City and County of San Francisco Tuesday, September 03, 2019

Roll call:  .

>> Mr. Chair, with have a quorum.

Please be advised the ringing of

any cell phones electronic devices are prohibited at the meeting. Any person responsible for one going off May be asked to leave

the room.

Microphone set on vibrate and we respectfully request they be turned off. Item 4, approval of the minutes for August 4 meeting, Mr. Chair, I have not received an indication that a member of

the public wishes to comment. >> any comments, the hours from

the August 20th meeting? Board members, if there's a motion to approve? >> moved to approve.

>> all those in favour say aye

and item 5?

>> communications, none, and

unfinished business by board members? >> other than addressing the

lack of air conditioning in our

meeting chambers which has been

addressed, board members, any

items of new or unfinished business?

>> I jill say, I was at the

opening of the chase center but to and from was challenging. It took me over an hour to get there and I had to hop into a

taxi to get here because waited

20 minutes and there was no kt.

So this can't happen and members of public to note, people like

me are trying it out and I've

been in contact with julie kirshbaum but it's critical because we will have a lot of people going there start on friday and tonight, too, so it would be great if it worked well. Thanks.

>> any other new or unfinished business?

>> item 7, director's report. >> Mr. Mcquire.

I'll start with a special recognition and I'll go to the podium for that. >> we don't have your walk-up music today but hum it to yourself as you get up there and

get revved up to give a great award.

Now batting, tom Mcquire. [Laughter] There I was like to ask the director of communications to join me.

So directors, I have the honour

to honour but the sad news to

share that after six years as an integral part of our agency and

key member of our executive

leadership team, candace sue is moving on.

She's been responsible for communication, community

outreach bubble relations,

social media, digital creative services and during her time

with us, she's redefined what a communication's director could

main for a transit agency like

ours and leaves behind a great

legacy of all of the endeavors he's undertaken.

I'm wearing my blue mta pin and

prides herself on inclusive on values important to the way the mta does business and I can tell

you she responses to emails and

texts 24/7 and she's a terrific partner.

While she's a technical expert

in almost every aspect of

communications, they're full of

experts like transit and

engineering, she's brings a

perspective to the team, and that's something we need to hear

working tirelessly on your

strategic priorities.

Her idea of how our actions will

be received and we'll Miss That.

I hope you'll join me in thanking her and wishing her

well at the university of california.

Applause:  .

>> we'll say a few nice things but maybe first we'll let you

have the floor since you're the communication's expert. [Laughter]

>> thank you. I'm director of the

communications and marketing and

it's almost hard to approach the

podium and speak today but I have been deeply honoured to

have had the opportunity these

last six and a half years as role in communications and I

remember the day that I stood

before this board to be introduced all those years ago

and I think I said that I was so

deeply. Impressed by the people

of the ssmta and I stand before you to say the same thing.

Six and a half years in, the

time of working with every

aspect of this agency and you

all as a board has been an incredible experience and such a pleasure to work with the people

of this agency.

I think that my family, when

they came here as immigrants in 1895, and they landed and tried to establish themselves here

never would have dreamed that their great granddaughter would

have stood in front of this

board, in this role at city hall to do the things I've had the great honour to do.

And I'm proud of that and really

proud that the lee family, which

is my matriarchal name had the opportunity to represent in that name.

And I want to say a couple of

thank yous, because I can't of course, stand here without

deepening thanks to ed risken too hook

took a chance on me and I

came to him with no one spec of transportation experience and I never lived here. He saw that was an opportunity

to bring a fresh perspective to

the agency and we both took a

huge risk to relocate, for me to relocate here and able to correct in the way I believe I have.

I want to say a huge thank you to this board to your support

for my ideas and of my team, for

all of these years and just, you

know, the council,

counsel, connection and friendships.

I've watched you make so many

hard decisions in this room.

As a san franciscoian, I'm thank you.

Those who are here today as well

as those who came before, I

can't not mention bonji, who

extended such an olive branch of friendship on my first day.

I'm deeply, deeply thankful to my communication's colleagues,

many of whom are here today.

They make it look so easy, even

when it's really not and they make everyday a pleasure to come

to work and finally, I just want to say and express my deep gratitude to my family.

My family, my husband rob who is

behind me and my daughter,

violet, who you can see popped out of school today.

They were willing to pick up everything to move from new york

city to here for me to take on this opportunity and for me to move back home and that has been

so meaningful for them to allow

me to make sfmta my second home in san francisco.

Yes, I'm moving on to another

public service opportunity and I

think I would not have even thought that I could make a contribution in public service

had I not had the opportunity to come here.

I'm looking forward to doing some new things and other things

at the state level, but san francisco and sfmta will always

have a place in my heart and you'll always be able to count on me to come back and testify

at your podium for two minutes of my public comment time. Now. [Laughter] >> thank you so much. Directors, director brinkman, May I call on you in. >> I'll Miss You so much. It's been a great time working with you and your future

employer and your future coworkers are so lucky to have you. You'll be great.

I said hello to your daughter and his without realizing who they were and I'm so glad you could be here and thank you so

much for sharing her all of

these areas.

These years.

Violet, don't forget your home your mom is an amazing woman and you're

lucky to have it. >> I was so sad you were leaving. I was hoping it wasn't true and you would change your mind. You've been a great asset to this agency and helped us think

about communications in a way, I think, the agency had not and

you helped us grow and helped to figure out how we do that well.

One of my favourite changes the

change from an l bus to a r bus, rapid. For those of us who remember the limited for a long time,

thinking differently about

transit and making it so we're prioritytizing the right language, which is rapid not limited, which is negative

connotation but makes a difference in market and people know this when they get millions of dollars. You've brought that professionalism, that guidance, that voice and then overall skill to this agency that we

were so lucky to benefit from.

You are obviously a great public

servant and I'm happy to you see you in public service. I'm sad to let you go because we have benefited from all of your great work. So you'll have tough shoes to fill. And the best to you and your

family as you move on to your next endeavor. >> you and I have gone through a

fair amount together, obviously, difficult issues we took on as a team, but for me, the image is not what we did here as city

hall or at 1 south annex.

Our daughters were in the same

ballet class and we ended up

riding the 43 bus together.

When violet and gretta were small. i remember one time after my

daughter, gretta had met violet

and we saw her on the bus and chatted with her and her daughter and showed what books they were both reading.

She said so, what exactly does

candace do for muni and she's

not driving the bus and dressed

well like she's not riding the bus. She's in charge for communications in-bound and

outbound and after a two or three minute conversation after

what that meant and gretta

looked at me and said, boy, that sounds hard.

And she was right. You make it look easy.

Not just easy, but through some

of the most difficult times, you

always handled yourself with

poise and grace and professionalism and for someone who is the voice and the message

of the agency, that calm and that class is really important

and I've always appreciated that about you. I thank your family for sharing you with us and I wish you the best the university of

california and I will note the last person we sent to the university of california sat in

that chair and she came back. So just remember that little history point right there. [Laughter] >> and best of luck. You have our deep gratitude on behalf of the board, the agency and the city of san francisco.

Thank you, candace.

>> thank you.

>> Dr. Torez. >> where are you going to in university of california. >> I'm going to the university of california office of the President.

>> well, give janet my best and

I just swore in the new speaker

and if you need help, let me know.

I want to thank you for treating me with respect and I never thought you were going to leave,

so I'm sad by your departure but I wish you all of the best and

you'll be working for an

incredible woman who I knew as the university.

She's tough, a visionary and you fit right in. Thank you. >> director e arc

akin. Congratulations on your new move.

I'm happy that you think of this

as your second family and I hope you'll stay connected to impart

over your hard-fought six years

to whoever ends up being your sec cessor. Successor.

You have helped people to take

pride.

My husband wearing his search

trucker hat. You make people feel part of one

team and that's vital work that's not always recognised. So thank you for recognising that work and I wish you the best of luck in your next steps. >> thank you.

>> good luck, candace.

>> thank you.

Applause:  .

>> so work on our central subway project reached an important milestone as of last week. If you have traveled around chinatown or union square over

the last few year, you know

stockton street is in various

states of closure for over three years and we're happy to announce that stockton street

was open, completely to

pedestrian, vehicular and transit. The first time it's been this

year in over three years. Restoring stockton street is a huge priority for the community

and something we aim to get done this fall.

Our new subway director and his team focus on getting it done

ahead of schedule as in recognition how important for

the communities who use stockton street.

We're important to continue the dialogue by getting the central subway done. I was fortunate enough this

morning to travel with candace

to the new chase centre where

director bordon was directing we cut the ribbon.

I got a piece of the ribbon for my trouble.

It's great to go there and see

how integral transportation is

to the mayor, devoted her

remarks to thanking the warriors

thanking the warriors, as well as the partnership where once again, it was announced to the crowd and

we'll keep announcing it through

advertisements and messages that

your chase centre ticket is your muni ticket. So excited about that partnership and watching the

chase centre for the whole city today. We do want customers to know

that starting on September 13th, the cable car

will be shut down ten days and

this shut-down will take place

to enable us to finish the last gable car box.

bus shuttles will be serving all

lines and the gear boxes that

have been in continuous service since they were rebuilt need to

be overhauled and we rehabbed the other ones. So this is the final one, but

this gear box is used by every

cable car line and the only way that the each of the cars can

get back to the cable car barn.

We've done outreach to district

supervisors, residents, merchants and tourism groups. This is an important investment

that will enable the kabul car cable car

to run for decade.

We have the rehabilitation of the l tire ball and this is

between mta, public utility commissions. And it's a project that I know intent quite

we spent quite a bit of time talking about. Because of construction staging turned out to be an important

issue to the sunset community

and supervisor marr, we pulled the community, actually, about where they were prefer to see

the equipment laid down and gave options, gave an option whereby we would stage the equipment and

take up as many as 96 parking spaces and gave another option

to take 16 parks space buzz have spaces but have

to remove a lane on the highway. While there were strong voices on both sides, the community

voted to take less parking and

taking away the travel lane. Network is underway and you can

see crews replacing the sewer

line between 45th and 46 proceeding and it's a long-term project.

We will be announcing bus substitutions passwordcally

substitution periodically and

we'll make sure to let customers know those changes are coming.

Two exciting upcoming events, September 7th and 8th will

host the muni heritage weekend.

This is a collaboration at the

market street railway and an opportunity for customers to

ride some of the oldest vintage vehicles. I know people travel from all over the state and all over the world to ride some of the

vehicles from 11:00 A.M. To 5:00 P.M., saturday and sunday at the san francisco railway

museum at 77 stewart street.

The highlight this year is an

opportunity to ride cable car

number 19 which was built in

1883 and has not run on our streets for 77 years.

We have rehab ed this cable

rehab that cable car and

run a car that hasn't run in

most of our lifetimes. Community heritage weekend is

the kick-off of transit week,

September 13th, a week-long celebration by the sanfrancisco transit riders and a group's annual event to reach out to riders and operators and thank them for the choices they make

to ride muni and the work they

do to help us build a more

sustainable, livable city and

we're pleased to be a partner

and that concludes my report. >> very good.

Thank you, AREMcguire.

Any questions? Director torez?

>> do we have any idea when the central subway will open from your perspective yet.

>> so we plan to bring an item

to this board for action later

this month and we'll be fair

won be wouldn't be fair

to give you a completion date. >> I'm tired of receiving all these letters and referring them

to you with no response to the

agency to the subcontractors who have not been paid.

A lot of small companies will go under because we're not paying them. I thought we were getting close

to a resolution on paying some of them.

Just want to reiterate again, that these subcontractors, I'm

talking about the folks that are doing the subcontracting work, small companies and they're getting hurt. Thank you. >> thank you.

>> I do have one question.

>> about the cable cars. I saw ed is head of travel and I don't know why the information about the kabul

cable cars didn't get

to him and he had all of these

people calling because it's a number one tourist attraction.

So whatever we can do in advance, as much notice as possible, because this is one of our big tourism things to make

sure -- I think laurie armstrong is the person on the press side

and joe, the President's office,

jessica richardson, just get those people just because they

do call them specifically wondering what's going on with the kabul

kabul cable cars. >> thanks, we'll fix that right away. >> Mr. Boomer, public comment and how many cars do we have? >> for this topic, one speaker, this is an opportunity for

members to address the board on

items addressed only by Mr. Mcguire. >> two minutes, please. The speaker.

>> terry mamude.

>> good afternoon, directors. Stockston street traffic flow, crossing market street to fourth

street, you have created such a pain.

Every time I go five, seven, ten times from that route,

route, I grind my teeth.

There's a three-car space to turn right and the second lane for the bus and taxi to go forward is blocked. For the people who are waiting to get into the right, they

cannot.

And the left side, one lane used

to be a small narrow lane to

make a left and so the spaces

which are left in front of cole hardware, you have to remove them.

So the right lane can become

eight, ten cars, not two, three

cars.

Where there are ten cars every minute.

You have made such a mess on

that one block that literally five minutes is one block. Can you imagine that?

You have a staff who go there and check it in

? No.

Because millions of dollars is spending.

Do you see how much pain is there?

I went through 500 time and I

have a horrible, horrible pain

from you just not fixing that shinning the way

the way you opened it. Any public comment? seeing none, public item is closed.

A scheduling issue through the director's report, if I could. I will not be able to be here

most likely next week and I know

that -- excuse me, next meeting.

I know, Miss Kirshbaum, the plan

was to present on the uni service and the issues I raised last time.

So if I main

May invoke perfect

privilege to move it to the

first meeting in October and if

they are agreeable one

agreeable, I don't see any fellow board members throwing things at me.

