Transcripts For SFGTV 20140502

Continued fragile system. We see continued of doors even after rehabilitation of vehicles which i know is continuing vexing problem theyre attempting to address and on the good news bad news front we have increase of buses even though there are more in service. Its a good thing and more people are riding transit. We know we have a growing population. We know people want to ride transit so we see more riding it. The bad news is were not providing enough service to accommodate everyone that wants to ride in a comfortable way in particular during peak hours so the system is making some progress on some fronts and there are significant continuing challenges and i think its incumbent upon all of us, not just with our words but actions, to support muni and its ability to continually invest in its system, to improve its reliability, and expand its capacity so colleagues if there are no introductory remarks i will call up john hailey from mta for his presentation. Mr. Hailey. Thank you mr. Chairman i will i appreciate your incites and the opportunity to speak to the board. I will say regarding the report card and how it looks after the first year i think you did an excellent job of summarizing it, but there is clearly good news. Number one maintenance is improving. The reliability of the fleet is up, and all across the board i should say fleets, and number two the number of delays and the duration of the delays is down. I think thats a very important point that speaks to both improvements in the operations and maintenance side. Secondly, as we hope to show with some of the information today your help, your support particularly in investing in the system. Today we will talk more perhaps about vehicles, but also targeted and focused efforts to deal with systemic problems on the vehicles are paying dividends. Across the board the fleet is up. The number i guess the third thing i would say were sitting on a five year high with ridership growth. We dont expect that to go down. We expect it to go up and thats the good news as well as you said a challenge. Number four, while there are clearly improvements we will talk about and communications to the riders its one of the challenges but we think there is good news here in the indisises so without i would like to move right to actually we talked about that. This is important only in the sense that the approach were taking is really drill down into the basics to improve the core system and to do it both in hitting home runs as well as hitting singles and in the last year this is a series along the rail lines. This does include the bus lines ofests that we made and make up time and balance and improve the safety and operation of the system and we will talk about these going forward. Can you go back to the first slide, the general performance trends . I want to make sure i have the numbers right. Muni a year ago the on time performance was 61 and thats what it is today and a dip of 4 during the fall. I know there were a number of challenges in the fall so it dipped to 57 and now its up to 61 . Is that right . Thats correct. Yeah. Okay. Do you see that number 61 going up . I do. I think that what you saw is both the bus and rail side one of the factors that mechanical reliability, vehicle delays for the single biggest source of problems. Were continuing to correct those and improve them will make a difference in the on time performance. The other thing you mentioned the bunching and gaping for example. One of the things were not showing dramatic improvement on over the year is the percentage of scheduled service that were delivery. Our goal is over 98 and we have been around 95 to 96 . Thats an issue because if you dont put the amount of service out that you need you have to make continual adjustments. It challenges individual operators. It creates crowding, increase in bunching and gaping, so what were doing is the agency is invested in providing Additional Resources to Human Resources and training to bring up to increase our training efforts and get the percentage of runs on the street up. Thats an important one to helping us drive on time performance. The other thing i will say we will talk about this in a minute, but its supporting on time performance is the effective leveraging of the entire department using Traffic Signals on both 3rd street, mission street. Right now we had a recent success over the last six weeks we have been able to sync the lights to give preface to transit and that is important to our corridors and improving the on time performance. In terms of the 61 on time performance my understanding is that when you look at the light rail vehicles its lower than that, closer to 50 and the bus reliability is higher . Is that true . It is true and i think its important its an important distinction and i am glad you brought it up while we focus on one number from a planning perspective its an integrated system but for example on the rail side because of the conditions and the subway you would expect we should operate at higher on time performance than the lrv and the surface. We are operating in mixed traffic and you dont have as much control of the entire environment as you would, so similarly on the bus side you will see i think a continued improvement, so within the modes and the way that we operate you will see some differences, but the one thing of note with the subway, and we will talk about this. Right now the subway and the rail system i should say is around 50 but a significant pors in the last couple of months are [inaudible] and part of that is because some of the improvements improved the running time so we had to recalibrate the schedules which we did two weeks ago, so i expect that you will see the earlies go down and the on time performance also go up and again the key is putting the scheduled surface out on the street. What is the bus on time performance . It varies route to route for example as the matrix shows. Some of the muni rapid routes because they make less stops, theyre expresses they should be higher than some of the local rowels but in general if you blend the average it should be between 60 and 65 and climbing and i submit to you that that will steadily move up based on some of the things we have been doing. As far as where it goes in terms what theres a prop of 85 . Will we ever be there on the bus system . Its hard to tell. I think when you look at the environment, rightofway, other traffic, other conditions i think you ought to look at it with a more focused eye if you will on the type of service. I ride both the light rail vehicle s and the buses and i think i noticed a real improvement on the bus side. It feels like there are more vehicles. I know you gradually have been replacing the fleet and i think it shows so its a much better experience riding the buses, the light rail the same, and i know partly because of the problems with the vehicles that we have its a real challenge for riders and the agency so thank you for the bus improvements. So we wanted to just highlight excuse