal driven and the data shows this is a better situation then what we had before, but to lead with data and our goal as we think what we want in our future whether Center Running or side running we want something safe and leads us towards a joyous street we all want to go to and congregate on as we go to merchants and as we socialize. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. Im a bike person, a mom and huge fan of our Small Businesses and the spirit of valencia. Im here to encourage you to think much bigger then this. Wree are supposedly a world class city. We do not have a single pedestrianized street. The only one that is close is inside a park. Valencia is one of the most vibrant streets in the city and deserves to be a place, not just another thoroughfare. Our businesses say they are struggling and i argue it is due to bike people wizing by them separated from them by car traffic. You heard so many people say they felt safe because the protection. Protection, what are we protecting them from . Can you imagine how much safer they would feel if there were no cars . We need to start reducing the flb of cars in the city and the amount of access we have. We need to make valencia just for peep jl you can do this today. You can accommodate deliveries in the morning like in other major cities with pudes destrenized streets. Make the Center Running lane paint only and move the equipment to folsom. Create a express lane on folsom. Why are we fighting over one single corridor . We should have multiple options . Cars do. Meal delivery and pick up and drop off can happen on number streets as those spaces can convert to loading only and motorist park in the garage. This is what transit first city would do. This doesnt require study. Cities around the world have been doing it. You have seen on the pick clr. We need to pilot Something Bigger, 10 to 20 staff working on valencia, talk of reinstalling parking meters, what are we doing . We need to make valencia for people. Thank you. Any other speakers who like to address item 12 in the room . Any request for remote accommodation . Alright. Close Public Comment and colleagues, the item is before you. This is a time to ask clarifying questions of staff on the very intensive Data Presentation and materials before us or share your personal experience or any sense of direction you like to channel Going Forward and i do see director hinze has her hand in the queue so well start with you. Ill go first. Thank you madam chair and thank you everyone who came out to give comment today. I do have a couple questions that i came out of the Public Comment and some of the written comments we got. One potential iteration and concern in the Current Center ride way is the bike boxes are not large enough for bikes to workspecifically not large for two bikes. I just wanted staff if we are look at potentially making those larger Going Forward or any change to the bike box es . I know there was onechanged several months back. Yes, so we heard that very clearly from a few meetings and we have directed our project team to start looking into what they can do to expand the footprint of the bike boxes. Yes, we are working on that. Okay. And then, we heard todaywe heard through Public Comment today is that, people who do ride on valencia dontim curious also whatsince that isnt a guarantee, ill put it that way, what staff is thinking of doing from a engineering perspective to try to selfenforce those restrictions that are at those points . I think that is also very valuable and we also instructed our Engineering Group to look into. The most immediate thing they are doing is reinforce uturns are illegalane Business District and we know there are specific locations where this seems to be occurring, so we are developing work orders to encourage that through additional signage, but signage can only do so much, so we are looking at additional measures we can roll out in the next few months. So, i think my thoughts would bewe received a lot of comments on this item and it has been the source of controversy and with our multistakeholders. I think i dont regret voting on the pilot, but it is a pilot and so i do think we need to lean into making improvements and commit to maintaining the pilot here for at least the next time, but then also, it is clear that it is not the ideal design, so leaning into make structural changes to the pilot as you are, but then also acknowledging that we are hearing from some stakeholders and folks that use the pilot on a daily basis, this is the most ideal design, so also leaning into making sure that we are doing the proper outreach and investigations to see if we can do the side running with the curb side parklets and i do think that maybe this is a question for sheda, i do think that will require some outreach with the community, so if you cani think you talked a little bit about it in your presentation, knut but if you can sort of describe what your envision in terms of a potential outreach timeline for doing that for curbside parklets and side bike lane, if you can describe that sort of timeline for that. Time lines or outreach, i think that would be helpful. Sure. So, our engineers have already started looking at the very early conceptual design for side running bikeway option, and we are beginning to share that with people along the valencia corridor and there are some very large design decisions that need time to get figured out, and probably the biggest one that probably has the most interest at least publicly is how the parklets are handled. We started speaking with merchants who own parklets last week and introducing the idea with them getting them comfortable with the ideas and different options and we will continue to do that as the design progresss and as they need more engagement. We started last week, we will continue for the rest of the month but this is ongoing conversation with merchants and parklet owners so they understand exactly what a side running bikeway design would look like if there is a pivot to that at some point. So, that is our job right now is to engage directly with merchants where they are, but also talking to Community Groups and trying to understand the nuanced needs store front by store front and parking and loading space by parking and loading space because any pivot will take time and it we want to do it correctly it will take time to make sure everybody is listened to and heard. So, that is what we are starting or what we have already started to do this month and what well continue to do through the spring. Ill close with thisi also realize we are asking you to do two projects in one here, both maintain and make modifications to the pilot and continue to iterate on that, but also lean into the future, whichi knee some people are soon to look at side running protecting bike lanes. I do want to recognize i know we are at least from my perspective asking you to do two different projects, two different sort of things and manage two different sort of components of this, but i think thats what we are hearing from community is that, we need to iterate on this center bike lane, and also look to the vision of curbside bike lane with parklets. With that, thank you madam chair. Thank you director hinze. Very very clear feedback and very helpful. Director hemminger. Thank you madam chair. When we get these lovely slide decks every couple weeks, i tend to skip past the goals page because it is a bunch of words. Pretty pictures. Thats im a planner who doesnt like goal s. But this one i think was really illuminating were three goals the first is safety and second and third were versions of Economic Activity, and that really does say the story. That is wlaut we are dealing with here and you know, like most human beings we want our cake and eat it too, but you cant always do that, and when those two values Economic Activity and safety come into conflict, safety is supposed to win. I think one reason we are here today is because that isnt always the case. So, i do think we need to prioritize safety and i think that means we got to take some chances on new things. I was certainly heartened to hear a couple people say, i like them. I didnt think i would. Thats just the kind of attitude that i think San Francisco at least used to be known for is we take a flier on something and see whether it works, see whether we like it better then we thought. I think at our last meeting on this project i complained we really didnt have a choice. We had the Center Running lane before us and do nothing alternative. I continue to think that is a mistake, so i am also encouraged to hear that the staff is considering some kind of side running lane and maybe one question just to interrupt thethere is a side running lane on some other part of valencia, right . And that was installed when . That was installed in 2019. Why couldnt we run that through the xerox machine and put where we are talking about now . What was the incompatibility . Well, for the northern section we were tasked by the mayor to do that directly in a very short amount of time, so that is the section from market to 15th street. Okay. Before covid, we had some Public Engagement that showed a side running bikeway design from 15th to 23. 