Great. I would like to thank the staff are putting on this meeting thank you to our clerk. San francisco government tv who are recording this meeting for prop posterity and no one is sitting in the directors chair. At this point, i will ask, you can read the next item. So, we have Public Comment on items not in the agenda and we have one Public Comment or one public speaker. This is for Public Comment on items not on the agenda. So anyone who is here to speak on the transit issues will have a Public Comment period for that later on. This is for people who want to speak on items within the purview of the Human Rights Commission were not on this evenings agenda. Youre welcome to step up at this time if you havent done so , fill out a speaker card and give it to the Commission Secretary. We will have a clock for the Public Comment. Two minutes. Good evening, commissioners. I just want to bring to your attention the issue of a Current Article in the paper about approving 10,000 scooters into the bay area. I think theres some concerns about bike share in the secondary mobile systems that are being implemented that do not take into account disability i think it has gone far and long enough without that really being revisited and relooked at seriously. When you look at any of those platforms out there with bike share facilities that are dropping in and every district in this city, not one of them shows serious addressing of disability issues. There was an article in the New York Times on bike share options that are rarely available for people with disabilities, but portland and detroit managed to come up with some alternatives. It is time the city and county of San Francisco takes this issue seriously. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have anyone else who wishes to speak on items not on the agenda . Very well. If we could have the next item, please. Item two his adoption of minutes dated august 8th, 2019 discussion item and action items this was circulated earlier in the week to the commissioners via email. It is in your binder under tab two. I will entertain a motion. I move that we approve the minutes from august 8th, 2019. Do we have a second . Second. Seconded. This is a motion to approve the minutes of august eighth, 2019. Is there discussion on the motion . Seeing none, we will take the vote if the commissioners and secretary would please read roll call. [roll call] motion passes by consensus. Thank you. If you could please read the next item. Regular business item three, transit reliability presentation focused on equity. Thirtyeight, h. R. C. Staff presentation three a, h. R. C. Staff presentation. It afternoon, commissioners. My name is, and i am a staff member of the Human Rights Commission. And on september 24th, 2019, a packet was submitted to you all electronically. Thank you. We are having a little techno technical difficulty here. With that, we will move on to the next item. Item three b. , invited guests , one, sfmta, two, district to supervisor catherine stefani, three, district ten supervisor shamann walton, four district 11 supervisor ahsha safai. I have a couple notes here that i will share. I understand that supervisor stefani, i have a note she sends regrets and is unable to attend the meeting today. Supervisor walton sends his request just his regrets and was unable to attend todays meeting and in place of supervisor ahsha safai, we have monica chinchillm his office. For george davis Senior Services , cathy davis sends her regrets and is unable to attend, as the George Davis Senior Center has been operating in partnership with the department of Emergency Management as an Emergency Cooling Center this week, and hope s. F. Director theo miller sends his regrets and is unable to attend todays meeting. We will go back up to monica. Julie is here. We will take it in the order it is on the agenda, which is supervisor ahsha safai office and then, hold on. I am just going through the people who arent here. I would like to say i am pleased to see commissioner ricky from the m. T. A. Here, as well, and former h. R. C. Commissioner stephen hermon who reminded me im sitting in his former chair. We will hear from monica and then julie. Thank you. Good evening, commissioners. Im excited to be here today. I just wanted to affirm that the supervisors commitment to ensuring equity and transit within our district. He is a relentless champion in making sure that our bus lines run on time, that we are balancing the dual needs of transit reliability and pedestrian safety, as i am in many conversations with sfmta every day to talk about old bouts, introducing more bike lanes, stop signs, and speeding. There are traffic calming measures to make sure that transit is functioning well. In terms of equity, we are committed and we have been working with the companies of emerging technologies to make sure that there are Employment Opportunities for people in our district so as these companies are growing in and coming within our district, that the communities benefiting not only from the technologies being available, but also from the Employment Opportunities. With transit lines, also making sure our equity lines are prioritized and we are reducing wait times. For example, i have been communicating with constituents today who have regularly had to wait for a bus line. We have been working with m. T. A. To reduce that time so that even within our community, and sometimes it often gets overlooked and we are making sure that transit works. I just wanted to state there are many parts may projects they are working on. I am sure that they can share more about what they are doing in our districts, but with our supervisor, he is committed to making our streets safer, making sure transit works and making sure that our community and our residents that are often overlooked are prioritized. Are there any commissioner questions . Very well. We will now call into Julie Kirschbaum for the sfmta. Thank you for the opportunity here and thank you