So if possible, to pull that

off, I would appreciate it. >> they're nodding at each other. >> that's great communication. Item number 8. >> Miss

Mr. Chair, there is to

report today. Item 9? >> an opportunity for the members of the public to decrease

addressthe board on matters in the jurisdiction but not on today agenda. Mr. Chair, you have five, at least five speakers. >> we'll go two minutes.

The first speaker?

>> nancy arbuckle.

Inaudible:   Perform

. >> Mr. Camude, the floor is

yours for public comment.

>> good afternoon, directors.

Taxi driver.

So recently, I started driving a

new meter, flyway taxi meter and

that is a havoc on the taxi drives. tout

drivers.

My metre started at $3.50 and than

then it was 22-cents.

This is a meterimposed on us. I don't know if this will turn up on the screen but you will see from the point, I've trimmed it and can it show on your

system? No, it's not.

And I wentu will send you a full video of six minutes.

I'm trying to download it on Youtube. So let it start again.

So this meter has ten other problems.

You see, for example, 7:16, 8:02

and now reversing, $7.85. Can you imagine this kind of meter?

I trimmed it 20 seconds to show

you this portion.

Let me put it back again, $7.85

first and to $8.27.

This is this meter and hundreds

are crying and this is creating

a havoc for us.

>> thank you, that was helpful.

>> hi, good afternoon.

I'm here today to address the

number 9, the infamous number 9

bus, particularly the service on

sundays which is haphazard.

I travel on the 9 all of the

time and 9r, my favourite bus, thank you.

Put the problem on sundays, though, is often a bus will be

out of service or call out of

service un-beknown to customer. We have a lot of houseless

people on the bus, cyclers on the bus and the bus driver had

to say no to two different people with wheelchairs.

So I would like to ask the ffmt

board to approve weekend service on the 9. It

most of us work on weekends.

We're not all 9 to 5, monday through friday workers.

This is a tourist with a lot of

hotel and retail workers and so

that's my pledge to you or my

urging is to please improve the 9.

I would like to see the 9r on

weekends, the larger bus or the

9 be a larger bus on the weekend service. Thank you. >> thank you very much.

>> just noted also services sf general, clients and customers, as well. >> thank you.

Next speaker, please.

>> herbert winer by tom

calberti. >> Mr. Winier, welcome back.

>> what I want to discuss May be

a muni secret and correct me if I'm wrong.

Because with muni forward, you

have deleted altered bus stops but as far as I can see, amount

of coaches on the runs have not

been increased, so, basically,

what you have, people walking alonger distance to watch the

same amount of buses that travel

slowly anyway and so there's actually less service.

Instead of being a zero sum

solution, it's a minus one and,

basically, what it amounts to is

planning and some deception,

similarly disguised as transit first. Thank you. >> thank you very much. Next speaker, please.

>> tom gilberti by rowan gadeu. >> tom, welcome back. >> thank you. It hardwood

good to be back but lovely month away. >> nice to have you back. >> it's nice we're all here. Wheel locks, I don't understand why we're not putting wheel locks on the new buses. All of the old buses had wheel locks.

A certain amount of security in

knowing that my chair won't fly

away helps. Now, we're

some of the buses have spaces for wheelchairs but not straps for them.

I don't like the idea of asking our drivers to bend over, awkward-back positions to try

and unlock a wheel, unstrap, unstrap. It takes minutes away from travel time. We're all trying to get buses going faster and takes minutes

to be unstrapped. We need to put wheel locks back on them. We're getting rid of the old buses.

Let's take them off of the old buses.

All of the old buses had wheel locks. When I say I don't want to be

strapped in, I get, you're

riding at your own risk.

I don't think I want to play that, if you know what I mean.

I don't want to be saying, I am

now riding at my own risk.

Muni platforms, please, I ask

the door on the powell station

to be washed a year and a half ago.

It still has not been washed.

Muni has to take care of the

platform, both the walkway, and frame. signage, I hope you're working

on traffic signals in the future, dedicated right-hand

turns and also vanesse, we want

a two-stop system, alternative buses that can pass each other. Thank you.

>> thank you, Mr. Gilber electrician. Ti.

>> are rowan catea-rbgs.

>> I live on garry close to

vanesse.

I hope I will be less old than

the cable car that was mentioned.

But that leads me to what indianapolis said this week. Some of you May have heard that

a new brt line opened up in indianapolis today.

It has 23 stops, more than ten

miles long, which is more than more than

both brt projects combine. It's done. It's operational and running.

We have concrete centre islands.

New buses where the lug nuts

don't stick out and bits of sixth

single track and one lane where

buses go both ways. Indianapolis is putting us to shame.

We're work on brts before, but

we've also been work on v arc

arc

anesse spaws

vanesse brt.

Why can't we do this for the next project. Let's learn some lessons from

the folks in indianapolis who is

clearly figured out how to do something we haven't figured out yet. >> any further speakers

speaker public comment? >> none who have turned in a speaker card. >> I will close public comment on item 9. >> thank you, Mr. Chair. >> I

if I May, are Mcguire, I suspect maybe there's an answer

as to why there aren't wheel

locks on the new buses but given

the steam with which we hold

Mr. Gilbertu, I appreciate you coming down. Everything you say I listen to closely and appreciate the input you give us.

And then on the taxi cab issue,

which is near and dear to me, Mr. Mamude's video was alarming, maybe the word for it.

But that's not the way a meter should behave. Not for the customer, not for

the hard-working driver.

I don't know the answer but that's something they should know about and care about and look into it and at least deliver him and answer. If there's a bigger problem,

deliver you and us an answer. >> we will follow up on both issues, thank you.

>> thank you. >> Mr. Chairman, directors,

you're on to your consent

calendar, members of the board and public. Mr. Chair, no member of the

public, nor a member of the

board has indicated that an item should be severed. >> ok.

And I don't see anybody making a

move to sever. >> motion to approve? >> approve.

>> all those in favour please

say aye. All right.

>> on to your regular agenda,

item 11, presentation discussion regarding project on vision zero. >> directors, so you have asked

us a few times over the course

of this year about the progress

we're making at vision zero and

the fact that even this year, even five years, we still have lost 22 people on our streets and so we've brought the staff

who have been leaving the vision zero initiative since we adopted

this goal in 2014, to talk about

the way in which we have been focusing, some new ideas to further focus resources and we'll talk about the mayor's announcement this week and we've

got neithers from the department of public health and the police department here to answer any questions have about the presentation. With that, I will turn it over

to our vision zero programme manager at the mta. >> good afternoon, board and chair.

I am just sweating up here, I'll start there. [Laughter]

>> it is hot in here.

>> so you al on the hot seat,

literally and figuratively. I'm the pedestrian programme

manager and the vision zero task force cochair.

I am joined my colleague megan weir and I'll trade the presentation with her about halfway through.

And I'm joined today by a dozen of my colleagues who support me in vision zero and I'm truly just a figure head today, report on the progress and work of so many of the staff of mta and not

the least of which is the sustainsable streets division, delivering the majority of this

work.

Tout

we watch our fatality numbers

the same way you do and our media does and the attention is important to us because this

work is important to us. So today, this is a brief overview of the presentation I'll go into today.

I know we have some time and so,

we will be taking hopefully a good discussion afterward and taking questions then, but overall, we'll talk about where

we are in terms of our goal and our recent trends.

How we work across the city, so not just with the mta but across

the city to deliver the goal of vision zero.

The strategic actions that we

agreed upon earlier this year in our action strategy and how we're working on and making progress on many of the

different actions already.

Some of our metrics and beyond our strategic actions both as a

city and also to ask you and

those who are watching in sanfrancisco in general to

support and help us to build

momentum to get to vision zero.

So we staff a task force and we take a minute to centre around the lives lost. I'm take a minute to both read the names of those who have died in our streets in 2019. But before I do that, I wanted to take a moment on this slide to share the story of one of

these names.

Saylaenriguez.

Just after 1 al on

she was on a list on her way

home from baby-sitting when the driver crashed into her car,

killing both and 26-year-old

lyft driver aleem before

fleeing. The 49-year-old good morning was left dead from the house she bought.

She's remember as hard-working, humble, loved and special.

I want to acknowledge a name not on this list.

My colleague pressi morale, ha was filled by a trolley five years ago. See worked for years in the room just below me and I worked with

her on a project to improve the city's property tax processes. She, too, was a grandmother and was a pleasure to work with.

So these two lives are too many

to have lost and we have lost many more.

I'll read the names of those

lost and join me after I finish reading to remember these

people, their families and lives they lead. >> your slides are not showing

for us or for the public. >> I have a hard copy. >> I do, too.

Give me a second.

Lucy morales, nancy ing,

chou gogn, jose gosko,

teth rostein, mark swonk.

Darrin travis, alexander rayes,

alexander norton, michael evans,

benjamin dean and wu ying.

Moment of silence:  .

>> we off adopted vision zero

across the city and that's the route goal.

It elevates the dignity and sanctity of human life and

there's no reason to accept

human life from traffic.

This policy is partnered with

our department of public health because every one of these fatalities is treated by the public health system. We work this with a suite of

policy tools, we need to treat traffic fatalities with the same regard and I'll use this to

centre myself.

This is our sooning the trend's page.

So this is our current trends and I think we need to back this up.

How do we do that?

So here we are, and so, in 2017,

we had a city-wide low of 20

fatality and last year we had 23

and currently we have 22

recorded traffic fatalities and, you know, our prayer is that

that will be the last this year.

And we watch these trend and we're very careful and

thoughtful about what they mean

and how our work impacts these trends.

And as the vision zero lead for sfmta I'm presented when you

talk about my work with a personal experience that relates

to the cause of these trends and

I just want to say, it is a constellation of factors that contributes to the graph that we're looking at.

And so, you know, there are so

many things that are impacting whether we see another fatality

on the street, but I think we'll talk in this presentation about the ones we believe as a city are most impactful and what

we're doing to stem those

particular trends.

Our work is based on the best information that anyone has

nationally and this is created

through our high-injury network and it's a predictity tool because it shares hundreds of

data points about where we have

seen injuries and fatalities in the fuse

past five years and includes

hospital data in addition to the police records. We focus on the high injury network because it allows toss look at corridors which

contribute to the interventions

that are most imimpactful and we really worked at the intersection level as we would

see a severe injury or fatality, traffic engineers would consider what do with that intersection. But because we're seeing these

in terms of line, we know that

something that happened at an

intersection that has a fatality

might duplicate one intersection over because that looks similar to the one we experienced this loss at. We want to think about these things in a network format. This is not so abstract.

All of you sit here, meeting

after meeting and you see us come with this slide and with this information and we say, this project is on the high-injury network.

So you have seen sustainable

staff come through with projects

on corridors saying this directly improves and works

towards our goals of vision zero and here is why.

So here it is in total and when

we did the math, we've worked, we've brought something to this

board on the 170 miles of high-injury network in the last three years and you'll see more coming.

In the next board session,

you'll see projects on mission excelsier and it is here on this

line.

Just to discuss the fatality

trends they're in our five-year data sets and the most information is that the trends we're seeing are the ones we've

seen in the past that our fatalities are on a high injury

network, a community of concern, that they're seniors who are

impacted and that the types of

causes related to these are the two that always come up at the

top which is unsafe speed and

driver's failure to yield.

Just looking at the vulnerable population trends, the things

you see here are people walking, disproportionately impact and that is true every year and people with disabilities is an area we're exploring because the data is hard to feign

find and cannot record someone has a disability

but our hospital can and we're

exploring how people are

disproportionally impacted by traffic. Cyclists are impacted in terms of their current mode percentages.

So you'll talk about

motorcyclists in a second but

motorcycles represent 5% of our mode shift but maybe up to 10 brass

10%of injuries and fatalities. Something every single started

to grapple with and we got an maul

email where five cities talks

about homelessness and this is just the city's number one issue

of homelessness, that any one will till is their deepest

concern and here it is insecting with our own traffic policy and

we are not a policy unto an highland. We

highslain. island.

One-fifth is were those who had no known fixed address. We are talking about how these actions are addressing these issues and I'll hope you keep those in the back of your mine.

The newspaper one palestinian we

held is that forward speeds save

lives. Because of all of the factors that contribute to me, I'm more likely to survive and that is

not true as I age and so, we all

know that all of us, went we are older, when our parents are older, when they get hit by a

car, things are dramatically different, so we use this.

But when we think about 20 miles per hour maybe too fast if you are older. And so we have to think about

how we're reducing speeds.

Truly mile per hour matters and

when the populations hardest impacted by speed.

So as a city, we've committed to addressing vision zero and that is no small feat. It takes a lot for us to

organize ourselves. We bring the projects on our

items and hoping to solicit feedback on how to move forward together.

We have a dozen agencies committed to vision zero working

in big buckets of work, including safe streets which is improving our infrastructure and safe people which is the

education enforcement piece and safe vehicle, ensuring every vehicle to regulate on san francisco streets is safe for a user.

And then we also support this

work through or improvement and continual improvement of the data systems that both inform

our inputs and discussion or outputs, as well as -- and this

is critical -- a legislative agenda. Because san francisco cannot do this by ourselves and we need to change at the state and we need

improvement at the federal level

to support getting to zero.

In March of 2019, we issued an action strategy and that is on the web and I encourage anyone

to look at it and these city agencies are tackling the work

that we're doing, which is a strategic action I'll talk about

in transformative policy, complimentary goals and we'll talk about those briefly but I hope we can have a broader conversation about those items,

as well.

So that action strategy was not

just me at my desk writing away.

It is informed by national research, including transportation research board in

effective practices at reducing traffic fatalities.