me im going the wrong way again. In terms of some of the focus improvements we talked on the rail side on the turn around time at embarcadero and what that means to the rest of the system and we have been able to its a unique feature of the system and take the turn around time down by two minutes which allowed us to increase the through put in the subways and were in the process of adjusting that and the schedules. The three car train we believe continues to be one of our success stories, and i think its proven the concept that we want to be able to increase capacity on these trains. We have positive feedback on it but also from a maintenance perspective its proven to be very reliable because all of the three cars are joined together. Theyre on the same inspection cycle. We take care of the maintenance of each of the cars together, and so thats been very positive, so were looking at that, and one of the other things i would point out thats worth mentioning part of what we have done we increased the car requirement from one 14 to 117 and were working to continue to increase the car count as best we can over the next couple of years until we start to see new cars, but i think the increase in demand we have been able to handle that for the most part, so we are looking at a second three car train. I dont know because we feel good about what has taken place. I mention the impact on the delays. The delays are both less but in our system you will always have delays and our ability to recover from that has been helped using first line supervisors, giving them training on door problems to help clear some of the delays more quickly. We are methodically through actions and maintenance working through slow zones. I think removal of the double xs throughout the system was something that made a difference and were improving the running time. Our system we talk about the uniqueness no more than portal entries. They go into these portals. 1100 times a day they go into the portal. We need to keep the failure rate around 20 a day so we can get into the subway with a good vehicle and we focused very hard in the last year on campaigning that, and the results have shown that we have really been consistent above 98 month to month. One of the things that the board was concerned about earlier was our Service Management one of our Service Management techniques, the use of switchbacks. I think the good news here and its been a learning experience for us but the good news is the number of switchbacks we have been able to reduce them without impacting service and how did we do that . Two ways. We used more dead heading of trains or other Service Management techniques, swapping trains but more importantly we did a better job of communicating to the riders, both on social media, but on head destination signs on the train as well as in the stations to let them know the final destination of the train. Finally one thing on the service i think its important to note that over the years we done a good job of providing 1015 of a giants crowd carrying it to the ball game but we did so at the expense of some of the out lying residential areas so what we did this year was revamp the entire approach to serving the giants to make sure that we provide them with good service but we ensure that the service that goes down the t line to sunnydale or out to ocean beach or out to terra valthat continues to be as scheduled so we have in the first month or so of the baseball season changed as planned. We worked with a number of Community Leaders to talk about some of the impacts, some of what were doing, and so the early results were going to sit down with a group of people over the next month or so, but things are looking better in terms of our ability to do both. Vehicles remain a challenge as i said. The number of delays are down. The delays by type. One of the things that we have done is gone through a series of focused efforts. As i mentioned a number of times in some of the other discussions we have a difficult environment with the design on some of the vehicles, things like the doors pose challenges, but we have tried to focus something called the five minute rule with our first responders, so rather than try to fix trains in the subway theyre making a quick dinoseis and moving the trains and the people. One of the things to talk about there is an upward tick in the performance of the mean distance of failure of the lrvs. We believe that is significant and we believe its sustainable and we believe it will go up probably another 1500 or so miles. The result of that what we have done is drive this improvement is a series of targeted campaigns on things such as the brakes the doors, all kinds of systems that are failing. We have analyzed the information and we focused on things that would give us the most bang for the buck. We had great support from our Capital Group from our financing of this and its made a difference in the performance of the fleet. Now the one thing mr. Hailey this is a fascinating graphic and extreme swing just so members of the public to understand the mean distance between failure is the amount of time that we can expect the number of miles that a light rail vehicle will travel in between failures thats correct. So mean and half below and half above and the mean failure for lrvs in 2014 was 4400 miles. It then dipped to about last summer 2400 miles. Very dramatic drop of 40 so instead of being able to travel 4400 miles before it failed again it would only travel 2400 miles before it failed again and now you have it back up to 4,000 miles so its lower than last february but dramatically higher than last summer. Can you explain . Thats a dramatic increase and decrease. What was happening congratulations on getting it back up into the land of the living. Well, a couple of actually a number of things. First of all weve gotten additional cars back through the that were longterm over hauls. Its like getting a like new car. We have four of them. There will be four more coming back. Secondly i mentioned the focus what we call focused campaigns or maintenance efforts and last summer in the vehicles were fail more with the electronic sensitivity to movements in temperature but what we have done is get more cars through a Rehab Program so some of the faulty parts like something called an articulation harness which is the bend in that section that carries all of the communication systems, the braking systems. They were replaced systematically. Most of the rise that you see in the maintenance efforts has been steady and climbing. Its taking each of the systems that had never been replaced. I mean the same thing with portal entries. Such as a card that talks to the acts or the train control system in the vehicle. Those should have been replaced biannual intervals were never replaced so i think the two things that drove it was the focused campaigns and then the improved maintenance practices as well as getting back recs and vehicles that are coming out of the what were calling the over haul program. Some of that has been