23 to cesar chavez, so we were getting ready to do that and covid changed everything. Kimberley. Which part . Kimberley, active level streets director. Early 2020 we brought forward proposal to open house to take a look at parking protected bikeway from 19 to cesar chavez, the roadway in the section is the same as the stretch between market to 15th. When we did come out to open house we had 400 people come out to provide their feedback on the design and there were a number of concerns impact of parkjug loading with that design. The project did go on pause when the covid pandemic hit because open house happened about 4 weeks before everything shut down in the city, so when we came back to the look at the project we saw that there was a need for loading and also need to respect the shared spaces that popped up during covid and that forced to rethink how to approach the bikeway here. It changes how people were usesing it right . Yes. The stretch between 15th and 19th the roadway wid thd is narrower then the other sections of valencia, so in that stretch we have 10 feet less to work with, so in order to meet the clear width required by the Fire Department, it would be hard to preserve parking and loading on boket sides of the roads so that is a challenge we are working through now with the other agencies. But also lets clarify the most crucial point, the thing that changed was the parklets. That helped to save merchants throughout the corridor. Correct if im wrong, but i believe early covid there were up to 66 parklets at the height of pandemic which took up one out of every five Parking Spaces. That has down down . By half. The other thing we learned since then, so the parklets all happened in the space that would have been used for the side running bike way, so we can no longer go with there design we had and to go with that would have required the removal of all the parklets, or basically bikeway that whipe out most of the commercial [indiscernible] make it non functional. We said we cant just keep the status quo, what can we do . And the space and roadway that was least utilized was the middle. But in order to make the middle work, because the bulk of the deliveries occurring on valencia occurred in the bike lane, in order to make the middle work we had to reallocate more curb space to acomidate the commercial loading activities. So, that was really what changed. What changed now is couple things. One is the number of parklet dramatically reduced and two is, we have seen what oakland but particularly new york has done with this same. In new york city which has far more protected bikeways then we do, the bulk of the parklets are happening in what we call the floating configuration. They had 4 years of design experience trying to figure out how and when to have the bikeway run between the parklet and the sidewalk, so those are key factors that changed that allowed us to think maybe we could actually go back to Something Like our original design, but staff said getting there requires extremely careful attention to myriad design details and working with every individual merchants that has a parklet to figure how to get that right. It also means we donts have to go floating with everything parklet. Every merchant would have a choice, but the more parklets floating, the more opportunity there is to maintain that essential loading function. And thank you for that because that is the best explanation and heard as of yet of the sequence of events that put us where we are and essentially prevented us going backwards. We are Going Forward and it is some version of a side running lane that you want to look at . Thats right. We are trying to work with closely valencia murch association to figure out design detail and they are intense because very slight shifting of the parklet norkt, south, east or west has profound cascadeing impact on the commercial loading spaces are available and whether you want to fill the Available Space with motorcycle parking or move the bay wheel station around the corner and what impact does that have . So, again we are trying to optimize across many variables here. As you saw from it goals but within the goals there is a dozen subgoals each of which are important. One thing i worry about and look, i just received information today, so i got to think about it more, but it strikes that we could be also headed toward a cake and eat it too scenario where 80 are not willing to force the tradeoff and new yorkers in my experience are much less cooperative then san franciscans are, so i dont know what they are really doing to make this swerve thing work, but that would really scare me. You are worried about bikers coming in and knocking over the waiters. We already have a example in valencia street which is loading at Friends School which is near 15th street. That took a lot of careful design attention Primary School pick up and drop off point is on valencia and there is a protected bikeway between the drop off and the school. And it works remarkably well, like people were terrified of that . And i think staff were quite thoughtful getting design details right so it is working. What we are interested in doing is do we go on a field trip to Telegraph Hill in oakland . There is a video on street films that shows how the new york designs work. I can send you all the link. I dont knowmaybe we probably should go to field trip to manhattan, because there is a lot to learn in new york. Madam chair, in terms of input and direction, i think the staff has it about right in terms of the big moves they want to make. I still want to insist that we try to really confront the tradeoffs and not try to slide around them and that all most visually is wlaut what we are trying to do in a couple places. Theest lathing i wanted to ask about though is speed. I know folks are working hard. I know you dont want to try to bully your way past legitimate objection ares. On the other hand, it seems this poor project has a little momentum right now and it wouldnt be bad if we got done sooner rather then later to try to put something out there and i think we do sort of run the risk of turning into one of those civic and urban myths that it is the bike lane that never got finished. So, given the fact we got some real world experience now and we got an icdotal evidence that people who use it are liking it, i do think the longer we take with the redesign of the side running thing, the more changes we ought to make in the pilot we got. So, we dont just sort of turn into a paralysis. That is my final comment and i appreciate having the hearing today. Helpful. Thank you director hemminger. Director cajina. Thank you madam chair. Thank you so much for your presentation and for all the hard work the team put into this. Not just staff, but also Community Members. Members of this board and body that have gone out and list merchants and everyone has drawn their different versions of this project and [indiscernible] i just really do appreciate everyones time and thought they placed into this particular corridor. It just is a testament to how special this corridor is, how significant it is for so many different folks and i am glad we are in the space and we have this privilege to try to do right by the folks that care about the space. I was little surprised notoot see a lot oof members of the knz community out here today. I still want to make sure we have space and hold space to talk about one of the key project goals,ic the second one which is preserve the econom icvitality of valencia street. I do want to acknowledge Mary Thompson from office of Small Business is here so i want to say hello and encourage you to come up if you have something to contribute to this particular question. Profit margins are so low for Small Businesses and so any small adjustment can have real large impacts on whether or not a business stays open or closes, and we did receive a lot of Public Comment and letters from folks saying, i lost 40k with this change. I cannot get deliveries on time. It took a week to be able to get my deliveries in the cadence that we were used to. It was [indiscernible] with all the staff time we had allocated to this, i know it is still a struggle to address every nuance and every need each unique business had and it was a impossible thing to accomplish