We work wid our peer cities over

a dozen of which have adopted

vision zero and called them to

make sure what they were doing

they were pursue background to make them effective. We work with city staff because

there are people who are working on vision zero everyday and what they want to contribute in the next two to five years and we reached out to the entire community of san francisco

through coffee talk and

workshops to ensure that the

goals we have are aligned to the goals we have and we're not working this a vacuum but making sure we and the community are working together. if we weren't aligned, we would

not maybe any progress. So these strategic actions

reflect all of those things together, both national research, our peers and our community and our city staff and

what we can reasonably expect we can did to make a dent towards

zero. So now I'm going to talk a

little bit about the safe

street's portion. So the most important bucket

that we sort of tackle, because infrastructure really leads wait

in vision zero, is how do we

engineer streets for safety using the proven high impact tools on the trees with the high

northeasts? Needs?

We're focusing the vast majority of energy on those streets because they're the most in need. So I'll talk about the four booklets in the next four

slides.

So number one, and this reflects

really the depth of work that our sustainable street's division does, which is to install high-impact sustainable travel lanes.

And so the reason these are important because for most of

these, which is a red lane muni

project or protected bikeway or widing sidewalk, they come with the benefit of being a road diet and so that's the best tool we

have in our corridor toolbox to reduce speed. What's nice about this is that

they have the co-benefit of

increasing our goal towards mode

shift, of making muni more

reliable, of bicycling a safe choice for anybody on the street.

And this mileage is really ambitious and it's going to take every single project we have in our toolbox to come to this board and be approved for us to meet this goal. And you already approved almost all of the these projects, which

is why I listed them, but you'll

have a lot more coming your way. So know these projects are routed in this goal.

We need to see all of these meet success. Really important, and I think

it's a cornerstone is that transit will drive that.

This is a huge number of miles

and they will vastly improve the safety on those streets.

If you live at the corner of vanesse and garry, the city is

sinking millions of dollars into

making your muni choice excellent but your safety a priority. And this includes so many

projects that you've seen at poke, second, sixth and taylor and the subset of quick bill

projects that I'll talk about in a second but our fifth, sixth

and seventh would be good expects of quick bill projects

that we're doing to improve

safety for all mows. Modes. I was going to highlight which

is hard to read, but we are spending annually and I have do this at the back, because it's

hard to tease out how much I'm spending on all projects we're doing, but 25 to $50 million. We called or colleagues in new york to see whether we're

comparable and the verdict is

still out but I think we're exceeding new york's expenditure

on these types of projects. that tells me we're investing our money where needed most but as a city, we're prioritizing these dollars and I'll

personally very grateful to the

taxpayers of san francisco that

have prop a, the general

obligation bond, sales tax, all

of our regional funding sources,

including one bay area grant, new starts. These are all of the things that are piling in and when I flip through the next slides and it May be hard to read because we're working on paper, if we

add up all of the strategic strategic actions in total after this,

they will not hit this number by bifolds. This is where we're putting our money and it's hard with one

line item, but this is the vast

majority of the work that vision zero is doing.

Please stand by:  .

>> of sustainable streets in the

quick build projects and we

committed to five quick-build corridors and you told us to do

it faster as did the mayor so we

funding in the sfcta who is now funded more projects faster.

We're now going to do 10 corridor. I estimate we've reduced the

time lines of each of these projects by seven months through the delegation of the traffic

engineer for the quickville projects to having a funding

pool so which no longer have to

go individually to the

transportation authority. The large infrastructure project you approve we immediately go out and do an improvement on the street with what we can do with paint and post. It happened on taylor street and

that will be coming on fifth street which hopefully this board will approve in two weeks.

So, this is about $6 million

annually and currently really supported through the sales tax

from the ssta.

Again, to reflect the request of this board, we've heard loud and clear, you want to see a quick bill projects on market street as well.

As we legislate market street, we will be immediately following

up with the turn restrictions on

market street to improve safety

on market street as fast as possible.

This also reflects the huge

desire that I heard and my

colleagues have heard to think

about car-free spaces in this city. So, this is the current action but I don't think this is the end of it.

As an agency we also need to consider where are other opportunities for car-fro spaces just to reflect how much we heard from the community that

that was a value to them.

Should I wait a second? >> keep doing what you are doing.

>> ok. So, those were four actions from our safe streets category so as

you know, there are 58 total actions across our different

buckets of work.

Those were just four highlights. If you have any questions about

actions I did not discuss, I'm happy to take those questions. Moving on to safe people, safe

people is not intended to be work unto itself.

It compliment programs and fill gaps. i'm going to use some of the

highlight action to discuss precisely what that means. Safe people does not work in a vacuum.

It truly compliments the engineering work we're doing and helps the community to come along with us in understanding

why we're doing the things we're

doing to those streets.

So number one, this is also from

the mayor earlier this week.

A goal to think about left turns.

So left turns are 27% of our

fatalities in the last three years. There's innovative work in this area and we're duplicating elements of those and we're piloting these safety treatments

at eight intersections. We're working with national safety experts to see how all the things that go on in your brain when you make a left turn

which is way more than should be going on when you make a left

turn and how we can contribute

an education method to see how

complicated it is and makes you think this is both complicated and I need to make sure I'm looking for another human being

before I complete this maneuver. An education campaign will compliment those safety interventions.

This is funded through the act of transportation program grant and so we have about $2 million

over two years to support this

specific program.

We are first in nation to

facilitate training transportations with san francisco motorcycle riders. Safe people isn't here to supersede any other work but

from the perspective of traffic engineering we have limited

tools in our toolbox to address motorcycle safety.

They are smaller and they are

much more vulnerable. We're trying a opportunity to

think about how we can -- we're working. How we can address some of the fatalities that we're seeing. It has been extremely well received by the motorcycle community.

My understanding is we offered a training and it has more people on the wait list than can be afforded in the training. We worked with the police department so the police officers are actually training motorcycle riders about defensive maneuvers. It's been a really wonderful program. This is funded out of the california of office traffic safety grant.

The point I'm trying to hammer

home is the vast majority of our safe people work is grants that have targeted towards this effort and cannot be used towards some of our infrastructure programs.

So we apply for and we're successful and we've done the most we can with the limited

dollars that we have in these spaces. I believe the next slide I'm

going it turnover to meghan.

And the powerpoint is working so you are good. I'm disappointed I enjoyed

standing up here with you.

Good afternoon directors, chair.

My name is meghan were.

And I have the honor of co-chairing vision zero and

working with sfmta and sfpd, our city and community stakeholders to realize vision zero and our city.

I worked on the issue of traffic

safety for san francisco for a decade.

I'm continually inspired by the progress we made but also

humbled by the tremendous amount of work we continue to do. Thank you for highlighting this at your meeting today and for

your continued leadership. So the next slide I wanted to

talk about, some of the work the

department of public-health that is responsive to the needs of

seniors as the most vulnerable population which she highlighted in her presentation. Seniors are much more vulnerable to dying when involved in a crash and the department of public-health has been doing

sustained outreach through the stay straits for senior programs engaging senior as well as

senior service providers through presentations, materials, community workshops anden gainment around vision zero and

how to get involved, how to

communicate feedback to the

sfmta and how to stay safe and also funding community based organizations city wide as well

as in the most impacted areas to

further engage around vision zero.

Next I want to talk about the critical role of the police

department and focus on the five for vision zero which has been a

focus since the beginning of vision zero.

This is focusing 50% of traffic citations and the five most dangerous driving behaviors that we see continually contribute to

our fatal crashes in san francisco.

That's speeding, failure to

field to pedestrian, red-light

running and stop-sign running.

The captain who is here and available for any questions at the end. We really wanted to highlight the recent critical initiative

that the police department has launched with having motorcycle officers dedicated to focus on

the five enforcements. That will be nine total officers. They'll be exempt from other students that will be

departments.

To date, the team has written over 500 citations. The majority of which were of

course for the focus on the five

crashes and 75 for unsafe speed. Which we know, when we look at whether or not someone survived

the crash, speeding is the

primary predictors. In addition to co-chairing

vision zero, I'm also the lead for developing comprehensive data systems in our city. I have a small but mighty team and the department of public-health that enjoys the privilege of working across the

city family with the police department, M.T.A., the medical

examiner, the fire department, E.M.S. And also our partners at san francisco general hospital including trauma surgeons and nurses that are responding to

these severe crashes on our streets everyday to both improve

our surveillance, to monitor

vision zero and also better

understand the data to inform

targeted prevention efforts. I'm going to talk about our work to update the high injury

network using linked police and hospital data.

We were the first in the count introduce to link and mass hospital data to capture crashes

that were not reported in police data. For a cyclist that is 40% of severe crashes were not in police records. This is significant.

It really matters.

When our city-family is given to data driven prevention efforts. This is a high injury network that's been something that has

been replicated nationally by other cities working to achieve

the ambitious goal of and doing

the most to save lives. Last year we released our first report on severe injuries using our hospital and trauma center data. This is really important because when understanding the distribution of severe injuries, we both want to ensure that

we're capturing the most comprehensive universe of severe injuries but also partnering with our hospital allows us to

use clinically determined severe injury assessment so we know we

have a better handle on these trends. This work foss our monitoring and also of course goes back into our high injury network and leads to critical findings such

as that 20% of severe injuries are to psyche lists and another 20% are to motorcyclists so

again informing where our vision

efforts are being targeted.

In addition to monitoring the 58 actions in our action strategy

we have some critical key metrics that are also monitored

on an annual bases related to of

course our fatalities but also mileage improved on the high injury network where that mileage is being improved as well as some critical metrics

with respect to our safe people initiative.

Of course, the city, we hope has demonstrated is using all the

tools that we have in our tool kit to eliminate deaths and reduce severe injuries on our

street and we're engage in national best practice.

There's some tools in our tool kit that are not available to us

right now and that informs our transformative policy agenda which I'm going to talk more

about that as well as our focus on complimentary goals with other city initiatives that we need to collectively advance in order to reach vision zero and

just have the san francisco that

everyone has been working towards.

But this work is a focus on equity. We will not reach business zero if we don't advance equity and address the needs of the most vulnerable people on our

transportation system. As it was described in the

opening presentations, people,

seniors, people with

disabilities, people walking and

biking, low income communities,

this is where our fatalities are concentrated. These are populations from a health perspective.

They're vulnerable toll traffic deaths and to a whole post of high school health

aswell as other needs in our transportation system.

Through a focus on equity, we

will prioritizing and monitoring

improvements on our high-injury network. Working with our policy at

police and other colleagues to

ensure our vision implements culturally competent engagement and also our surveillance system that helps us understand these issues and what more do we need

to do. This is our transformative

policy agenda focusing on automated enforcement, pricing,

and reducing vehicle miles traveled. For example, it would be accomplished with congestion pricing and also local regulation of transportation network companies.

These policies address both speed.

What our robust tools that could

have a seismic impact in san francisco reducing deaths and lowering injuries.

They also impact on vehicle miles traveled.

They're essentially how many peach are driving around our city in single cars.

That's because the more people driving on our streets, the

higher the risk of injuries.

With respect to automated

enforcement and the speed limit setting vision zero is thrilled the state currently has a task

force, the zero fatality task force. My colleague is the san francisco representative on the task force and give the honor on being on the advisory committee

along with jody ma deros of walk san francisco.

They have met so far twice and will be releasing a report at

the end of the year. urban speed limits are set on how fast cars are traveling.

In some locations, for example, los angeles, when city traffic engineer and support of vision zero tried to lower state limits, they had to increase them because of the way that

speed limits are set. This task force is looking at

what are health protectives speed limit approaches that are supportive of a safe system. Right now the task force is

looking both at an interim short-term solution that would work within the current structure of speed limit settings that could make changes that would be consistent with

the changes we know for vision zero and a longer term study

that could inform a more

comprehensive revision of urban speed limit settings.

It will look at automated speed enforcement and making additional recommendations to the part of that approach. We're really grateful for this opportunity to engage with the

state around these critical

changes for vision zero.

And then also, our latest strategies really focusing on

the need to add chance complimentary city goals.

As they create safer streets we have safer conditions for walking, bicycling and transit

that we know is also critical to the reduction and the reduction and driving that we need to

reach our climate action goals, to reach our mode shift goals

and reach our transit first goals in this city.

We also know as we saw with

these statistics with respect to homelessness, issues of housing and affordable housing are really critical to achieving our

vision zero goal and we're

working across the city family

to better coordinate with respect to how we can support each other to realize a safer

san francisco, a healthier san francisco.

That concludes my part of the presentation. I just want to thank you again for your leadership.

I know every mta board meeting focuses on issues critical for

us to realize vision zero and thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

With that, I know tom mcgwire has closing remarks.

>> just to wrap this up, because

I think the two-subject matter

experts have covered it in great

detail, the two observations I

would add is that we are fighting headwinds not just here in san francisco but nation wide. Nation wide, not just population

of jobs are growing but vehicle miles are growing faster than population and jobs and we're

losing ground in certain areas. These trends are going up in many cities including san francisco. We're not alone here. Also, the issue of people experiencing homelessness being

directly affected as victims of

traffic fatalities it's a huge concern of D.O.T. Nation wide and one of our five fatalities victims are homeless and that is

on the rise nation wide as well.

In that sense, we're trying to achieve and drive down traffic fatalities to zero at a time when the factor is they contribute to fatalities are working against us.

That said, we're absolutely committed to vision zero for

five years and this board has made several moves to push us further. Project delivery, we have a

quick build initiative back in

the spring and we're going to continue to bring projects to

you including the seventh street

project that we delivered last

month and we're going to keep using that direction you gave us

to try to transform streets more

quickly and finally if the mayor adds this on friday, we're working with our police

department to really get laser focused as well as deliver lots

of near-term pragmatic tools,

some of which we discussed here

extending walking times and new signal lights intersections, new corner red zones and turning all

that stuff out as fast as possible.