to our director. We brought several staff up. If they wouldnt mind raising their hands, were here to listen and we appreciate taking the time to do this hearing, although i havent heard directly from the folks in this room, we have heard frustrations throughout the city, and i can assure you that while i think we have a number of important initiatives underway, the service is not meeting my expectations for our customers, and certainly for our customers who need it the most. I want to talk about what were doing around transit equity since it is a topic that we take very seriously. For example, we are working very closely with people with disabilities on things like the design of our vehicles, as well as our fair policy. We have just started piloting a Choice Program in partnership with two Public Health clinics. One in potrero, and one in the bayview for folks who are having challenges using munimobile but dont necessarily qualify for paratransit, and we have access to a taxi voucher program. We also have the most comprehensive free and reduced fare program or low income customers, which is used by over 100,000 San Francisco residents. We are also piloting a discounted day pass, which is something that we havent had before, but we are working with m. T. C. To try and set up. That is in part response to feedback that we have heard about our current clipper fair, which has a reduced fare for people who use clipper that has a higher cash fair. In 2014, our board past the equity policy which made us the very first agency in the nation to blend the equity needs with the budget process. As part of that policy, the board sit out the expectation that a series of routes that we identify with social justice advocates perform as well or better than our average, and then as we identify performance improvements, particularly around service and capacity, we have concentrated those on routes that really serve as means of concern. We recently received an award for a Community Outreach process that we did on the 27 bryant, which was identified in our equity strategy is having very poor reliability, particularly as it went through the tenderloin and the south of market neighborhood. We are pleased to have recently implementing those changes. As we prepared for the service improvements, we have a lot of things going for us. We had better vehicles, we had better data systems, but what is really impacting us right now is a very acute operator shortage. We are currently missing about 250 operators. With the help of operators working overtime, we are able to minimize the impact only about 5 of our service, with 5 of the Service Still represents hundreds of trips each day. And as you heard from monica, of a route runs every 20 minutes and we are missing a bus, that can create a 40 minute gap. When we have well we have worked hard to prioritize routes that go through our equity neighborhoods, there still have been impacts, and that is something we are monitoring very closely and trying to get through this difficult time. We have put a huge focus on hiring we have been able to double our class sizes, but we will need to even further increase hiring as we move forward. We have been very fortunate. One of the reasons we have been able to double our class size trip with the mayor his office, it is providing a free Class Permit Program for anybody who is on our eligible operator list that used to be a huge hurdle for people to have to go through the d. M. V. Process to get the permit to be considered for hiring, and we are seeing about a quarter of our applicants take advantage of that program, and we are also we are doing much more frequent classes of new operators and we are publishing those dates in advance, which is really helping a lot of our nonprofit partners do recruiting for operators. It is a really wonderful job opportunity. It is something that you are becoming part of a family, you have a really wonderful job trajectory. A lot of the folks that are current managers supporting me today started at ought as operators and went through that process. I also anticipate today that you may hear questions about the chase center. We have had a very successful implementation of a strong transit First Program to the new arena. We did that investment because we felt it was critical to not have that area become a huge congestion bottleneck, particularly as we think about access to the ucf us ucsf hospital, but also didnt want to congest up freeways that some of our routes rely on. In the most recent article, i did incorrectly state that we were diverting service from equity lines. It was a very poor choice of words. We did not remove any service from routes, but we didnt seek that we didnt see initially as much overtime interest in the service as we expected, so some of our extra board operators, which we used to fill gaps throughout the system went to our chase service. The feedback did prompt us to provide Even Stronger monitoring tools on some of our routes, particularly the eight bayshore and the 19 poke. While i wish i had communicated better on the topic, i think there was a Silver Lining to it, that it provided even more heightened focus. Anyway, my intent ensuring these remarks is to not make excuses or invalidate some some of the experiences you will here today, but to assure you that despite some of our current shortages, we are doing everything that we can to provide excellent munimobile service, and what we will do is come back in october with what i hope to be a meaningful and actionable response to some of the input. Great. Thank you for those remarks. We appreciate you coming and listening. As i said, it is great to have a member of your commission here, as well. Are the other m. T. A. Commissioners . Okay. I will recognize the first speaker. Why dont you stay up there, because i thank you may get some questions. Thank you for your presentation. The articles in the paper about what happened at the chase center were deeply concerning, and i understand your