in a short amount of time, and so inevbly folks had losses in their business during the early stages of the pilot and perhaps still do and perhaps even closed. So, i do want dissect that piece more and do want to spend more time there just to better understand what were the Economic Impacts of this pilot . Do we have data to speak more in depth and can we talk about that . I appreciate the question and it makes since why they are not here. They busy making sure the businesses are operating and making a profit when they can. We did prepare around Economic Analysis but i want to first preface im not a economist im a transportation plajer and we heard the Merchant Community is struggling and taking it very seriously. So i can go over slides mpt it is very high level and a lot of caveats. There are a lot of metrics we were not able to incorporate into the analysis. I will go over that at the end of the segment and we can talk about it then as well. We have been asked to includes Economic Analysis as part of the initial findings. We are happy to discuss this, however we have limited access to Economic Data and there are many caveats attached to each of the findings. Our high Level Analysis of whether and how much the pilot may have impacted the valencia street businesses three months into pilot looked at sales tax, leaving activity and off street parking. None paint a complete picture of individual merchant experience. But, we think they can serve as some signal of economic impact. Lets start with sales tax. With this analysis we are looking to see if sales tax received from the Controller Office have gone up or down as a signal of overall Sales Activity along the corridor each quarter. Before we get into it, we need to discuss limitations of the metric first. The construction for this project began in a seconds quarter of 2023, back in april and the pilot officially began on august 1, 2023, which was in the middle of the Third Quarter of that . Same year. This analysis only goes up until the Third Quarter of 2023. It did not capture the 4th quarter of last year which includes the month of october, november and december as that data isnt yet available to us. We expect to have in future evaluation s and can share with you then. The data are not perfect. The data reflect when the sale tax was paid not when the Sale Transaction actually occurred. For example, some companies do not seem to pay every quarter and instead pay multiple quarters at one time. Other times businesses pay incorrectly for number of quarters and then there is a adjustment at a later quarter. Third, businesses are only required to pay sales tax by county not by location and only report a single total for the county. The Controller Office takes the total and eveningly distribute across all locations so one business with multiple locations sells less at one location then another that will not be captured. One way to interpret sales tax is by comparing with other corridors. This graph shows sales tax collected on valencia and mission from First Quarter [indiscernible] there is a substantial drop beginning of the First Quarter of 2020 which reflect around when the covid19 pandemic began. Much like on Mission Streetd, we start seeing trajectory towards recovery along valencia around the First Quarter 2021 and it has been a slow growth sense. We do not see rise or fall during pilot construction during the Second Quarter of 2023 or when the pilot started the Third Quarter that same year. We are still waiting for q4 numbers we anticipate getting the spring, but this provides one dimension of signal related to this project. We also decided to use sales tax to assess the growth rate of valencia street Mission Street the Mission Neighborhood as a whole using the 94110 zip code and comparable corridors with similar land use characteristics and merchant mix. This graph shows the year over year percentage change relative to that quarter in the previous year. For example, the value for quarter 1, 2023 is derived from calculating percentage change from q1, 2022 to q1, 2023. The up and down we see in pink for folsom refer back to a caveat just discuss said which is the reporting of sales tax may not reflect that particular quarters earnings. The Second Quarter of 2023 however, all locations on the graph seem to experience low or negative growth which leads to believe there may be broader Economic Impacts effecting neighborhoods across the city. We also pulled data from costar a leading commercial real estate data base and look at leasing and vacancy three months before and three months after the pilot began which is mayjuly and augustoctober 2023. The caveat for this analysis is no single data base can cap clr all commercial leasing activity because of unique situations like offmarket lease or perhaps a business closed their doors but havent vacated the building. In light of this, we saw the number of commercial leases signed remained steady. More specifically, we saw 3 leases signed within the three month before and within three months after august 1. We also took a look at vacacy rates along the corridor. On valencia are half then Mission Street and comparable streets. We looked at parking occupancy at Mission Bartlett garage. Located within the pilot on 21 bedween vulens juand bartlett we believe looking at the garage utilization rates can serve as a rough proxy for Economic Activity in the neighborhood. While also found within the pilot area we could not include the 16th and [indiscernible] garage to the analysis as a meter we have there currently do not transmit occupancy data to us. We also wanted to compare with onstreet parking occupancy but were in the process changing meters when the pilot was being installed. Because of that . We dont have a complete data set to do a proper analysis of onstreet occupancy as part of the three month finding but will include as part of future evaluation. When comparing occupancy rates at the Mission Bartlett graujs between 2022 and 2023 we saw significant increase in occupancy across all hours of the day and days of the week ranging between 25 to 63 percent increase with average of 42 percent increase in occupancy. Three months into the pilot. While we will continue to improve signage that help navigate to both garages it seems drivers have adjusted the travel pattern to use the garage over parking on street. At the same time, we hear that merchants are struggling and we take that seriously. I was one of three teams going out speaking with businesses over the last month or so and in our outreach efforts the merchants talked about other metric assessing activity they think about. The metrics on the slide have been shared such as change in daily customers or how much the customers spend when they visit. We at the sfmta dont have access to that level of granularity business by business level. Listening to merchants. We understand that valencia Economic Situation is touch and empathize with merchants along valencia and corridors throughout the city. The settee is struggling with larger Macro Economic issues as it works to return to what it was prior to mandemic. We remain committed to work to insure valencia is vibrant and successful destination for years to come and that concludes the Economic Analysis we were able to do. Thank you for that. I think in your other slide deck and presentation you mentioned that there was less foot traffic along valencia. Can you expand on that more . I believe the foot traffic was within 5 percent. There is a 5 percent decrease in foot traffic but that is within the 10 percent margin of error when we see a significant difference in travel pattern changes. You also mentioned there were a 23 percent increase in passenger and food pickups. I do wonder if why the reason we are seeing that increase is because less patrons less folks are going into the different establishments and ordering out . I do wonder if there is a way to better understand that level of analysis. If you have ideas how to capture that, but i think as we try to evaluate that second goal we have, i do want to give guidance to our team that we do need stronger metrics and stronger ways to tell that story throughout the duration, what will be the duration of this pilot, and just so we couldEconomic Vitality is tricky thing to assess as you noticed and seen through your analysis, and it is very much a lot of the work i used to do with Corridor Economic Development work was talk ing to businesses and it take as whole group of folks to do that and so, we have a Construction Mitigation Program and in that program we have partnership with oewd. I do think that it would be a good use for time and resources to see how we can activate that resource for this particular corridor throughout this pilot, because