We're not here to say that the strategy that they presented is the end all be all, we're not

here to say that we're necessarily waiting for this hearing to take quick action.

We've been trying to accelerate

our pace of action since you

renewed your focus this year and

we're excited to have a further conversation with you. >> very good. So, directors, I think we have some public comment on this item.

Is there questions first?

Questions that would be great.

>> maybe, I know that someone from the police department here.

I would love to hear them talk

about the new unit and officers

dedicated to vision zero and the

goals for meeting some of the targets that haven't been met

for citations. >> good afternoon, everybody. My name is luke martin I'm the

current acting captain at traffic company. So you want to know a little bit

more about the unit we're

starting just to give you a background. I've been with traffic company for two years now.

So I've been monitoring a different capacity.

This June, I took over as the captain, as our former captain

was promoted and after kind of

examining the numbers I noticed

a steady decline in traffic citations. We were hovering just right

about 50% on focus of the five violations. I think there's several factors that have contributed to the

decline and citations, I'm more

focused on how to improve.

The first thing I looked at

doing was forming a small group

of our officers and took away

some of the you've tasks that

other tasks they are detailed to. We investigate collisions. We respond to different protests and demonstration and other events that happen in the city as well as help out other districts with traffic control

and things like that. I took all those responsibilities away from this small group of officers and just

had them go out to high-injury corridors and just hit focus on

the five violations with the

emphasis on speeding.

We got the team up and running

right about the end of June.

So from then until now they've

hit 500 citations with probably

99.9% focus on the five.

Heavy emphasis on speeding.

It was kind of a pilot program. I wanted to see how it would go. We started talking about it more and more and apparently the mayor heard about it. Wanted us to increase our staffing for that. We just added

five additional officers to that group so they're going to be hitting the streets doing the

same thing this other group is doing.

That's a little background how it got start and why it got started.

Some of the things we'll try to do.

Another thing, I've been getting

feedback from those officers about different issues on the streets. Got another light bulb and going

to try and work with the sfmta and get with their engineers and our officers out there doing

that and see if we can't have dialogue with the issues they're

seeing that might be addressed.

>> is there anything specific that -- any observations?

Is it too new to bring it up? >> specifically I don't have anything on hand. One of our officers brought that up but I thought it would be a great thing to start doing. >> thank you.

>> so, captain, thank you for being here and thank you for your efforts to keep your fellow san franciscans safe. It's most appreciated. One question I have about this program, which I applaud, is

what's being done to communicate it.

One of the ideas would be that if folks know police officers are out there focusing on these

five issues as potential ticket sources, hopefully that will be further motivation for them to focus on these issues and not violate those rules.

Obviously I suspect you've done media outreach and if not that

would be wonderful and the other, this is something our department could support. There are natural groups of

drivers in the city. Uber and lyft have a lot of

drivers and the taxicab are professional drivers so they're not the biggest issue you are having here. I just wonder and just suggest

in addition to standard media outreach if there's ways to

communicate to the groups of drivers, you know, homeowners

associations, whatever, hey, fair warning, we have a task

force out there ticketing on this so you May want to tell your members and your drivers

pay attention to these issues. That seems to me like that could be an effective way of communicating the message rather

than ticket by ticket. >> I absolutely agree with you. I know our media relations unit

just recently got wind of what we're doing.

I'm pretty sure we'll start having dialogue about something like what you discussed.

>> let me offer this agency support. You guys are well trained in different things. You are trained in a lot of

things including law enforcement obviously. If we can partner with them to figure out the best way to

communicate with the police to support our gels to educate drivers as to what the focus is, I suspect there are a lot of drivers in this city who can't

tell you what the five leading

issues are that are causing pedestrian fatalities. They don't want to hit

pedestrians. Telling them these are the five things we're ticketing is also a way of saying these are the five things when you leave your driveway or your parking spot

you should be focused out there.

So I would encourage, with our great communications resource and knowledge of the issues that

we support the police department

and work jointly with them to announce what they're doing here.

Any other questions for captain martin? >> thank you for being here. I think your team is an important part of helping us reach the goal here.

I wonder, since this is a newer area for me and some of the other members of the board to understand, if you could just help us understand how you think about enforcement? It seems so much about vision

zero is actually a numbers' game. We have 130 miles on the high injury network. We have a certain number of

miles we're meeting every year and could you help us think about how you understand what is

say reasonable scope for each officer to cover and is nine

officers enough to cover the 49

square miles of this city t a reasonable amount to get strong enforcement or are you still

seeing gaps in that equation?

>> yeah, so, to answer that question, no.

Nine is not enough at all. We can certainly use more staffing. The department is working hard

to try and beef up our over all

staffing so that units like ours

and other units do specialized

police work have that support.

We would triple or quadruple

that number and have that number

of officers out there that can

focus on the focus on the five violations. The reason we don't have all of

our officers currently we have

about 46 you are looking at 10

to 15 officers working for the

whole city and part of our job duties is respond to go serious collisions and our guys are the

experts on doing those

investigations.

On top of just doing traffic

enforcement, we're doing those investigations and several other

duties that we often get hold

for. Staffing is definitely an improvement for us and help over

all citation numbers.

>> any other questions for captain martin specifically

before we go to public comment? >> just as a follow-up, I appreciate an opportunity for

further dialogue and to understand is it a certain number of square blocks you

think is the right coverage unit

so that we can do the math and calculate how many officers would be needed to make our streets safe. >> I'd have to look into that. >> that's fine. That's great. Thank you.

>> thank you, captain.

>> are there any further

questions before we go to public comment?

>> does anyone else want to go first?

>> so, thank you so much for this presentation. I will note I have been on the board for almost a year and haven't had the pleasure hearing from you two directly. It's great to have you here and

have this robust dialogue and I hope we can meet with much more frequency going forward.

On the transit side under chair

we have surfaced solution zoos we really appreciate this today. The first question I want to ask

and you started to allude to the

answer is why are we seeing the numbers so high this year in issue there

?Why are we at 22 right now in September when that is roughly the equivalent of the total number of fatalities in several

of the past years?

>> I mean, when looking at the

data and in terms of reseptember

years, we've really -- like ours

lower so as our numbers go down

we've been seeing increases regionally and nationally in traffic fatalities.

One thing that with respect to fatalities and the reason we

also monitor severe injuries is is that they are statistically relatively small numbers so

there's a lot of random variations. However, no death is acceptable on our streets.

Vision zero, our city family and community of course all take

very seriously every death on our transportation system and san francisco, as we talked about, we've been seeing increases in population.

We've been seeing increases in

vehicle volumes on our city streets. We do have a homeless crisis on our streets and we see that with the data.

We're also working to increase

people walking and the more sustainable modes that are more

vulnerable in our city.

All these factors contribute to

a con tellation of

con stellation of factors. What we see is our high injury network is strongly predictive so that we know that we're

investing in the right places. It's where we need to put our

dollars and we know we need more tools. While we're focusing on the high

injury network with our capital investments with enforcement,

with our engagement, we need

system wide tools that are depicted in our transformative

policy agenda to make that impact. We need more.

With respect to acting captain martin and your question regarding ep

enforcement, P.D. Has been walking happened and hand

with us at the state level in respect to automated enforcement. These tools are resource efficient, evidence based and

will be able to make that more sustained impact we know is

critical to realizing vision zero.

>> I think meghan and I live and

breathe vision zero everyday so we get told frequently what the issue is.

I want to say, whatever that

issue is it's a false prophet. There is so much going on. There's no simple solution, which is why we're doing everything we can with every tool that we have. There's not a single tool that we don't want to deploy and so

we cannot come up here and say

it's absolutely because of x and

so if I told you what the number

wan cause is teenagers on their

cellphones with head phones in but I want to be clear it's absolutely not in our data.

What is in our data is grandmothers crossing street who

are dying and so if we see those people as the people impacted then our solution have to meet them and I would like to hopefully put an end to the teenagers on cellphones with head phones, that is not what

we're seeing an issue with and I hope think of our grandmothers. >> there are of course 58 strategies as mentioned in the

strategic plan and I appreciate seeing each action has a

specific owner and a specific person that has a responsibility

for delivering that. How do you prioritize across those.

Secondly, you put up 25 to 50 million for one of those. Is that enough money?

Are we on the right course or

are you lacking support and you

have a strategy, which I

appreciate, I also am a big fan of continuous improvement of

continuing to get smarter and refine and reiterate and hone as you learn more. How do you balance the idea of sticking to this plan. How much you believe if we execute everything in this plan

we're going to hit zero by 2024.

Versus continuing to review the data, understand the trends, know what is happening and evolve our strategy in response

to what we're learning. >> there's about three questions in there so I'll try to address all of them.

58 actions and how do we prioritize. These 58 actions represent the work of 500 people. And because there's an individual owner, we're not saying oh we don't have enough of this we need 20

to move ahead on this. It was listed because they were physical tally con

fiscally constrained because we had the budget and staff to do.

We started tracking how we were

doing on these actions very specifically.

And that isn't to say we're doing 100% success rates. Of course there are areas where

we're monitoring and saying we

might need more support for x so it's a clear example one of our

goals was culturally competent outreach training for

sustainable street project managers and we will to fill that gap.

In terms of are these being done by the same set of people the answer is no so there's not a certain priority of one versus the other they're all getting done and we're monitoring them

as a program and thoughtfully so where an action is falling short, one of my jobs is to make

sure that the people responsible

are filling that gap and so we do that.

We ask people to whom we report, specifically on the strategy are the T.A. Committee and our vision zero task force and we ask them to hold us accountable in the same way that we published this and it shouldn't be a document on a shelf.

We're hopefully making progress

on each action and we should share continual progress so if you pick any of those we would love to tell you another hour long presentation and those of

you who came to policy and governance did see one of the 58 which was the advancement of our safe routes to school program. It's hard to take a program that

big and tell you 58 things that

we're doing but we're happy to report frequently that this board would like on our progress and where we're making success

and falling short.

Another question was about how

do we address continuous improvements. We have an entire section related to getting new data to

inform the things we're doing. There's a certain percentage of

things that say, this data confirms the things we're doing were on the right track. So some of the projects that are going the ground actually

reflect the agency's prioritization of safe before we

address vision zero and so polk street, second street, market street, van he van ness came long before vision zero was adopted and yet here at planners we knew that's where we needed to work

to address a number of our agencies' goals so we're there. At the same time, we're taking in new information and so some

of the actions are certainly in nature. So some of them are very

specific and projects because they were grant funded. Others are not. That eight miles of sustainable

miles is a really good example

we're not pre trick as there's

new merge from the intersection bucket where it's about what are we doing to retime everything on the high injury network, I get an e-mail from our city traffic

engineer looking for funding support from the capital side in order to help with some of the operational needs of the city based on what they're saying out there so we're always taking in

new information and addressing it. Further, this is our third so

we're happy to take in new information up and date this

strategy as is needed. We've just started and we're seeing progress where we're

making progress and we're

hopeful to make single progress

there.

So one of the request was take a

look at turn collision and what

would a program attic no turn on

red look like and sustainable and with meghan's team are always thinking about is there a

new policy that is emerged from our cities that we could take on that would address the issue. They weren't included because

it's really hard to take when we're not sure the policy. The strategy is not the be all and end all of the work we're doing.

If I could just put in a 580 actions I would have.

We ran out of pages. Did I get to all the questions. >> I have a question.

add one thing about the improvement.

When we came here, after we had published this strategy and

talked about this quick build

approach, that was a form of continuous improvement. We written down five miles in

two years and you gave us some clear direction you wanted to see faster progress.

I was working from my hypothesis

that that was not just where our financial and staff resources

were but it might be the limit

of the political capital we had

to build vision zero projects. With the push for quick build we're finding that there's a hunger and thirst the for these projects and there's not a political limitation but rather

we're able to do what is

essentially quadrupling the pace

of project delivery with these tools. That is just an observation to your point about continuous improvement and how we're trying

to take that to heart. >> what are the limitations?

We did write a fiscally

contained plan. If you offered us another $50 million we would use that

$50 million to build additional

B.R.T.S or any one of the high-impact sustainable travel miles.

We committed to the things we

had known or projected funding. I want to say we're probably one of the best funded D.O.T.S in the country so that's why the

work we're doing is robust

compared to our peers. There are always a financial limit at what we're at but we're continuing to always pursue every competitive source that we can. We're typically very successful as a city.

In order to get to zero we will absolutely need another set of B.R.T.S and absolutely need a

full owe protected like lane

network through the city and

some is political and some is financial, just to be clear about that. >> I don't see any further questions.

We can have comments after.

>> thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, there's been a lot of debate over the last several

weeks about whether this issue

constitutes an emergency. Your presentation brought home to see when you've got a slide with two dozen names on it,

that's an emergency. What was missing in your presentation and I appreciate

all the work you are doing and I appreciate the mayor's leadership shining a spotlight

on this, what I didn't get is

what would it take to get that

page to no names?

It seems like we're stuck

between an incremental approach of some things we can do and a bunch of things that will be

more powerful but sacramento

hasn't authorized us to do yet.

What I am left wondering is have we stretched the limits of our own authority so we're not speeding up incremental change

but we're trying to move to some

kind of systemic difference on

what this high injury network

would look like that achieves zero deaths.

I just jotted down, and look,

from a place of much more ignorance than where you operate

but I jotted down five ideas.

the crosswalks that used to flash, I don't know if that's daylighting, that's one idea. Scrambles.

A third is banning right-turns.

A fourth is banning left turns.

A fifth is removing corner parking. I believe all of those are

within our existing authority and I expect that all of them

would be pretty tough going as well. But, that does seem to be a

place where we have authority.