comment that you misspoke, but im not sure understand, from m. T. A. s perspective, what did happen, if the article is incorrect. Yes. We had a day on the eight bayshore where we were balancing a loss of lastminute sick calls and other issues on the route, and supervisor walton reached out to, which i appreciate, and in my email response to him, i said that we diverted service, which we did not to do. It was just a poorly worded email. We have a pool of operators every day that are not assigned to any routes, and we use them to fill gaps and vacancies, and we prioritize them based on things like making sure we deliver the first and the last trip every day. We focus on our equity routes, we focus on filling the rapid routes which go through many of our neighborhoods that are low income, and on that day we also used some of our extra board to fill the chase center service. That is what i was referring to. And when you say there was a Silver Lining and that lessons were learned, what were the lessons that were learned . We are trying to anticipate problems earlier in the day. Because we are now i am getting daily reports, for example, on the eight bayshore, on the 19 poke, which is another route that we were seeing starting to slip in terms of Service Delivery, and we were able to use all of the tools that we have to make sure we are minimizing the service. Thank you. Thank you. I was wondering, how do you prioritize improvement and services for neighborhoods that need them the most . We do it in part by feedback and dialogue. We are currently working, for example, in the neighborhood planning process in the bayview. We also have gotten, heard from a lot of different constituent groups with request to focus on the 29 sunset and to look at potential skip stop service that will get people to school and to connections like colleges more quickly. We are also constantly reviewing our data, looking where we have crowding and other Service Needs , and then we also look at the performance of a route. For example, on the 27 bryant, that is a route we do not see a lot of crowding, what it is a very important route to making connections across a number of different neighborhoods and it is having having total liability because all the turns it was making through the tenderloin. Thank you so much for your presentation and thank you for your service. I would love to spend i would love to understand the operator shortage, what caused it, what impact are you seeing that have it haves on the system, how are you mitigating that, and what steps are being catch up with a fully stocked department. The shortage was initially created because we werent training large enough classes and we werent keeping up with attrition and all of the other demands that we have in the system. When we went to increase the classes, what we saw is we had a pipeline problem. That the smaller classes hadnt made visible. And what i mean by that is that we would take an operator list and it would appear to have an ample number of people on it, but as we started calling, what we found is the list was exhausted. Either people hadnt gone through the commercial permit process or they got other work, so what we have done is work in a number of different areas to solve the pipeline problem. The first thing we did is starting doing classes every two months instead of every six months. In the past, we used to do a class every 15 months, and thousands of people would sign up to be operators, and that is not the job market we are in. We do classes every two months. We also scheduled those classes 12 months in advance so that everybody that we were partnering with to market the job opportunity new when a class was coming and could work with their different clients. The further during the third thing we did was a city drive program which helps people get through the class b. Permit, but the operator shortage is not unique to munimobile. It is something across the bay area and across the country where we are facing, but ours is worse because we were slow to react to it. And what impact are these reactions, the steps that you have put in place, what impact are you seeing on the backfilling of those roles, and what are you doing in the meantime to ensure reliability . What we started to see is a stabilization, so we were going, you know, fewer and fewer trips that were being delivered. We have now been able to stabilize and we are starting to see it eating away at our shortage. We have increased the cost sizes we were doing classes of about 25 to 30. We have a low class last december where we only got 14 people. Our most recent free or four classes have started anywhere from 55 to 60 students. Were graduating between 40 and 45. We more than doubled the amount of people we are putting through the pipeline. Were doing our best to spread out the pain and make sure the routes that need the service the most would be helpful. We did not always have great choices, but we do some Line Management so instead of having a bus come in 20 minutes or 40 minutes, sometimes we will split the difference and try to have it come 30 minutes, 30 minutes, to be a little bit more regular. We are trying to communicate better, also, where we are having a Bad Service Day and letting customers know through 311 and through our website or through the next bus displays on our stops. I want to follow up on something you said and then i will recommend special usage. We are trying to communicate better. You said 311, the next bus on the display. And then through the website and social media. 311 is inbound, right . Someone has to actually call. Yes. What percentage of the bus stops actually have operational boards . I think about a third. Okay. Can you do you know where those operational boards actually are in the city . I would be happy to bring a map. Are they spread across the city or are they more in the center of the city . Or are they in the neighborhoods that we are talking about . They are. There are some cases, if we havent