with that comes a suite of services, included mptd actually marketing valencia, supporting merchants and getting the word out about promotions and Different Things going, different activities they are doing. In addition to that, also staff time from oewd to contribute in this analysis trying to understand how it is going there and what more can we do to support businesses . I do want to make sure that that is something that we are following up on more intentionally because i think it is such a key goal and so critical to understand how we are going to design the space so that all the different interests that exist for valencia are upheld as much as we can, right . So, ill say that piece. I appreciate my colleagues noting woo eare asking you to do 5 different projects. It is true. I think it is a ask because this isthis space and this corridor is so significant for so many reasons from the american indianso many Different Reasons why it is significant, and i do think that sides runic bike lane is something im keen on understanding a bit more and init is a great alternative for this corridor. There is like a half version of this also on the other side of cesar chavez from cesar chavez to mission, that piece in front of the hospital by cpmc, and it would be nice to see a continuum of that . I see a strong case for that to encourage and continuum of treatment there. I understand why that particular design would be functional there. I did want to ask throughout the pandemic did we is have floating parklets because i do [indiscernible] or a version of a parklet on the other side of a bike lane . There was a floating parklet at milk on valencia so we had them before just as we had them in other cities. My mistake. It is okay, because i recall during the pandemic that shared spaces were going up so i recall on valencia in particular thrfs one on the other side of the bike lane, so i do wonder if we have valuable feedback from the merchants we can also incorporate wasnt there one on folsom street at trademark as well . There were a couple on folsom early pandemic. There were a few where we had parklets where there was a existing protected bikeway. All im saying, if we have a existing case study in the city with the different ridership that already exist in the city and a way to evaluate that, lets figure out whater were issues there with servicing customers with anything they can contribute to that i think it is great we are talking to our neighbors across the pond and getting their feedback, but it would be wonderful to see if we have case studies lets rr explore those mptd i will also say, i agree that we should come up with solutions as quickly as possible. Ithe beauty of a pilot, it is a pilot and that there are offramps and if we see things are getting to a point where we need to consider those offramps that we take that approach, and i do think we are kind of there with this project. I understand a lot of folks are feeling safe and that was great to hear as well and are that does tell me that we definitely need to make sure whatever iteration of the project that ends up existing in valencia does prioritize safety of cyclists. I also through all the comments and articles that have come out, one thing i really valued is that, i dont want this to get lost, cyclists are patrons of businesses and we do have to figure out a waythis is a Customer Base for valencia and we do have to make sure that we are creating corridor where that Customer Base can access the businesses in a easier way, and once we figure out that piece of the puzzle i do feel we are going to enter into a more harmonious design for the space, and i dont think this design particularly achieves that piece particular. It does make it challenging for a cyclist to patronize a business and we heard that in Public Comment today and that is something i think would need to get adjusted with the more permanent solution. It is exciting to hear that we are thinking of a new project and i do want to also just congrati know this project came with a lot of pain points, but i want to congratulate the agency for taking a risk and doing something advenchious and different because something the board is excited about is we innovate our agency and innovate the different tools we use to make the city more functional for every day san franciscans and so this was that and not working out so great, but we can make those adjustments. Thank you. Thank you director cajina. Director tarlov, please. Thank you chair. So, i just would like to thank you and the whole staff for the tremendous amount of work and heart that has gone into this. The feedback is sometimes im sure difficult to experience and as a member of the business community, i really particularly appreciated shada what you said about it isnt a surprise that Business People arent here because they are working, and that demonstrates a lot of sensitivity that i think ishas been present throughout and i really want to commend you all for your incredsable work on this. A couple things that i just want to highlight. I thought that the reduction in double parking was particularly good to see. I also bike quite a lot and thei would justi want it go on the record that going back to the way valencia was is unattenable and should not be considered. There are other corridors in the city where you are always going out into traffic. Up per market comes to mind and it is very frustrating when you gee out and a lot of timeatize is somebody waiting for a friend who goes into a cafe and there is a parking space right there, and it feels terrible because it is like im putting my life on the line and dont want to be inconvenienced. Enough about that. I thought it was interesting the dwell times going down and i think that is something in particular for delivery drivers when there is a adequate space, i think there is a mindset there isi have to double park always and it is just habits that people develop over time and it is demonstrated through this pilot that when you do not have another choice and there are adequate places peopleit is resolved. People are loading in commercial spaces. One of the things that came up in Public Comment that i just like to say is that, Business Owners not having a option for when they are doing their own loading is something that i think is a longstanding issue that i dont know what solutions there might be. The temptation to abuse a special permission would probably be pretty great for the Business Owners, but what we see with commercial loading spaces is that often times a city truck will be there and they wont be making a delivery to a business, they will be picking up a burrito, or Something Like that. There is quite a lot of abuse of commercial plates that goes on and it just adds to the general sense that there is a scarcity of options for the professional delivery drivers coming with goods for businesses, which the businesses rely on. One thing that i wanted to point out is, the goods pickup going up. I believe it was actually 43 percent, correct if im wrong on that, from 2022 to 2023, so thats a tremendously significant increase and i think that some of that is just advent of these Third Party Delivery apps, but i would be really curious if theresif the data is available and there is a difference in valencia and other neighborhoods in that particular metric and i want to point out at the mta staff that, those services by in large take a pretty large cut of the sale and so this is going to be something thats going to add to the pain for the merchants. This is trends mta hasnt created, something that staff needs to be aware of because yes it might increase sales but the margins of the sales is lower and thats a Economic Trend that it will be very interesting to see how that plays out over time. Soso much to talk to. Talk about. I can respond while you look. Just wanted to say i appreciate you noticing just about the difficulty of businesses having to use their own vehicles to sometimes unload or a lot of times we heard during outreach we implemented is that abuse of commercial license plates and so we actually wanted to make sure the commercial vehicles also had access because they cant use that center lane anymore. They much depending on anymore and that is why we had the variation in the type of loading you see along the block face, but we also heard it is causing a lot of confusion, so we have been trying to tweak iterate and titrate so thank you for acknowledging it. It is a very difficultit is every singing parking spot we looked at and tried to customize to the fronting business and witness the externalities as well. As i said before, i really appreciate being able to sit down with you and learn more about how you puzzle through all that. It is a incredibly complex piece