We don't have to ask someone else's permission and we might

have a chance of making more

significant changes much more

rapidly if we were to try that. I just wonder what you thought about that and I would be certainly interested in your

answer after today, not just on the spot. I had do think we have to break

out of this box we're in.

We're waiting for someone else's permission and what we can do

just isn't getting the job done.

The numbers keep coming in year after year.

>> so I think you listed five

things, which were flashing beacon, scramble, no turn on reds and removing corner parking and we're doing all of those things. That's included -- >> when you say you are doing them, what does it mean?

>> in the tenderloin, we day lit every corn.

You have have a 20-foot red zone so you can accurately see a car

and cross the street.

>> pardon the interruption. Why don't you do that at every corner on this network? The thing about the network, it seems to me that it's so powerful is it is a network. It's a system.

And so, why can't you do -- not

why can't you but why don't we

try to do something on a system

basis and see how that works versions picking at this corn versus that corner?

>> so the tenderloin was an

example.

Every time you see a package so you approve fifth street in two

weeks skull be approving wholesale suite of daylighting

and in addition we're doing it through multiple factors so

we're doing it both at the neighborhood and the system

level and with every projects

and that's absolutely what we're doing. That's what we're continuing to do. You will hear people come to this board with concerns about

the daylighting that you are recommending. I appreciate your enthusiasm for the program.

>> I fully respect that. Do you have a system planned

that says we're doing this intersection this week and this one the next week and we will be

done with this strategy in year blank?

>> we committed to daylighting the high injury network in five years from the strategy and I will suspect that we'll have -- you know, this happens to be one

of the assets that is trickier to track so we don't have a curve. Having looked at our own work, we probably substantially completed a lot of it on the high injury network and now

we're just looking for the areas we might have missed as we pull through corridors or look at intersections ourselves.

It's just a much more fine grained tool that we don't -- it's hard to report specifically on 20 feet of paint but it's not something we're not 100% committed to.

I encourage you to take a look at that board packet and you

will see no parking all over those packets. That's what are approving and the consent calender is another great space to see it because that's where we're getting the

work done so it doesn't come

vocallally to this board.

It's something that is true in

new york city, is that correct? Manhattan. >> no-right-on red? >> it's banned city wide in new york.

So it's something that is a really blunt tool in our strongest peers, we put up a fine that everybody ignores. We want to make sure it's the right tool for the job so we're working on a policy bev that will be released next year to

help us make sure we're making a data-driven decision that informs whether we're getting

that job done. Our work is so much broader than

the strategy can encompass is

the signals program. We're building new signals all the time.

Most of them are now on the high injury corridors. That includes count down signals where they're needed. We're putting in new signals to improve visibility so the old

signals are kind of on a stick in the corner and approximate we put them in mass arms where people are driving they're more likely to adhere to them because

they're more visible and so that's what your capital improvement program is really going towards is these signal improvement and every muni forward project, every vision

zero projects and in addition individual programs are just done to tackle signals. If the beacon is the right thing for the job as opposed to a

signal, that will be a tool we

absolutely use. Scrambles, I don't know in this board hazarded them but they're

a very blunt tool in our toolbox. We want to make sure we're using

them at the absolute most needed place before we deploy them.

>> you are using the word blunt ma jor activity,

tive ly. >> I'm asking whether or not there are tools in our kit, as

you call them, that we are not deploying even though we have the authority to do so.

Do you feel like you are operating under constraints along those lines?

>> I would maybe go across the program the transit and the street side.

I think the only time in which

that is the case is what we see

a again

genuine trade off.

And scrambles, I think the word blunt is correct.

Scrambles can create immediate pedestrian safety visibility improvements and also create

serious impact on transit reliability. Again, there's places where that's the right trade off to make but there's places where we can do something different with the signal to achieve pretty much what the scramble would

have achieved without impacting transit.

So, there are tools that we're

trying to roll out. The mayor's announcement talks about daylighting and signal timing changes and things we can

stamp out all over the city. Many things, even without the

board's approve, there will be locations. Stockton street was an example where made the trade off between

the scramble and the reliability. There will be locations where we have to have that conversation and we bring those locations to

you as best we can. >> it's a privilege to work in san francisco specifically. We have the permission to us not

only the standard toolbox but we're constantly evolving the things we're doing and I think are protected by facilities are

a great case. We're nationally leading so it's exciting to work in a place where we have every single

opportunity at our disposal.

No one has tools we use and everybody is firing with

everything they've got. So, I don't feel like that is

where we're at and I think -- it

isn't just that we can't do it because the state won't let us,

it's incumbent on to us help the state evolve. When you said what is it that

gets to zero, the speed

enforcement and speed limit

setting and congestion pricing,

like, we cannot glaze over the

impact they would have. they're game changing for us.

They help to us move the dial incrementally and I fully agree with that. They're incremental and we're going to see what we can get out of them and we'll max out the

benefit but the things that

moves us, is the transformative policy.

They have them and use them.

That's where we're at. >>

>> there are transformative as

opposed to waiting for and you

talked about how complex. I made how tricky it is to make a left turn. Your response is educate drivers

to think carefully on left turns

and his response was ban left turns. I think that's we're encouraging you to think about. Are there things we haven't put

on the table that could be transformative that we have the

ability to control here.

On our large high injury network, I think about sutter

because tom said we just improved sutter. It was textbook.

We did all the engineering improvements you said are the foundation of this work and we

had someone die because of a driver making a left turn. Should we make more aggressive steps that can prevent the problem?

>> we do have left turn prohibitions encore cores

on corridors so we

about it on the corridor and if that is the request of this

board to look at more corridors that's something we can do. >> are there any other questions for our staff? >> pardon me Mr. Chairman and

I'll conclude with this one.

I fear I'm being a little misunderstood.

What would be helpful to me is

the picture, again, of what that

network looks like.

It's infrastructure, its

enforcement policies that is at zero.

At least for me, I can only see 20 and 25 people dying a year and I can't see where the glide path is to zero. And I think it would be very helpful when you put that

picture in place, to use it to

inform us and other policymakers about what kind of progress we are making and what kind of tough calls that they will have

to make to get us the additional progress we need to make to get so zero. Zero is a really hard number to

reach, as you well know. If it means in some cases muni has to slow down a couple mines an

milesan hour I'd make that trade off. If safety is number one it's number one. Which means it beats number two.

That is what I'm after here.

And please don't interpret the question as hostile. I am very supportive of what you

are doing and I appreciate the mayor shining such a spotlight

on it so we can do better than we're doing.

That's what we have to do. >> for what it's worth, nothing you said came across as hostile it came across as caring which

is most appreciated. >> two specific questions about

two actions that are listed. One is the action with respect to the safe streets for people with disabilities. I'm just focusing on these because we know people with disabilities kind of overlap heavy with our senior population and other populations of concerns when we talk about

traffic fatalities and injuries.

Very focused on this population.

Can you give a little bit of background to the action?

The strategy or the action is two traffic calming projects

under that program and just to

purview the second question with

respect to the two down from

there there's audio, A.P.S. And

the number of signals that are

going in I think is 75 in the next five years which seems like a really low number. I understand the background around A.P.S.

I'd like to hear kind of an update on both of those things.

It would be interesting to hear

about any data that we have

around the efficacy of A.P.S. On the streets not just people with disabilities but others. >> I'll take those in reverse orders.

A.P.S. First.

Audible pedestrian signals are

for low vision users and they actually buzz so they're something you can feel as well.

I was actually just going to --

meghan just sat down. [Laughter]

>> your question was, how are we

deploying the A.P.S. We just have a convening with

the mayor's office but we can expand our A.P.S. Goal and we've

looked at similar to is a

program attic look so there is

in the request pool of about 75 requests for A.T.P. So

P.S. So someone

with a disability and would like

an A.P.S. We think there is low hanging fruit so we're going to

go into our sales tax in the

next year and then try to double the number of A.P.S. We have on the street in the next two years but similarly, our commitment is when we build the new signal,

that we're building it with A.P.S. So that's a big step.

If you just think of again,

everything we do double dips so V.M.S. Is my personal pet peve because it does not have count

down signals so when that comes in, it's going to come with this

huge safety improvements

including count down signals and

A.P.S. And so we're tackling it at one at a time where we can and at the same time, our

corridor projects are spending

funding on these additional improvements as we rebuild the

system and so I actually think

75, we also heard, in the same way we've expanded our program because that's wildfires we got a lot of feedback I think we'll double the number of A.P.S.

We've committed to in else terms of 75 and it's really great. That would double the number we have on the street. Or 50% increase of the number we have on the street. And then you asked a little bit of our traffic calming program.

I brought meghan back up here,

she used hospital data which is

protected in terms of hipa and health protection so I can't look at an individual line item that came from the hospital but not from the police but meghan

was able to work with her health privacy data officer in order to create a map for us that specifically looks at where our attractors for seniors and

people with disabilities so our paratransit data and other land use or transportation data that

we have, and over lays where we see collisions that happen to a

person with disability or a senior.

[Please stand by]

>> let's take a pause for public comment and then we can come back. Too minutes apiece. Will you call them? >> richard rossman by harold

findly and maderoz.

>> I'm richard rothman, a district resident and I want to

say that I'm interested in transportation issues and there's two projects that we

want to improve, two

intersections in rich monday. Richmond. Everywhere in richmond, including the last two

supervisors want to make changes

there, except shawn kennedy and

muni refuses to approve them so they won't get approved, because

the engineers won't override his decision.

And I think this is wrong.

You know, the 31 and the two are

aren't major. You think it's important for pedestrian safety in crossing the street so the bus can stop

for two minutes at a stopsign. The other is 34th and fulton.

There's a serious accident, five, six years ago and why has

it taken mta so long to upgrade the signals there.

Every time I talk to the engineer, he gives me a different story. I could write a book with all of the different stories they tells me and they're still not going to fix the problem.

You should read this book here

by john massingale. He has radical ideas saying the

people should run the streets.

Seattle did away with their red

book, their engineering book.

Also, mta, the same old streets

need to be reorganized like the

planning department, where you have teams in each section of the city.

I realize downtown, the eastern

need more engineer and planners,

but still, each area should have their own planner and engineer,

so we know who to talk to and be responsible for doing things in

our neighborhood. >> thank you, next speaker,

please.

>> good afternoon.

My name is jodie maderas. I'm here with a message from our

members and some of them you'll hear today. The message is thank you, thank

you for pushing the sfmta staff

to do more, faster, quicker, else on our most dangerous streets in asking the right questions. Don't stop pushing.

We are counting on all of you. Time and time again, we're

hearing the devastating, angry messages about the precious lives we're losing and it's feeling disheartening that we're

getting further and further away

from our zero vision goal and fatal crashes by 2024. That's because we're in a state of emergency. We've lost as many pedestrians

this year as we have in all of

201.

2018.

We believe that vision zero is achievable. It's all of us, the board,

staff, mayor, our board of

supervisors, public health, police departments, we have to double down on what's necessary now. We're grateful for this team and

board for pushing for a new

policy on no-route

no-right on red and

we're thrilled to try a left-turn campaign at eight locations soon. Thank you. These are the solutions we need to put in place to prevent the possibility of crashes,

especially in the most dangerous places, our intersection.

We're grateful to mayor reed for boosting traffic enforcement on

the most dangerous driving behaviours. But as we've heard today, it's not enough.

We want to see tools like red-light cameras, especially if we don't have the people to tackle. It will take every engineering

tool and enforcement solution possible to meet the challenge

of our streets, as well as all

of the transformative policy.

>> thank you, jodie.

>> next speak, please.

>> harold findly followed by

jennifer walsh and missasm

Miss Arbuckle. >> I'm harold findly and you all

know how to stop the killing. You know it.

You know the route cause. You know how to eradicate it. You have some the best professionals in the world that

know how to solve it. You don't need me to tell you the specifics about how do it.

i could tell you, but you've read the same books and all of that.

But what I can tell you is that

there's a growing tide of public support for you to do the right

thing, for you to create safe, vibrant cities.

You don't have to put the perceived need of somebody to have an S.U.V. Parking in front of his house and drive around

the city on his daily errands

and drive to tahoe on the

weekend, put that perceived need

over the real need of a child to

walk or ride a bike to school without violently slaughtered.

I mean those are two completely different things.

You can change your focus coming down from the board to the

leadership of the sfmta, to the

pd to have things like you

pointed out, that should just flow naturally from the top.

It shouldn't be a question of no right turn on red. If you have vehicles at all, they don't get to drive in front

of people in cross-washes. Cross-walks.

Every officer shoulder citing

every single sidewalk or bike lane violation. That's not up for contention.

If it's a violation, cite it. If you're thinking from the right perspective, you're doing

it that way. And you've got -- you need to know you have the public support

growing to do the route things. Right things.

>> thank you, sir.

>> jennifer walsh, nancy

arbuckle and sandy wiseburg.

>> my name is jennifer walsh and

I work with the ability's integrator.

I wanted to advise you of the sidewalk search party. We believe everyone can give

back to the community.

But the community must be

accessible physically and psych psychlogically.

This is all about making simple issues fixable by shining light on them so other people can have

the power to fix them.

The ff sidewalk search party has

been meeting since May to

strategize how to implement city departments on making sure temporary pathways around construction areas are

accessible for all types of accessibility.

Over the months, we have had

enlightening conversations with

mta, 311 w street inspectors about their responsibility for

issuing permits, enforcing codes regarding issues, such as path

of travel, right-of-way, smooth

surfaces, contract compliance, a accessibility guideline.

In an ideal world, alastor all study departments will take ownership

for all than rather than relying

on the mayor's office for

construction sites temporary pathway.