good, the trucks and important to the quality of the ride and key components have been good. The doors have not been good and the doors i suspect although we will continue to look at it the doors we will see some improvement on but essentially you have a design that say challenge and probably a bad design. We will continue to work with it until we get new cars in but the good news is we learned from that. What caused that dra mat ig decline from february to the summer that you largely recovered on . Because thats a significant decline. I think theyre the same system im talking about and propulsion problems and door problems. Systemses under the car have problems and harnesses and theyre things we have looked at. System by system we have taken the approach to fix them. Okay. Thank you. So with again this is just some of the things we have done in answer to your question. This slide addresses some of that. The third point being about the articulation harness which is interesting. One of the things not only is it one of the key systems but we changed the design of the articulation harness when it went out and that meant we took a 16 hour repair job and reduced it to four. Those are some of the things were continuing to look at. Here are some of the things, the brake system in particular. Something as basic as a tack comter and smive replaced. They have never been replaced and we started replacing the entire fleet so those are these focused initiatives on rehabilitation are responsible for bringing it up. In addition we continue to work on doing our inspections on time. Our inspections are all mileage based and we dont allow trains to be out in service if theyre due for an inspection, and we made progress as well because of the age and some of the uniqueness theres no longer a propulz ion manufacturer for the lrvs. We have parts challenges and were working on those as well. I always wanted to update the committee. You have as a board suggested that we take a look in the short term at reconfiguring a vehicle. We have done so. We have pulled the seats out, worked with some of your staff as well as supervisor breeds staff. We have agreed on a concept, and for the single seating it will come in the second week of may and we will hopefully have the train in service in a couple of weeks to evaluate that as to whether or not that provides some relief. Thats terrific. Thank you for doing that. The other good news is that we are in the process of evaluating two bids for new lrv cars. What you see here is 175 represents the central sub way and the fleet and this is up to 260 and cover some of the planned expansion coming down the road. We are reviewing the two proposals right now and hope to make an award later this summer in terms of who to get our lrvs under contract and as we talked about before weve tried to learn a lot of lessons from the purchase of the cars 15 years ago. Who are the manufacturers of that submitted bids . Have those bids come in yet . The bids are here and being evaluated. We have two responsive bids from two firms. One is a firm called caf and a spanish firm and the other one is semens. Both make a lot of vehicles all over the world including light rail vehicles in the united states. Thank you. To switch over to the bus side i think this is something. I want to point out while the numbers look are steadily going up and dramatically. The blue represents the trolley coaches. Theyre the oldest and most unreliable equipment. We continue to work on those on a campaign basis but the message is the fleet is getting more reliable and part of the investment you have been so supportive in new buses and over haul buses is playing off and the red line is going up and it will continue to go up, and if you focus on the 112 new buses that we received in the last year the mean distance between failure is 22,000 compared to a year ago when you were down in the threes so this is clearly something that shows the benefit of replacing some older equipment with new. I just want to say for the record i know the mta got beaten up by sf weekly by the purchase of the buses and the graph shows theyre working and i think you can tell for anyone that actually rides the buses its working well, so i think its terrific. And again same approach and because of were under contract to buy new trolley coaches the first will be here we expect in january of 2015, and the first ones will be 60foot and go on critical lines like the mission and on the mission corridor, and in the meantime were going through the fleet and continuing to focus on components that are failing, and taking care of them. Again as i mentioned the new buses. On the infrastructure side we focused a lot on using signal priorities in getting the system up and running. We will continue to do that and also to maintain it. One of the problems with the system that was on 3rd street wasnt properly maintained. We believe we now have a system in place where we will be maintaining it and on 3rd street were in the process of gathering information now. Not only do we have signal priority but signal preemption at six intersections so were looking can you explain the difference there . Yes. Priority means if the vehicle is approaching a green light it will get priority whereas preemption is a step up above that. Not only it holds everything in place as the vehicle is coming it stops Everything Else and gives preemption to the train, so any other signal you may have say if you have a traffic signal it would be downgraded and the train would preempt it so its just for us it should be able to give us when you look at the length of r from sunnydale say to carol and give us more and we will evaluate and come back to you on this. Do you have an estimate of what it will be . The engineers are estimating it should be from the trunk from sunnydale up to cal train five to seven minutes with all of these in place which would be significant. And when do you plan to put this in place . It is in place. Were in the process of measuring it, its effectiveness right now. Its been turned on for about three weeks. Thats good to hear and i was under the impression it was in place so im glad you confirmed that. Absolutely. We will get back to you on that. And mr. Hailey one of the challenges that they have and you spoke about and how long it can take to get from the subway all the way down, and i know youre working to improve that, and sometimes there can be theres not enough service on the line which is partly because of the shortage of lrvs but particularly with the warriors new proposed site and rely on the t since its not walkable on bart lik piers 30 and 32 but this is a t station there so theoretically it will do the trick so assuming that the central subway is up and running by the time the warriors open up, 2018 or thereabouts. What do you think that we can what is your level of optimism that muni will have enough frequency and capacity on the t line, on the central be subway so we can efficiently get people in and out of the arena whether its for concerts or basketball games