of the whole. The curb Management Strategy i can give homework. It is good one. You are on. I just heard a lot in the Public Comment about confusion around the bike boxes. I share that confusion. I feel like i never successfully used one of those things. When you pull into one you turn your bike in a certain direction and wait for signal to complete the turn and move across the intersection. As shada said, we are assign homework and talk about it, but that is very valuable to hear because if people have confusion about the treatments in San Francisco we need to know that. We live in this world all the time and to us we have a perception how it makes sense, but if others have challenges then that is helpful for us. I never seen that behavior you are talking about pointing your bike into thebut, thatsim very small sample size. I think for me just as we talk about it, it feels like okay, go out into traffic and sit in this box and be vulnerable and doesnt always feel that great. Enough about that. I can add that if we were to move from the current quick build pilot to more permanent design it opens additional design techniques we could use in order to make that box feel safer and be clearer. They require more interventions to the street then we currently have the resources to do so we are waiting on a decision, are we going to pivot or really work on making the center lane work. It creates a conundrum because one thing doesnt feel right so the whole thing doesnt feel right. Okay, so i have just some thoughts about the curbside bike lane in the Public Comment, there was mention of sight lines with moterist and parked cars and thought it was a good comment and got my attention. I noticed on valencia where its implemented on the northern stretch and also bay shore boulevard where there is a similar thing by the lowes, food trucks rightly take advantage of the parking space into the bike lane and customers will depending on the situation will want to dwell in that area and thats just a safety concern i didnt hear brought up. Im sure you are probably aware of it, but i wanted to bring that up today. Similarly with floating parklets, i would be very interested to hear about it. There is a awkwardness that i feel like is difficult to overcome and it is something that gets me pause with that design. Just to return to if parklets are not floating the loss of parking to the Merchant Community is really something that i think needs to be highlighted over and over again that theand you see it on the northern stretch of valencia with the 4 barrel parklet that there is at least two Parking Spaces that are gone and on some stretches 4 or 5 parklets on each side of the street, so if you do the math that is a lot of Parking Spaces and so there is a lot to consider with a side runningwhich isnt news to you. I just wanted to reflect it back. I appreciate you mentioning that because there are two ways to look at it. The good news is we have two parking garages for Public Parking that are affordable. They are often cheaper then the onstreet spaces so at lease we have that in the pilot area. This is why we stress about the outreach because we really need to understand the loading habits and parklet needs and we hear it now. Based on the pilot how it is impacting them so we dont want to make the same mistake twice. We want to show we are learning from lessens and want to collaborate and understand from them what type of loading needs they have and need and how to accommodate it. There is such a finite amount of curb space along the block face. It is the most valuable piece of land in San Francisco, more then real estate, so i think it is really important to figure out the balance but also understand and take advantage of the other resources we have. Also metering the side spaces. We metered 36 spaces on the side streets to encourage turn over and parking availability for everybody. We are still hearing from businesses and tweaking and heard from coffee shops that maybe a green meter might meet needs more then just a general meter parking space, so these have conversations, they take a lot of time and we have a lot of trust to rebuild with the businesses and that takes a lot of time too, so we want to make sure when we communicate with them, we are both doing it collaboratively. Thank you. Thank you all for your work. Really shows. Thank you. I appreciate everything my colleagues said and so,b i just are have one quick point. I think that what i have heard today isup until today is a lot of the Public Commentary not super in favor of the Center Running bike lane and today was eye opening because it is like, not everybody hates it. Great. [laughter] so thats good. Congratulations. But, i think what i also have heard is that there are couple dealbreakers for us that we need to be really up front about. I think wewhat it sound like is we will not compromise safety for parking or increasing the number of vehicles on valencia, and i know it is hard to say, it probably is unpopular, the reduction in number of cars. Sounds like it is then being tied to the reason why there might be lower sales on that corridor, and maybe maybe not. I dont know. But i do think it is important to really be up front every time we talk about this about the things we are not willing to compromise on and so i appreciate the conversation around tradeoffs. I think we have more to discuss there and whether Center Running or side and floated, there is so much more education that i need in order to know which direction to go, but i do think that hearing that there are fewer accidents and fewer fatalities with the no left turn, that really is helpful and to know and see and what we cant do is undo that. That is progress and so whatever decision we come to i think is important to note that things that have really achieved those numbers that we hope to see in terms of reduction of accidents or incidents and ultimately increasing safety, i think thats what we need to stick with and thats a lessen learned from the pilot that we dont want to undo by creating these other versions of convenience for the cyclists or the vehicles or deliveries or whoever. Thats all i wanted to add, but i really appreciate all the work that everyone has done on this and i understand the difficulty that this poses for the merchants for people who live on that corridor and also just for anyone who wants to enjoy their time there. I am in the area probably weekly and i think that whatever we come up with i just want to make sure that we are sort of really clear about what we are not willing to give up in a different alternative design. Thank you so much director henderson. That is really really helpful. Director hemminger again. Yes. Ill be very quick as long as the answer is. I have been on a plane all day so please forgive for asking for clarification. Pivot sounds like we are turning our back on the center lane and do the other one. Maybe if you can just give us more insight about what you plan to do to carry out this evaluation and as i understand it, it is a head to head with the center lane, which has a lot of good data behind it, and some version of a side running operation. Yes. Because the project is so important to us and because the corridor is part of the High Injury Network and it is one of the most important beloved commercial district s in all San Francisco, we are doing two things simultaneously. One is, continuing to refine and iterate on the current design. We heard many concerns from all members of community, we are taking in those concerns and trying to make adjustments to see can we get the current design to work better. It will be part of the evaluation and well continue to evaluate, including a whole set of evaluation points that we havent done yet around perception as well as other factors. So well do that and simultaneously to that, we are also going to look at dusting off the original design and seeing okay, now that conditions have changed, there are fewer parklets, we learned about floating parklets, is there a version of side running that could work and is therecan it be made into a have our cake and eat it too . Can that design actually achieve the safety goals and garner merchant support at the same time sphwe . We dont know whether the answer is yes, but we got the entire livable streets team working on both project sametaneously and i should let you know as a result, other work is being delayed. You anticipate at the end of that . Twoheaded procedure that you bring a recommendation back to this board saying it ought to be a or b . Our final evaluation for the project the one year evaluation is due in august, and by that time, we should have a second potential design, which could give you all the opportunity to either say you know what, youve