Perhaps mt can be the leader in

changing this philosophy of accessible for all.

Everybody is welcomed to the

next sf sidewalk search party meeting at 1663

1663 mission street. Fifth floor on September 9th September 9th from 1:00 P.M. To 2:30 P.M.

>> thank you very much. And since we rode over on the train together, I will say thank you for riding muni. Thank you. Ok, wonderful. Next speaker, please.

>> nancy arbuckle, susan wiseburg and nancy harrison. >> I want to thank the board for this opportunity to speak.

I'm nancy arbuckle from hyde street. I'm a member of walk san francisco.

I'm a committed pedestrian and a public transit rider. Everyone in my family is. We sole both

we sold both of our cars six years ago and will never own a car again. We're concerned about injuries

and fatalities on san francisco's streets and not just

on the high-injury network, but on a lot of streets. We don't want to die out there but we've come too close too many times. Right turners look left for

other vehicles and turned right and turned right into us.

Left turners look at oncoming

traffic and speed right into us.

I often cross the street with my

arm outstretch acting like my on

traffic cop.

So I'm glad that mayor breed is

asking for a no-turn policy and support a policy that recognises

safety, safety, as the highest priority.

I'm also glad that the mayor recognises that citations and enforcement are critical to getting division zero.

I want to thank this board for quickly implementing the

solutions that we know will slow speeding traffic and protect us all in intersections. Thank you. >> thank you very much, next

speaker, please. >> susan wiseburg, nancy

harrison, brian weadonmeyer. >> welcome. >> good afternoon, my name is susan wiseburg and I'm a pedestrian. In June, I spoke before this

board urging you to pass the quick-build proposals to reduce

pedestrian deaths and you approved those.

And I thank you for that.

But since then, in just three months, there have been three more deaths and countless more injuries.

This is outrageous and I know

that you all agree. Miss Crumbburg said earlier that we're doing everything we can with all of the tools that we

have.

So clearly we need different tools and do different things

with them.

Now as director henninger said,

the danger of pedestrians on san francisco streets is an emergency now.

The city must forthrightly work to implement all proposals, specifically those in the

transformative policy agenda. Even though, they May need state

approval. Vision zero needs to stop being

a vision and become an actuality. >> next people, please. >> nancy harrison followed by

brian weadonmeyer. >> I'm nancy harrison. Thank you.

I moved to san francisco from madison, wisconsin about a year ago.

One of the reasons I moved here

was because of muni and bart and your public transportation system. The senior fairs, the apps that you have have all made it easier

for me to make this transition.

I'm committed to walking daily around the city, gave up my car,

left it in the midwest.

But I am the dem graphic

graphic and I'm

so glad my name wasn't in that list.

In February, I was hit by a left-turring

left-turning car at the intersection of 18th street and gadado.

I was in the cross-walk, it was

dayloot. Daylight. You've heard this story 100

times, so the oncoming car stopped. The guy just turned right into

me in the cross-walk. So fortunately, I was unconscious and rushed to the hospital.

I am a survivor. It makes me hesitant to go in the trees.

I walk everyday and there it is, this intersection where I live, it's dangerous.

In looking every way, the right turners, left turners, trying to

make contact through the shaded

windows, I do this. It feels ridiculous in that I don't think the left-hand turner would have seen this either,

because there I was.

But I guess what I want to say

is that I'm glad that I hadn't

heard of vision zero and through walk san francisco, I did. I'm pleased to hear all of your commitment and some passion around this.

I hope to live here for many years and not find my name on the list and I'm greatful grateful for

what you're doing. >> thank you for sharing your story. It does mep

does help for you to do that.

The more personal accounts, there's a face to this epidemic

and thank you for sharing what,

I'm sure, was a traumatic event.

>> brian weadonmeyer and herbert weiner.

>> I'm the executive director of the san francisco bicycle coalition. On behalf of our 10,000 members,

I want to join my colleague and

friend, jodie maderos from walk

san francisco, thanking you and the agency and the progress we

have made in things lake our

quick-build policy, pushing for state enforcement.

However, I would not be doing my job as an advocate, if I didn't come here and tell you we are

not doing enough and director, since you asked for specific examples, I would like to suggest a few.

The first is that during the presentation on the vision action strategy, when you list

one of your strategy goals as

eight miles of improved sustainable transportation lane

per year and the mayor has

challenged this agency to build 20 miles of protected bike lanes

in two years, so you've got this

mismatch of it looks like you're working back from the mayor's

challenge on 20 miles.

That does not include brt lanes or pedestrian safety. That is 20 miles of projected

bike lanes alone and we're

saying 16 miles by 2021. On market, street, we will have

an opportunity to improve turn restrictions.

It suggested 10th street to

main would be a significant one. That's one of our most dangerous.

Let's extend that to goth and

franklin.

We have policies that we can use and deploy red light cameras right now.

Why have the number of red light

cameras reduced to over half

since the old models are

removed? Why are we not installing cameras that we've

seen listed on fatal collisions?

>> thank you very much.

>> herbert winer?

>> Mr. Winer, two minutes.

>> herbert winer.

I appreciate the thoroughness

and systematic rigger before the

board.

There's a safety on the sidewalk. Constantly, there's endangerment

of pedestrians on the sidewalk.

And an argument has been stated that if he build more bike

lanes, there will be less violations.

It's clearly illegal to ride on

the sidewalk and people need to

be protected, especially senior

and disabled.

And it's pointed out that a vehicle that travels at any

speed a threatening to a pedestrian. That certainly applies to bicycles on the sidewalk.

You have to stop this.

So hopefully the laws should be

enforced equally.

So hopefully, when vision zero

surveys people, they survey the pedestrians and not groups. What would happen if a member of

the board were struck by someone on the sidewalk or a law enforcement officer? It's up to you to draw the conclusion. Thank you. >> thank you, Mr. Winier.

Any further public comment?

If you want to speak.

So you'll be the final public speaker. Tom, the floor is yours. >> thank you.

Before I mention signals, the red, yellow and green, we need,

I say, dedicated signals to hold back pedestrianed to

pedestrians to let the turns turn. You have to make the decision in the beginning of a light change when it turns to green to let cars turn right or turn left while the pedestrians are still

holding up.

If you ban left-hand turns, that's ok and if you dedicate left-hand turns, they need to be dedicated in the beginning of a signal change.

What about magic eye signals that say there are people on a

corner waiting or there's no

traffic in the oncoming lanes or sides? I don't know how that can work but we have magic eyes everywhere and maybe they can

control the signal. Old folks crossing, that seems to be a major problem.

Is there a button that we can

hit at the corner that old

people can say gets ten more seconds to get across the street, that holds the lights

up?

And vanesse again, the buses

that we'll wind up putting on

vanesse, if they stop at every

other stop, we can do all of the

stops that we had once on vanesse.

The old folks on vanesse could use it. There are people that are going

to get old on vanesse.

And we can still put the stops

in half and every time a bus stops behind the bus that's at a

stop, that bus is going to move

and jump the next stop.

If you can follow me on that, I think it's doable. I think it's better for the

folks that live in the city on

vannesse, thank you. >> thank you.

Final speaker. >> good afternoon, board of directors. Could I have the overhead, please?

I don't think you see people

holding laptops.

I wanted to first quickly say

the vision zero sf twitter

account came out with a video

recently asking cyclists to stop at red lights. Please know they speak with the

city's voice and especially the

opposite is true. Charles vincent died in 2015

because a car ran a red light through him. I would appreciate it if the

city was not saying biker

bicyclists are responsible for their own death by running red lights. We had a discussion about what

hor can be done. This isn't stockholm and everything you see here is temporary.

Those signs, lines, trees, it's temporary. This is a quick build.

This is in vancouver, british columbia. There's now a curb separating the bike lane but it wasn't always there and you can see the planters.

That was a quick build.

This is my hometown in the the netherlands and you can see two things on opposite sides of the

street that force cars to make a

lig zig-zag and only one car can pass in each direction and I think this is permanent

infrastructure and a quick buildable.

This is in denmark, where cars want only pass no one direction through this bus stop here.

This is not a quick build but

quick buildable.

This is speed table.

Once again, I'm not sure this is quick buildable but resident's intersections should all look like this. So fad

food for thought there.

>> that concludes public comment

on this item and we had a robust discussion before. Is there anyone -- vy -- I have

comments myself but are there any with comments. >> thank you so much. You did such a great job. It's been so gratifying in the

years I've been on this board to see this discussion and to see

this work evolve.

I'm so proud of this board as I am proud of you and I'm proud of

the public that came here.

Remember what you heard up here, not just the work you're doing but all of the work that staff is doing. Remember how supportive this board is.

And when you're out proposing projects in the neighborhood,

remember that we will support

whatever moves the safety needle forward. so when you get pushback from new brunswicks new

neighbours on parking removal, on daylighting, changing anything in the neighborhood,

remember how engaged and emphatic this board was on

reaching these vision zero goals. That list and that moment of silence in the beginning was chilling and that could be any one of us and any one of our loved ones and so we have to remember that and any time staff

comes to us, we have to ask, yes, and, what else could you do?

Was there something that didn't get included.

As one of the speakers noted, we have seen public opinion shift.

To your point, director, dayloot

of intersections, went that

parking removal is on the

consent calendar, we have had people complain but I haven't seen that happen. So we're letting the public know this is important work and in

order to reduce deaths on our

streets, we need to do that.

Thank you so much, captain, the work with enforcement is fantastic. I would love a police officer on

the corner of vidadero and haze hayes to stop blocking the sidewalk.

Not all of my neighbors would

want that, so I try and remind myself.

So for me, more officers enforcing is fantastic, but not

all of my neighbors will feel the same way. Certain communities don't want as many police officers out there.

So we need to balance that and i

have every faith in the world in sfpg that they'll approach that sensitively.

I want to thank everybody. I am not surprised neighbors would choose to lose a traffic lane rather than parking spaces,

but it's a good message to us, because traffic lane removable

is palatable. Let's remember that as we go forward.

I can think of a few streets to lose traffic lanes. Thank you for the work, the

public who showed up, thank you

and hava and megan, I wanted to stand un-and

up and applaud. We've come a long way and we're on the right track. Thank you.

>> any a directors? Director torez?

>> I want to echo our past director's comments because think they're on target. I do walk the streets of san francisco more than I ride a

bike or do other things and

believe me, Mr. Winer, I've

been almost hit from bicyclists,

scooters on the sidewalk and

it's unbelievable what occurs in

there, especially for senior citizens and I'm one of those now, too, that are impacted but these activities and by the lack of ken for

concern for safety of others.

It's true for drivers. It happens all of the time where

I'm trying to cross the street and they don't care who is in the cross-walk. They don't care what's going on with the tree around them and not looking. But number one, they're on their phones.

they're texting or they're a vehicle that utilizes our streets for pay and they're not taxis. They usually don't live in san francisco but come from all over

the state to harass and to, basically, congest our very streets here. So we have a long way to go, but I believe that efforts of many of the mean

people who spoke should be applauded and we need to do

that to our staff and I will thank you for the incredible

report which I thought was pervasive in so many areas but my fellow director has good recommendations, as well. So we need to continue to work together, because this won't be solved overnight.

Thank you. >> Dr. Borden.

>> I wanted to say I agree with all of my colleagues up here and I want to thank the police department for being here. You're a critical part of the solution on our streets. I often wonder if we can build the railroads, cross-walks. I feel like you need to put

those gates down because I see such bad behaviour on streets and we have to let people know they can't get away with driving too fast. People are walking on street. There's people in neighborhoods,

a restaurant owner/chef got hit

at division on his motorcycle.

The point is that it shouldn't be that way.

People shouldn't live in fate fear of walking across the street. It's a message to remind ourselves to slow down. there was a great article a

couple of weeks ago in the chronicle, that it's not a problem just here but everywhere that people are in a hurry to get place. So we have to work against the national trend to be distracted and not slow down and pay attention and really do our part, whether we're acting as pedestrian, a driver, a cyclist, a motorcycle rider.

We have to remember when those positions -- how to be safe and look auto out for others. But on our end, you have our

commitment to work on these quick-build initiatives that we

know we can do in our wheelhouse. Obviously working on the state level enforcement, I think

police officer's union is supportive of the legislation to which

which is a great steph step forward

but we need to utilize all tools in our toolbox and stay on it. We need to look at data and it's

great to have people remind us and it's ashame to have people remind us, but this is a city

and the reason we live here is because it's walkable and it's notliable if you can't walk across street. So I want to thank you all for your work on this.

I know we have a ways to go. There are many things we'll be

doing in the coming months and

anything to do to expedite getting things done, I think you have full support in making

things happen. >> I just wanted to also say thank you.

i wanted to ask -- you're willing to report back as often

as we want, oh, excellent!

I do think -- this is so important to articles and

everything and I'm wondering if -- I'm interested in what others think, but maybe a

quarterly report is where we can see metrics and things like that.

I think that would be helpful

for me but I don't know how manageable that is. >> you don't think there's an objection. I think we'll acts

we'll ask or planners to work that out. I think that's a good idea.

You've gotten feedback on pretty specific ideas.

For example, director hemminger that shows a high injury

network, where we have daylighted and where we haven't

and an indicater of the year where we will be doing it.

That is the sort of document

that can be updated as we go and show progress to the director, at least this director on

something he's interested in. I'm not here to draw your

diagrams today but I think you have some feedback and if we

have that repeat update as we should, you can take a little

lesson from julie and this sort of ongoing, living organic

documents that show us how we're

growing are helpful and something the public will

appreciate.

Let me say one thing -- one

thing is a loose thing.

You asked and important

question, director, and we've

talked about small items, right-turn restrictions. i appreciate the sobriety of your comment. Maybe they won't work and now we've put a pedestrian in a worse situation where they're

not anticipating a right turn and it happens.

You can see similar issues with left-turn restrictions and how

that will send cars to different places and create patterns. Those small fixes, we have to look to see whether it works. But interestingly, on the eve of

our adopting the market street

plan, and the eve of our

adopting making a major thorough thoroughfair of san francisco a free zone, we're not talking about that tool. You've been advocate for a car-free market street for years. I've been toll to be patient

because of eir restrictions and

this, that and the other thing and now we're there. One of the reasons I've stayed on this board and fought this

day is to see this to completion. Director, that's a big tool that

we have and there's no rule that says that's limited to market street.

And I think we need to think bigger about this. There are places all through this state where cars can go and pedestrians can't.

They're called highways and freeways. They exist because they're efficient for the cars and because they're so efficient for cars, you don't want people there.

You need to think the other way around.

And I think we need to think not just about places where you can only walk, because then we're

only looking at the vision zero

goal as we're doing it. Director brinkman is right, there's a change in public

perception and a desire to address this issue through

public policy. There's also a changed and increased desire for muni to be

more efficient in this city. I will say to you planners again, I think you can marry the two.

I have on numerous occasions talked about red carpeting entire streets, making them transit only.

That will serve what I think is the most important safety goal for pedestrians, which is to get

people out of their private cars, get their commuting by

public transit, have them behind the wheel of a professional, trained driver much less likely to have an accident.

In addition, that will lead to streets where there aren't

private cars. People choose where to walk by

where it's safer.

I am very confident to a moral certainty that once we have finally completed the market street project, you will see people leaving mission street or howard street or north of market to make east-west commutes to

come to market street because it will be safer for them to walk there. We can do the same thing elsewhere. Ida I don't know what the street is.

You've seen a few that I'm thinking should be the next one. But you asked a provocative question and what's the next big tool we've got in ?

To that to me is it. I would challenge this by our

next boar retreat, which is January or February, to say what

is the leading contender for a

major red carpet thoroughfare to facilitate transit and safety and serve both interests at once?

As you're evaluating that, and I expect this will be a fun project for a lot of you and this is why you went to fancy grad schools to do this, think about both goals. How are we going to serve and

area where we need better transit, safer pedestrians and

merge them together and create

the political will of two forces behind doing this and, you know, obviously that can include bike

lane and taxis, as well. Let start thinking about the next market street, because director, that's a blunt tool

and I think blunt in the positive sense that we have in

our toolbox. Ok. Anything else? I saved my speech to the end.

>> if I could save, Mr. Chairman, you're my kind of

kindof Chairman.

>> made it all worthwhile. That was emotional air

conditioning right there. [Laughter] >> thank you very much. We will move on to the next item, please. >> item 12, discussion and vote

as to whether to invoke the attorney-client privilege and conduct a closed session. >> move for a closed session.

>> all those in favour say aye. Guests, we have to throw you out.

Oh, I forgot to say, captain martin, thank you so much for being here today and for all that you're doing to keep us safe.

We appreciate it.

Valencia has been a constantly evolving roadway. The first bike lanes were

striped in 1999, and today is the major north and south bike route from the mission neighborhood extending from market to mission street. >> it is difficult to navigate

lindsay on a daily basis, and more specifically, during the morning and evening commute hours.

>> from 2012 to 2016, there were

260 collisions on valencia and 46 of those were between

vehicles and bikes. The mayor shows great leadership

and she knew of the long history

of collisions and the real necessity for safety improvements on the streets, so

she actually directed M.T.A. To put a pilot of protected bike

lanes from market to 15th on valencia street within four months time. [

]

>> valencia is one of the most used north south bike routes in san francisco.

It has over 2100 cyclists on an

average weekday. We promote bicycles for everyday transportation of the coalition.

Valencia is our mission -- fits our mission perfectly. Our members fall 20 years ago to

get the first bike lane stripes. whether you are going there for

restaurants, nightlife, you know , people are commuting up

and down every single day.

>> I have been biking down the valencia street corridor for about a decade.

During that time, I have seen the emergence of ridesharing

companies. >> we have people on bikes, we

have people on bike share, scooters, we have people

delivering food and we have uber

taking folks to concerts at night. One of the main goals of the project was to improve the

overall safety of the corridor, will also looking for opportunities to upgrade the

bikeway. >> the most common collision that happens on valencia is actually due to double parking

in the bike lane, specifically during, which is where a driver

opens the door unexpectedly. >> we kept all the passengers -- the passenger levels out, which is the white crib that we see, we double the amount of

commercial curbs that you see out here.

>> most people aren't actually perking on valencia, they just need to get dropped off or pick something up. >> half of the commercial loading zones are actually after

6:00 P.M., so could be used for five-minute loading later into the evening to provide more opportunities or passenger and

commercial loading. >> the five minute loading zone May help in this situation, but

they are not along the corridor

where we need them to be. >> one of the most unique aspects of the valencia pilot is on the block between 14th street. >> we worked with a pretty big

mix of people on valencia. >> on this lot, there are a few

schools.

All these different groups had concerns about the safety of students crossing the protected

bikeway whether they are being dropped off or picked up in the morning or afternoon.

To address those concerns, we installed concrete loading islands with railings -- railings that channel --

channeled a designated crossing plane. >> we had a lot of conversations

around how do you load and unload kids in the mornings and the afternoons? >> I do like the visibility of

some of the design, the safety aspects of the boarding pilot

for the school. >> we have painted continental

crosswalks, as well as a yield piece which indicates a cyclist

to give the right-of-way so they can cross the roadway. This is probably one of the most

unique features.

>> during the planning phase, the M.T.A. Came out with three

alternatives for the long term project.

One is parking protected, which

we see with the pilot, they also imagined a valencia street where

we have two bike lanes next to one another against one side of the street.

A two-way bikeway. The third option is a center running two-way bikeway, c.

Would have the two bike lanes

running down the center with protection on either side.

>> earlier, there weren't any enter lane designs in san francisco, but I think it will be a great opportunity for san

francisco to take the lead on

that do so the innovative and different, something that doesn't exist already.

>> with all three concepts for valencia's long-term improvement , there's a number of

trade-offs ranging from parking,

or what needs to be done at the intersection for signal infrastructure. When he think about extending this pilot or this still -- this

design, there's a lot of different design challenges, as well as challenges when it comes to doing outreach and making sure that you are reaching out

to everyone in the community. >> the pilot is great. It is a no-brainer.

It is also a teaser for us. Once a pilot ends, we have

thrown back into the chaos of valencia street. >> what we're trying to do is incremental improvement along the corridor door.

The pilot project is one of our first major improvements. We will do an initial valuation in the spring just to get a glimpse of what is happening out here on the roadway, and to make any adjustments to the pilot as needed. This fall, we will do a more robust evaluation.

By spring of 2020, we will have recommendations about long-term improvements. >> I appreciate the pilot and how quickly it went in and was built, especially with the community workshops associated

with it, I really appreciated

that opportunity to give input. >> we want to see valencia become a really welcoming and comfortable neighborhood street

for everyone, all ages and abilities. There's a lot of benefits to protected bike lanes on valencia , it is not just for cyclists.

We will see way more people biking, more people walking, we

are just going to create a really friendly neighborhood street. [

]

>> hello, everybody.

I am london breed, mayor of the city and county of san francisco , and I'm really excited to join you here today,

but I tell you that no one is

more excited than the parents of the kids who will be returning

to school on monday. And today is an opportunity to

us to really get the word out to people all over san francisco

that we have thousands of kids

who are returning to school on monday. We will see kids walking, we

will see them by king, we will

see them on buses and yes, some

of them will get dropped off by parents in their car.

But ultimately, we want everyone will get around this city safely because there will be more

people out on the streets now than ever before as a school

began on monday. So a part of today is really

about highlighting the awareness that we need people to slow down

we need people to be aware.

We need people to do better. We have had sadly a number of

tragedies that have occurred on

our city streets and we know, unfortunately, that has a lot to

do sometimes with speed. We need to slow down.

Yes, I have asked the chief to

increase citations, and to be aware in this high injury

corridors, the need to make sure that there are consequences for people who are speeding, which

sadly can cause tragedy. If a pedestrian is hit by a

driver at 20 miles per hour,

their risk of fatality is 5%,

but if that is 30 miles per hour

, their risk jumps to 45%. What we don't want to continue is sadly what we see happening

on our streets where we are

losing far too many lives, and

our most precious assets are our children, so we want to make

sure that when they are moving around san francisco, going back to school, that they are safe.

When I was a kid, I went to school across the street from where I lived.

It used to be called -- but the name is now rosa parks elementary school. What was so cool about that is

we would all just walk to school someone would walk up to my window, yell my name, there would already be three or four kids.

We would get to the corner on eddie and buchanan, and then

there was a crossing guard right

there to make sure that all cars stopped so we could safely get across the streets and move on our way to get to school.

I never realized how valuable that was until I became an adult

and I see so many kids that are out there trying to get to school.

We were also taught to look both ways before crossing the street.

We also have to get back to some basics. This year we have hired more crossing guards and we want to

thank the folks who are joining us here today for your service and for your commitment to making sure that people get

around our streets safely.

We also, as I said, we have the chief here.

We will be placing additional

enforcement in certain areas, and so I just want to also ask

drivers to do better to stop texting, to stop making phone calls, to stop making -- looking at your phones when you're driving on our streets, to slow

down, and to look both ways and

to be very careful when you are navigating the streets of san

francisco to follow the laws.

The stop signs, the crosswalks, and all of those things are there for a reason.

It is to keep all of us safe. The protected bike lanes are

there to make sure that by his

-- bicyclists are safe, the people walking across the streets are safe, that people are moving. This is all about safety. This is all about highlighting

the need for us as a safety to do much more than we have in the past so that we can truly

realize the goals of vision zero , and that is no fatalities

of any kind in this city because of traffic or cars or what have

you. At this time, I would like to

introduce the supervisor that

represents this district, represents marine at middle school where there will be a lot

of kids here first thing monday.

supervisor catherine stefani. >> thank you. I love the middle school. It is so beautiful. I want to thank everyone, especially mayor breed and the students, parents, and city

leadership who were able to make it out today as well as crossing guards. The most important people in the morning when we're dropping our

kids off at school who really did the important work of making sure our students are safe in

our communities. My son just started high school

on wednesday and my daughter is starting fifth-grade next week and I dropped dominic off at high school on his first day.

I insisted I did it.

And besides saying to me, mom, don't say anything weird when you dropped me off, this people around, I said to him, look both ways. It is on a busy street.

He is still 14 years old and

still telling my child, be careful when his crossing the street considering how dangerous our streets can be. As we kick off the new school

year, as we all know, hit and runs and collisions between pedestrians and bicyclists and

be at -- vehicles are way too common in san francisco. Nearly every community meeting I have been to recently, neighbors have voiced support force crating safer streets and

sidewalks and I definitely share this goal. It is our collective responsibility to make sure our

streets and sidewalks are safe and secure for families who are walking, for those who are driving, and for those who are riding their bikes to school.

We know we all have work to do when it comes to making sure our kids are safe. I know I can always do better out there when you get to a stop sign, count to three, don't open a door before looking before -- for a bicycle and always be

aware, don't take calls when you were driving, just like mayor breed said.

We can all do much better. I am so proud to join chief

scott and his department who performed a traffic safety

enforcement list earlier this month. I am grat -- glad I didn't get a

ticket. Interim director mcguire who

continues to work with their communities and crating safe and sustainable transportation options, and marine, who has been an advocate for students and pedestrians across our city. And of course, again, mayor breed was continue to shine a light on transit safety and has worked towards creating a safer san francisco for all of our students.

As we begin our school year, let's all recommit ourselves to

making our commute to and from school safer. I look forward to working with mayor breed and my colleagues on the board of supervisors, our department heads, and families

and all of our school communities to further our shared vision for a safer san francisco.

Thank you so much. [Applause]. >> thank you, supervisor.

At this time, I would like to

introduce our police chief, bill scott. [Applause]. >> thank you, mayor. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. First of all, let me say thank you to the mayor and supervisor stefani for their leadership on

traffic and pedestrian safety. Back-to-school is an exciting time.

It is exciting, it is a lot of work and we want to start with

this. Slow down a little bit. Slow down.

The mayor mentioned it earlier. Speed kills. In terms of the focus of the violations that we concentrate on the most, we are trying to

get people to slow down. As the mayor stated and supervisor stefani stated, we

are going to be out doing enforcement. I want to also think the mayor and the supervisor because what

allows us to get better at this

is the generous support of our budget this year. Last year the mayor signed a

budget, and this year she signed a budget that included continuing our hiring plan. What that has allowed us to do

is increase the size of our traffic company and our motorcycle officers. We have at least ten more motorcycle officers then we do this time last year thanks to

the mayor's leadership on the budget and the supervisor stefani's leadership on the budget.

What that means is we are able to do more enforcement and get people to slow down and save lives.

What that looks like in the first six months of 2019, we

have had 19 light armed forces

operations, we have head sting and decoy operations, pedestrian sting and decoy operations, we

have had a bike lane enforcement

operation, we have initiated over 2301 vehicle traffic stops through the office of traffic safety grant operations, we have issued almost 100 citations just

for holding a cell phone in your hand.

I mentioned this at last year's press conference, that is a big issue for us. People driving in our city while they're talking on the cell phone or texting or distracted

otherwise, and that is a big issue.

Will be focusing on that as well

we sighted almost 75 of these operations just for citations

for texting while driving, which is very dangerous. The bottom line on this is enforcement is only one part of

the puzzle. We have tom maguire up here with this -- with us, we have crossing guards, this is really a community effort and a community event. We really need the community's support and your support to get the message out.