made some changes, people seem to like the Center Running, lets go with Center Running or you can say, in fact, it really looks like side running may be a better choice and do that instead. We dont know yet what the answer will be. Thank you. Thank you madam chair. Thats very helpful and we are on the same page. I have a proposal for you all to consider. First, i just want to say thank you to everyone here. I think your feedback colleagues, the feedback from the public, the answers to the questions, this is all felt really collaborative, constructive,ing i can just feel a sense of problem solving. I heard people being openminded and vocalizing how they chaimpged their minds because they were openminded about this project and im really heartened to hear that so thank you all for the way you engage in this problem solving exercise. I just have two questions of my own and want to propose a path forward to consider. One question is, we did hear this couple members of the public voice what about going all the way to plug in into connect to the existing infrastructure there so why is this stopping at 23 and why are we not thinking about connecting the network . Why are we not thinking taking all the way to cesar chavez or tiffany and duncan and mission . I think that is natural question if we try to solve the problem, why stop at 23 . Wonder how you react . I think it is important to right now to focus on the middle section of valencia. There are a lot of thoughts and opinions. Some were not expressed toot but we know we need to go back and refine some design and also heard maybe side running could be a bet rf option and because the middle section between 15th and 23 is super charged we need to focus on that now. I think the idea extending to cesar chavez or beyond is very exciting, but we need time to focus on whats at hand now before we start thinking about that southern section. There is a new round of outreach and consideration that has to start for that southern section and we are not there to do that now. Okay. I incur it is part of the ultimate vision is address that gap closure . Yes. The natural thing is extend it. Great. And then the second piece is, again, in the nature of openly sharing information and working together to solve problems, we have heard some people and a lot of Public Comment around the potential vision some hold including a former board chair malcolm said to the mayor, valencia is next, right . I remember that. That was in 2019. Some people hold a vision of valencia as pedestrian space and some as a world class spaces we were talking about in the last item around how the vision for the embarcadero as a wonderful public space and so just curious just for everyone to understand, thats not happening now, we all get that. In a ultimate version, someone showed beautiful images of pedestrian spaces around the world which resinates, how do you think about a bike lane configuration in that potential scenario of valencia . Does that make sense . Does either work if pedestrianized and how do you think about the longer vision . People said we are doing 2 projects, we are actually doing 3. The third one is focusing on the longterm studies that investigate that option or idea and there is a suite of alternatives we look at through the three studies. A lot has to be considered to begin to think about that. The three studies we have starting now, this year that go on this year, traffic and circulation, which is a very important idea and concept and thinking about any sort of Capital Project for valencia, placemaking and public realm and points towards what you may be thinking about, and that will involve a lot of Community Engagement and we will let everybody know when those open, and the last shada would like to talk about is curb management and what is the curb management aspect of any sort of grand vision for valencia because i think there are lots anytime about that. I understand your bikeway question and ill get to that in a moment. Thanks. I was asking about the bike lane piece. That really does need to be considered in the context of these three studies and we are just starting that process. We dont have funding identified for longterm Capital Project. It is at least 5 years away before we start approving any designs for that, so when we talk about in the context of a capital longterm project, that is where we are right now. We can say though, studied street scape projects over all the world, every configuration for the bikeway is workable. So, the work we are doing now doesnt preclude using our full imagination for reinventing valencia street. One thing that is in the way is making sure that as we reenvision valencia that we are doing it with rather then to community. Now we need to focus on community shortterm needs and make sure we have a project working for the Current Community and waiting till they have time to stabilize and be able to join with us on a grander vision for the street for 100 percent pedestrianization projects that happened around the world successful, have been successful because the merchant and Resident Community lead together with staff. I like to propes we memoriamize feedsback to staff today. A three part set of directions. We heard your talk about new collision factors introduced. The others have been addressed and there are new factors and that is a cause of concern. I think the gentleman who experienced a collision himself is here with us today and i think we want to be responsive to that. I like to propose we direct staff to take immediate steps to correct the current Center Running design to reduce incidents of the new collision factors and address the specific concerns we heard from merchant and Community Members and that is to take steps to address and prevent illegal uturns and left turns as well as taking steps to address the concern that director tarlov raised around accessibility of bikeicalest to businesses reflecting on the bike box issue raised. I personally experienced that issue. It feels very awkward and you dont know what to do, so i would like to memorialize the feedback. I like the board to direct staff to Development Design for the side running bike lane we heard so many people ask for and was part of the discussion when we adopted this in april and what wu are already doing before the pandemic, so i dont think thish is a surprise but i like the board to take official action and as part of inside running protected design please take into consideration addressing the concerns raised by stakeholders, especially merchants we received a letter today. Third is, the topic of timeline. We raise director hemminger, what people expect and what is ahead . I think as your presentation demonstrated when we share information when we explain our thinking people wewe can bring people to just have the same set of facts and all problem solve from there, so i just like to share a rough sense of timeline to the extent the original pilot lfs meant to go into august and then the presumption was at the conclusion of the pilot we assess and make a decision, keep the pilot or move to Something Else that we sort of anchor that direction to staff to bring back alternative design for board consideration and approval and that would happen in 2024. Just to anchor the timeline. Those are the three pieces and i can sort of read them again, i can review them again, we can take questions, but essentially they were the address the immediate concern we heard, develop the side running lane and bring this back to us in 2024 for consideration and approval. Thoughts and feedback, please. If thats a motion ill second it. Okay. Got a motion and second. Do we have thoughts or other questions or feedback from colleagues . I did have a question around any additional studies or additional evaluations we will do during the interim. When is this item coming back to us . I ask because i do feel we need a second time to sit with it before august and to really understand how is the pilot going, what are the adjustments you made, did it work or not work, because if we are working in parallel paths in the projects you are doing simultaneously, i wonder around august, september and before the year ends, we might be ready to take a particular decision or makegive you different direction on the project, but it should be informed and we should be doing itdo Due Diligence before we launch into a meeting about it. I want to understand when would be the earliest or good timeline to come back. Is your question about evaluation or about side running bikeway design or just b i think it is evaluation of the current pilot because it does seem there is still some kpi we havent been able to really tackle and even within this 3 month period and there seems to be more time needed to