Slow down, pay attention, be

careful because our kids mean so much to us. Save lives. Thank you very much, mayor and supervisor stefani for your leadership, and thank you all for being here.

[Applause] >> thank you, chief.

Another important part of making our streets safer is improving our infrastructure. Now I know that sometimes this can be a bit of a tug-of-war

because we have protected bike

lanes that we need to install, and sometimes that would require

the removal of parking, and we

have changes to the way that we need to develop our city moving forward to because because when

you think about it, you know, 20 years ago, you didn't see as

many people cycling, and now you

have people using that as a

primary mode of transportation.

That is not only protecting our environment, but it is also keeping people healthy and it is also making sure that the buses are less crowded and less people are driving. So as we make these improvements

to our infrastructure, the goal is safety.

It is about making sure that everyone knows where they should be when they're on the road in

order to keep people safe. So the M.T.A. Is charged with

the responsibility of helping us to reconfigure san francisco as

a place that used to focus mostly on developing our streets for cars, and now it is time to

develop the streets for the

future and that includes cars, walking, busing, and biking in all of those things in between, his the person who is leading

the M.T.A. At this time is the acting director, tom mcguire.

[Applause] >> thank you for drawing the

connection between the changes we see on our streets and the choices that all of us make every day about how we get around san francisco.

Our goal is to make everyone feel like it is safe for kids to be able to walk to school or bike to school or get to school

on the bus. The 190 crossing guards will be

out on the street this week. They are here with one thing in mind, that is the safety of the children of san francisco. We have been doing a lot of work this summer to prepare the city for a safe start to the school year. We read striped 90 of the crosswalks around schools around the city.

We've got troopers, we got transit assistance staff who ride the bus with her high school and medicals -- middle school students to make sure

they are safe as they navigate the city, and we are ready for a safe start to the school year

however you get around.

The M.T.A. Has got something for you to keep you safe. We are grateful for the support of the mayor and supervisor stefani. All the city's elected officials for the goal of vision zero to end traffic fatalities in the city.

Thank you. [Applause]. >> thank you.

We have a very special guest. The ladies of the westside waves

are here today and speaking on

behalf of the team is maureen.

[Applause]

>> hi.

My name is maureen and I am here

today because five months ago on March 15th, my friend was

struck by a car and died ten

days later, so I have normal memories of eighth grade. I remember my eighth grade play,

spending iron -- hours on my science fair project and

studding from a big math test, but I also remember coming in late to my homeroom when I saw my teacher crying.

I remember my team and I knew madeline was in the hospital because she was 14 and of

course, she was going to wake up I clearly remember spending my eighth grade graduation holding in my tears after her memorial

because I didn't want to ruin my mascara.

When someone dies, especially

such a bright light like mandelman, a community suffers. And knowing she died in a way

that is utterly human and

utterly preventable makes it so much more heartbreaking.

Our city has a problem and it is killing people.

With all the statistics and

initiatives going around, this is easily the site of the real impact madelyn's parents, or

siblings, your parents and her teammates were left behind,

trying and failing to move on. I am so grateful we have the

support of so many of our city leaders. We got some of the change we

asked for, but it is not enough.

It will not be enough until this stops happening. We cannot lose sight of what happens -- of what matters. We have to remember what we as a

city lose. We can end this. We will end this. Thank you.

[Applause] >> thank you for really putting

it into perspective of why we need to do better.

So thank you to everyone who is here today.

Please keep in mind this is a changing city, it is a growing city. We have a lot more people who

are out there on the streets, on the roads walking, so please be

careful.

So we also will be out there and

enforcing the rules of the road, and just keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there on

the streets and your kids are

out there, your mother is out there, your family members are out there, so just think about

that when you are out there driving around and you get distracted by a phone call.

That phone call can wait. What is so -- what is so

pressing that you have to reach for your phone, which could risk

the possibility of an accident, and the importance of today is

really to shine a light on our need to be back here in san francisco, to make sure that not

one more tragedy happens on the streets of our city. Thank you all for getting the

word out, thank you for being here, let's do better so that

kids that are going to school on monday can have a great day and they can enjoy themselves and

laugh, and play, and smile, and make it home safely to tell their parents about what an amazing first day of school they had. Thank you so much for being here

[Applause] >> are you ready to celebrate the women's equality day everyone? [Cheers.] >> good evening.

I am the communications director

to one of our co-host to the w challenge rally.

It is my pleasure this evening

to introduce our mc for the

event assess or carmen.

She is the only asian female

elected assessor in the state of

california, empowering women. [Cheers.] >> yeah.

As you can see, empowering women

and expanding representation is

one of her top priorities.

Last year was the w challenge in recognition of women's equality day.

May I ask you to come up on the stage. >> hello everybody.

I am going to ask all of the

folks on the edges to come closer.

We want you in the photos.

Our congress woman we want up here. Move closer.

We have plenty of space up here.

I think as vivian said, we want

to make sure everyone stays for

the big group photo afterwards. To kickoff I want to thank the

team for pulling this together.

Vivian, nicole, isabella, holly. Thank you for putting this event together. I am carmen.

I want to welcome you to the

second annual w challenge kickoff for women's equality day. I have been on maternity leave

for just a bit, for two months now.

It is something else.

Laughter:  . >> I think I have a newfound

respect for mothers everywhere

and fathers everywhere so a big round of applause to every

mother and father who is out

there, including the ones on the stage.

We are here today not only to celebrate women's equality day.

It is so more to bring people together to remember women fighting for the right to vote. It is important to make sure we ask for action.

You know, in the united states

we have gone a long ways to getting women the right to vote, fighting for the right to vote.

We have gone a long ways in

terms of better representation than before. We know we still have a very, very long ways to go.

We have yet to see the first

united states President Be a woman.

In california we have yet to see

the first governor who is a woman, right?

In many of our corporations and businesses and government, we have still yet to see women at

the very top or in the corporate boardrooms, women's representation.

I encourage you to take on the

idea of women's equality to encourage women to vote and participate, to also spread your knowledge. The theme of this year's challenge is about spreading knowledge and sharing the information that you have.

That is why we are so, so

thrilled to partner with the san

francisco public library, thank you, michael for our partnership this year.

Our challenge should you accept

it is not only to vote and to register others to vote, but

also to pass on knowledge and take up a book this year.

This year one of the books I am recommending for folks to read

to share the knowledge is a book called what I told my daughter.

Now, I have a young one, she doesn't understand a thing that

I am saying at the moment, and I don't understand a thing she is saying to me.

I hope one day I will be able to

share stories from the leaders behind me and in front of me

about all of the things we have struggled to make better in this world.

I hope you

you will take on this challenge.

I want to introduce our be loved

congresswoman who is an author.

Congresswoman. [Cheers.] >> I don't know about you.

When I had my first child, I didn't look anything like that

after two months.

Anyway, welcome everyone to our equality day.

99 years ago today women got the

right to vote. It did not come easy.

It took 70 years for the right

to vote in women.

Susan b anthony didn't live to

see that day come. Women wore white. They marched in the streets,

they went on hunger fasts, they

went to jail for the simple idea that women should have the right to vote. Why didn't women have the right to vote?

Well, if you listen to george bernard shaw at the time he said

if we give women the right to

vote there will be a crushing

tax on bachelors. Really?

Someone who wrote a column from

the seneca falls review said if women got the right to vote.

they would get thin lipped, flat handed and flat chested. Oh, my God. I don't think any of those things happened after we got the right to vote.

I will tell you this.

We are at a point in time where

we have a 21st century suffer movement.

We have a lot at stake.

We passed era in california.

Congress passed era47 years ago.

We still don't have it in the constitution.

Why should we care in even

scalia said the constitution

require discrimination based on sex?

His answer was no, but if the

question is does it prohibit

discrimination based on sex, the as was also no.

It is imperative we recognize

the time has come for the era to pass in this country.

I hope you join me to make virginia the 38th state and we

will strike from the pream bell

the deadline that our fathers

thought we needed to have in

that particular amendment and get it into the constitution.

This is an issue of our time. Make no mistake, there is a

supreme court poised now to overturn roe versus wade.

What that means immediately is

that one in three women in the

united states will live in

states that ban abortion. 25 million women will not have

the right to seek that health

procedure on their own.

The President Just by executive

order as he is apartment to do,

required if you are a title 10

organization that you could no

longer refer health clients to a abortion clinic if they sought one.

You know what that means? Low income women in this country aren't able to access healthcare. Planned parent hood was

responsible last year for

detecting 70,000 cancers in low income women, saving their lives.

There is really a lot at stake here.

I want you to see this tee shirt

and recognize that feminism is for everybody.

It is as important to the young girls as young boys.

The nation deserves a country in

which all of us are created equal.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

>> our congress woman did not mention the book she wrote.

I hope you pick up her book undaunted. Read about that. The next speaker is someone I

have known for a long time, one

of my favorite folks that moved to sacramento.

We welcome malia cohen. >> thank you.

Good evening, ladies. And good evening to the fellows

that love the ladies and who standby us and uplift us.

How are you this evening?

I want you to take a look to your right and left because

there are warriors that stand

among us and sometimes they look

like every day average people. They are doing amazing work in

the spaces they acoccupy.

Activists, mothers, grandmothers or just working. Every day we have an opportunity to make our mark.

I am with a battery of talented women and men. I want to tell you why I am here

and why I come to celebrate. First it is my pleasure to join

the men and women with us today.

I want to welcome back for the

cameo appearance coming out of

family leave, not retimer, family leave.

This is an incredible time

because we have women up here from the national level, people

from the state level and the

local level to celebrate the w challenge initiative. You must know what this is about.

This is important to us.

We together are gathering to

make sure that history is being made every day, and this is one

of the days we come together to

celebrate to wave our flag and

to shout and to proclaim I am woman and I am proud.

I am delighted to see my little buddy up here.

Who took a break off her first

couple weeks of school to join us today. Thank you for being here.

We are standing up here to fight as women, as feminist to believe in a better future.

For the young children with us today and that are out there in the audience.

That is why we are here.

We are here to celebrate because

we are smart and give our strength so women everywhere can achieve equality.

We know from the remarks from

our wonderful congress woman who gave a brief report what is happening.

It is disheartening to see the

rights we have won being rolled back. As a black woman standing proud

before you I understand the full urgency and difficulty of the task before us. In that regard I would like to recommend a wonderful book for you.

It is called the bluest eye by tony morrison.

The reason why I selected this

book is because tony morrison passed away and she is no longer with us. In regards to this book, it is

something that I think is

opposed upon us by our culture, and that doesn't make sense.

That is the yearning to fit into what beauty is.

This is how discrimination

cultural stereo types can harm people. A beautiful black girl suffered

sexual abuse and was harmed by

the society racist views of what

the standard of beauty can be.

The book, the bluest eye, is by Ms. Tony morrison.

This is a tough book to read.

It speaks to the truth about the cultural biases which keep people back and quite honestly

which forces people to doubt themselves.

When I read it, it hadmita a pause. -- me to take a pause.

As women it is to unburden

ourselves from the cultural

biases that exist and say that

it is not okay to treat women with anything less than human dignity.

We are proud to let you know we

are making history every day by

our actions, just by our living and breathing.

It is our goal collectively and be right in front of me to continue to change history.

We must be bold, unafraid and we

must not be afraid to fail.

We must stand united. To quote tony morrison if there

is a book you want to read but it has not been written yet, you

must be the one to write it.

Let's lift up our voice and

write our story, and let's own

this. [Applause.] >> thank you.

We are talking about owning our stories, we all have stories to tell. Our own struggles and experiences or living through the things our families have gone through.

I want to introduce our next spicker, dis -- next speaker.

She has a number of stories to tell about her history, background.

That has made her richer in

terms of representative for district five. [Applause.] >> thank you everyone.

Thank you board of equalization President Cohen.

I love to follow her, not

really.

Thank you to assess assessor.

Are you back but not?

And to our amazing

congresswoman. I read your book. I went and bought the book.

It is an amazing story that you

and all of us should read it. I am so proud to be standing

with all of these women and men leaders up here that really know

what the fight is about.

You know, we are lucky to have such fierce female leaders

locally, hillary, catherine,

sandy is not here, but she is very fierce, as you all know.

i love sandy. Also, our state leaders.

We have an amazing women state

leaders, and our mayor of san

francisco, a woman leader.

Also, yes, at our federal level.

This is really important.

You know, it hasn't been, when

we think it is 99 years since we

got the vote, but it hasn't been that long.

It is not equal for everyone.

Our african-american and asian-american sisters didn't

get to vote until 1948. When we think about this, we

have a long way to go.

When I stand here, I get really

upset and infuriated that our basic human rights as women are really being threatened today.

We are going backwards, folks, backwards.

We must fight to protect our rights.

The city and county of san francisco will continue to fight

and be in that lead.

I promise you as a legislator

and activist I will work hard

for gender justice and equal rights.

We will not tolerate disrespect

or discrimination.

We will support policies that put women in power and leadership.

We will fight to finally close

the gender gap.

That pay gap that we all know is out there.

We will fight justice for our

missing and murdered sisters.

We will fight to control our own

bodies and protect our right to

choose.

So I always feel this way because my grandma used to tell

us whatever happens to one of us happens to us all.

whatever happens to one woman,

it happens to us all. I need each and every one of you

to help me in this work. Are you with me?

Are you with me? >> yes.

>> so my book that I chose and

it sums up my feelings as an

activist and woman and legislator.

It is girls can.

I want to thank everyone for coming. This means a lot. This is a first step.

We will see you at the next one.