be able to evaluate those other metrics. Am i hearing vice chair cajina asking for maybe one additional touch point with this board before that final design is brought at some point in 2024 for final approval but might be one additional touch point to the board specifically addressing this sort economic goal and the data we have around that . Is that what you are requesting . Prior to august because the pilot ends in august . I dont think august is when staff is planning to bring back the Decision Point because it would have just concluded the pilot. It is before we make a decision. If that is august, but i just want to make sure we have time to see additional preliminary data coming out before we one we can offer, the data will bewe compile the data together to big reports but if you like us to provide memos to the board about the data as it becomes available that is Something Else we could do. I believe as part of public process our transparency around data is something i think is valuable for the community to engage with, and so i do hope that before we agendize the item at a point we are ready to make a more concreate decision that we have a public process to discuss the data . Absolutely and we will summarizeat the point in time in which we move forward to look for recommendation we will summarize all the data history that we have and make sure that is available to this board and the public. Great. I do think as you come before us as a item and i guess the reason why i am pressing this is because, transparency around data has come up a lot throughout the duration of this project and i want to make sure we are as transparent as possible with the public and giving space to the public to comment on things as we have with different milestones with this project and so i think this space is one of those venues to have that sort of Transparent Exchange with members of the public and so it is just trying to figure out the best way to do that. Is it just having a meeting before weit is tough because it is abstract date we are talking about, but i think it would be great to have a second bite of the apple of the data before we have to make a decision on this particular corridor. We do have the 6 month mark for our evaluation report, so we will start collecting data in march and part of april i believe is the current schedule. It will take time for the consultant to process the data and send to us and we need to go through the entire process again of understanding what we are seeing at the 6 month benchmark, so we will produce an additional report and look to what you had for the three month mark and that will just add another data point to what we are seeing on it corridor. Thatd that would be perfect. I think the 6 month report i think would be great to have for the board. You like to put language into the motion. Yes. So, i guess 6 month evaluation report presentation to the board. Something to that effect or bringing the item back within 6 months after that 6 month evaluation milestone has been hit. I do want to be clear, i dont know if there is specifically a requirement to come back to the board and present. I know there is a requirement to develop a report based on the 6 month Evaluation Data, so i just want to be clear about expectations at this point. The data will be there. We always differ to chair and vice chair what you want to agendize and how. I will just say, as we heard from the public multiple times this year last year theseand based on the turn out today these meetings are not necessarily the most accessible to everyone so i feel all most what i hear you say is we want to continue the approach to sharing information transparently through a variety of tactics and strategies and media that can reach the most people, including attending Community Meetings as you have been doing and working with steak holdsers and the blogs. That is all most more sure way of reaching more people, butyou like a Board Meeting at the 6 month . I think evefen it is like consent item. I think we should have the information publicly available in a way that i think folks can comment on if they come to the meeting. There is a lot of press about our transparency with data and i just want to be able to create different spaces where folks can access the data, engage with us together as a board. We are alsohave brown act restrictions so we cant discuss any data together because of the restrictions and so i think it gives us a opportunity to be able to be able to opine as policy makers and just gives us a opportunity to have Transparent Exchange with members of the public. You are amending your motion. That is a friendly amendment for the 4th item. Okay. [indiscernible] okay. Director tarlov. Yes. Actually, director i appreciate that and i do think that part of the consternation about release of data is lack of understanding about the timing. When i look at my calendar, i am like 6 months is this week and i counted on my hands and i wasnt here to see the initial communication around that, but i think if itsif a date is put out that is reasonable for what needs to happen from your side where there is going to be more data released i think that that is something that the public is demanding and something that is to director cajina point will be really important to our Decision Making, so i would certainly support adding that to the motion. I would just say that to take behind the curtain what happens when data is collected, because in the effort of transparency i think it is helpful. Once the data is collected it takes to imfor the consultant to process it and they give it to us and we need to understand it and then we also if there is something in the Data Collection that dont look right we make ask them to go out and recollect the information, so it does takethen we have topackage it and prep it, review it, talk to people about it and then release it, and that just takes time. It is great if there was 6 month and one data had all the data and perspective and know what was happening but it takes time. I think that is all perfectly understandable, i think it needs to be clearly communicated and understood. People hear 6 months and they just say, im ready. Right. It is understandable thing from both sides, so yeahif it is a range of dates, im perfectly comfortable with that. 6 to 8 weeks out from the 6 month mark. Something like that. I dont know what is reasonable. What if we just capture this and propose language to capture the intent . The 4th element of the motion is we continue to share information about what we are learning from the pilot transparently with the public including new findings from the 6 month evaluation . Come back to to the board once the evaluation is ready. I completely agree it takes time for all the information to come together and digest it and be able to assess it and so i would differ to staff on what that timeline looks like after the 6 month report is ready when it would be a good time for you all to come back to this board, so ii dont want to put time restrictions on that piece because i understand that it takes time, and to also make sure that members of the public understand that piece too, because you are absolutely right director that folks hear 6 months and expect the report in 6 months and that isnt the case, right . It takes time to do the analysis and talk about this and present to us, so ill differ to the team on that. We did notice clearly in the write up and the deck that the science around behavior change you anchored 6 to 12 months to see meaningful behavior change. It mightit is interesting to compare 1 month to 3 months wasnt a big difference. I say we differ to you maybe it is 6 month, maybe it is 9 month more interesting, i dont know. What is new and different information to share from what you already shared that would be a good time to come back to the board and give staff flexibility in that regard. I think we are hearing loud and clear you want strong transparency about data findings and you want to hear about that. Chair eaken, vice chair cajina, you set the board agenda, so you can decide at any point what the optimal time for returning to discuss it and we will do that. I think clarity about broadly sharing the data and conclusions from the data is well taken and well heard. Great. Thank you. Not seeing any further comment from Board Members. We have a motion and second and friendly amendment to the motion and second. Please call the roll secretary silva. I want to make sure i get the 4th language correct because i heard a couple Different Things. I heard return to board with 6 month evaluation report. Is that enough there or do you need to add more language and if so, i want to read that back . You can say updated evaluation report just so we can give staff the flexibility of 6 months, 9 months. The idea is it comes back to as we are trying to capture behavior changes that you have a report that reflects that and this body can hear that and dus discuss it. Just updated report. Return to the board with updated evaluation report . Correct. Is the maker and seconder party to that . Friendly amendment. I am cognisant of what director tumlin said there is so much staff timeoon this project and other projects including those we dependent on to get done to meet the vision zero target are not getting done. To me sharing information is different then putting together a package report and one maybe takes more time and more burdensome so i want to understand if the essence is to continue to share information that feels that can be done. Putting together a report sometimes involves a lot of layout and work like this and i just dont know if that is the essence what we need to see. Completely agree and believe it is worth for this particular corridor and project, because it is a fairly controversial project. I think we need to do our Due Diligence as a board and turn every stone, make sure we are completely informed as we make critical decisions on this corridor and so i think it behooves us to give ourselves a opportunity to discuss the particular corridor in depth and to as we see change to incorporate that into our understanding how this corridor is now reacting to some of the different changes we proposed. It is extra work, but i think this project just similar to how staff put in so much work the board would want to put work into it too and discuss it. Can i read language i hope gets at this . I have a suggestion as well. Go for it. Continuing sharing information and leag and return to the board with a updated evaluation. Perfect. Please call the roll. On that motion, director hemminger, aye. Henderson, aye. Hinze, aye. Tarlov, aye. Cajina, aye. Eaken, aye. Thank you. The motion passes and concludes the business before you today. Okay. Thank you colleagues, staff, members of the public, we are now adjourned. The next meeting is february 27we did item 9. Well before. February 27 Vision Zero Committee and march 5 regular meeting. Thank you everybody. Thank you. [meeting adjourned] i am supervisor melgar. I am the supervisor for district 7. [music] i am a immigrant to San Francisco. My family came when i was 12 from el salvador during the civil war. This place gave us security, safety and an opportunity to thrive, so i love the city deeply, and as a mother of three kids who have grown up as city kids, im grateful for everything the city has to offer for people like me and families. I have been politically involved my whole life, either in government or a non profit worker and i care about the community. I care about people around me, and i want to make sure that as the world changes around us, other people have the opportunity that my family did. We are back in San Francisco post pandemic. So important to be out supporting our businesses, supporting our neighbors. Im the first woman to represent the district, believe it or not. Im the first latina elected to the board of supervisors without an appointment first ever, so i do think that indiscernible i want immigrants to be represented, women, moms, people that have different experiences because that brings richment to our Decision Making and i think it makes for betting decisions so that inspired me to run. District 7 is one of the most diverse districts in San Francisco both in economics and ethnicity. It spans north from golden gate park. It includes all the institutions in the park, the wheel. The music concourse, mew seem to the south to the daly city boarder and west to the organization. Includes the zoo indiscernible all those fun things and to 280 oen the east. Includes city college, San Francisco state. I had ucsf parnassus so very large geographically. It is mostly Single Family homes, so it is the place where for generations family indiscernible nice parks, lake merced, mount davidson. This is like a village within the city, so we are very close nit community. We tend to band together and try to support one another and it is a friendly place and families and people to have a cup of coffee and check out the park. Ocean avenue, which is the southern end of our district is vibrant commercial corridor that mostly cater tuesday the local neighborhoods and the students. As you go further west you have the mall which has some of the best pan asian food offerings in the city. If you havent been there, it is really fun. As you go up a little bit further, there is west portal avenue, which is a very old School Commercial district where you can still find antique shops and cobbler shops and as well as like more modern restaurants. It is definitely hopping and full of families on any weekday. Im matt roger, the coowner or indiscernible carl, other coowner in west portal. We are a Neighborhood Hardware store. Been a Community Institution since it was founded in 1936. We had a little bit of everything. indiscernible to gardening or gift buying. My entire experience in San Francisco is this community. It is a very small town feel for a big city. The community is caring and connected. What makes me excited doing business in district 7 is i know it sell well. I grew up here. I knew a lot of customers, parents of friends. It is very comfortable place and feels like home. If you go up north, you have the innerpz sunset commercial corridor which has a awesome Farmers Market on weekdays and plethora of restaurants. There is everything you need. Friendly and safe and indiscernible i love they bring their kids with them. They teach them how to use their money, and it is something you dont see in too many markets in other communities. I love to see the kids come and talking to you. It is Something Different then i see from indiscernible the ev access to transit in inner sunset and ability to do a lot of shopping on foot, and now the improved biking with jfk closed to cars, because we have a 4 and a half year old who rides her bike. We now have a safe place to go and ride bike jz dont have to to worry about traffic. Graffiti continues to be one of these things that during the pandemic just got out of control everywhere in the city and i do think that it is hampering our recovery of commercial corridors, so some of the volunteers on west portal avenue, some of the merchants got together with interns at our office to do some hands on abatement and we have been doing it regularly. We are doing it once a week and we have a wonderful neighbor, carrie organizing and storing the paint and supplies in her office on west portal, but this needs more then just a volunteer efforts. Im grateful for the collaboration. We passed legislation at the board and put 4 million in the budget over the next 24 months to help the department of public works hire laborers and labor apprentices to abate the graffiti on private property on commercial corridors. I think that for a couple years this recovery strategy so we can get back up as normal after this awful pandemic. Participatory budgeting is a pot of money that is available every year for district 7 neighbors to propose projects that improve the neighborhood and the district. Anyone, any organization in the district can propose a project and then its a vote. It is popular vote. We have 14 projects just approved and they span from you know, a vegetable garden at Aptos Middle School to Pedestrian Safety projects on indiscernible it runs the gamut, but it is wonderful because it allows people to be engaged in a real way, and then to see the outcome of their energy and work, because the things get improved in front of them. I like it is really close to the parecollect parks and bunch of businesses as well as a calm feel. It is a very peaceful feel even though it is close to a lot of things. indiscernible also not boring. There is stuff to do too. So, there is lots to see and experience in district 7. [music] good morning everybody, and welcome to the San Francisco chamber of commerce. City beat breakfast on this valentines day. Im looking out at this crowd and actually, you know, it warms my heart to see everybody here on valentines day. And i know this sounds a little bit strange, but i have to start off by how proud i am of all san franciscans. Yeah we all deserve a hand. These past three years, ive stood up here at this breakfast before you and shared some pretty daunting numbers. But i want to be clear that theres still remains some serious work to do. However, the results of our annual poll bring me more hope and renewed sense of pride for our city and our residents. We saw two trends that i really want to share with you. This morning. One being that san franciscans are sng