Trying to find out a way of funding if we spread it out too thinly, but which could support advertising if our board approves. In the short run, we are making sure that we are eliminating driver renewal fees for the extent of the Health Emergency. Drivers can continue working out on the street without paying their renewal fees while were in this Health Emergency. Its the least that we can do in order to support our operators. Were also thinking about if we can waive the taxi fees for the next two fiscal years, given the huge impacts being felt by our taxi operators. Those are things under discussion outside of our budget but which we would likely do. Im going to shift my bicycle gear and move on and talk a little bit about the Golden State Warriors. During this last fiscal year the chase arena was open and we were successful in that opening because this agency partnered with the Golden State Warriors and provided excellent transit and Parking Management and curb management. One of the most innovative and really exciting things that we did was that the muni ticket is included in ticket of your event or Golden State Warrior game. Thats an Exciting Development and i think it has facilitated folks riding transit to the events or to the basketball games. So how do you envasing maybe expanding that program . In particular, are you envisioning partnering with the giants to do something similar . I think the m. T. A. Should be so proud of the work that you did. All that happened before i arrived, i had nothing to do with it. I sat back and watched and was braced for a disaster and instead it was a phenomenal success. You should be proud of that success. Sfmta charges 1. 50 on services on those nights and makes it possible for the arena to function with people coming in and out and without a lot of gridlock. This is an amazing success. So i would love to expand on the success of that program. If anyone from the San Francisco giants is listening, call me. Were ready to expand the success of a program like that. Similarly, if and when our Convention Center is open again for business, and it will be, i would love to have every conventioneer badge be a muni fast pass. I would love all the hotels plastic card keys to be a muni fast pass. For all major employers in San Francisco to chip in to help us deliver the Transit System that we need, particularly given the economic crisis, while at the same time having us deliver free transit to their employees. As an agency, were really eager to make some savvy deals in order to be able to maintain service in these times. And its going to require really, really active participation from the private sector in order to allow us to do that. Very good. One question that we get from time to time is about our crossing guard program. In particular one person asked can we increase the number of hours that crossing guards work. For example, the way it is today, we have crossing guards in the morning for an hour and a half making sure our kids get to School Safely and a shift in the afternoon when everyone is leaving school. Its not a long day. A person or two are curious can we give the crossing guards more hours. What do you think about that . I love our crossing guards. They help me cross the street at harvey milk school. They provide a phenomenal amount of service and keep our kids safe. In our budget, he had a choice to make about whether we expand the program to more schools or expand the hours to individual crossing guards. If we add more hours, we serve fewer schools. If we add for guards, we can serve more schools and enhance safety. We have chosen the latter and have allocated additional budget to hire 20 new crossing guards, but not expanded their hours. In fact, in talking to many of the guards, including the ones i have seen, most of them live in the community. Many of them are older adults. All of them are interested not so much in more hours, but are happy to get out in the Community Every day. We feel more safety for more schools is going to serve San Francisco better than more hours for fewer guards. Very good. Live from twitter, what is the planned schedule for sfmta to hire more supervisors in 2020 . Yes, this is a hugely important question and one of the questions that comes straight out of the Muni Reliability Working Group recommendation. If you want a lot of detail on that topic, search for Muni Reliability Working Group and also look into the detail of our budget. So in order to so back in the last recession, back in 2008, in order to hold onto our core service, the Previous Administration widely chose to slash line supervision, the people who are in charge of making sure that buses are evenly spaced out, that operators leave their terminals on time, when there is a problem there are many places in the system that we have recurring problems. That there is a supervisor there with operational experience that knows how to sort out those problems. In order to improve reliability and to have steadier service, we need to staff up with those supervisors. Those supervisors can also take advantage of the investments that weve made in technology. Years ago people thought that all of the Global Positioning satellite trackers on the buses would allow us to automate supervisor. In reality, what we find is that that data requires a detailed understanding of whats happening out on the street and what buses can and cannot actually do. So what were finding is that having a new array of supervisors allows them to get the data that were getting, which basically is a force multiplier on the supervisors and where were applying the supervisors, were getting huge increase in reliability as well as headway maintenance. This is a question of whether we will actually be able to hire the new supervisors. Im getting a question. Any Job Opportunities offered to recent College Graduates at the sfmta. Ill pipe in and say that we of course have an Internship Program that is amazing at sfmta, truly a trainingground. Many people who have gone through our Internship Program end up working at sfmta. And really people should be looking on our linkedin website and the city website. We post a diverse range of positions. Its important to retain and attract talent. If you google jobs with the sfmta, the jobs portal will come up. Another position that just opened up just today is our transit ambassador program, which is a really fascinating job. Its for entrylevel people, particularly san franciscans, who live in the southeastern neighborhoods to ride our School Tripper services in order to help ensure that muni is civil. Its our alternative to having a police force ride muni. Instead we train people in the community who understand the kids in their neighborhoods and can engage with riders in order to support civil behavior and that we all need to get to what we are getting to. There are 13 of those that were advertising today. Another person from twitter says why is the fine for fare evasion in some cases more expensive than a parking violation ticket . Can sfmta look into the aggressive action that requires payment for fare. This is important to me. It was one that would take too long for our budget conversations, but we are going to take a longer program that may require advocacy at the state level that restrict our ability to manage fares. It is very important to me that we look at our fare Evasion Program not as a way of making revenue off citations, but as a way of encouraging people to pay their fair share. Rather than charging people fines, i would so much rather people who havent paid their fare, instead be required to buy a clipper card that would be the value of that fine, but instead gets them into the business of actually of paying their fare. Or instead of asking them to pay a fine, that it allows them to contribute their time to a Community Service function. The thing that irritates me is the fine for not paying your 3 bus fare for taking up 3 feet on the bus is greater than paying your parking fine for 300 square meters on the street. We need to equalize the fares for the impact they have on the system. There is too much complexity or resolving all of that in this particular budget, but that is something we are absolutely committed to coming back to and revisiting in several phases over the coming year, particularly relative to the legislative effort we want to have at the state with the equity question as well. Very good. Staying with fares, we have a question, do parking permits go up by the same amount as the muni fares. Why is parking so much cheaper than a muni pass if we are transit first . Speaking of things that drive me nuts and require legislative change. Our residential parking fees are currently 144 a year. Were raising them by some tiny amount. A residential parking permit is basically 0. 30 a day to store your car on public property in our neighborhood or at least have a license to do so. The reason it is only 144 a year is that it is illegal for us to charge more for the residential parking permit than it costs us to administer that parking program. So this is really frustrating. Unlike parking meters, which we have a great deal of flexibility in terms of how we set the rate, the Residential Parking Permit Program is fundamentally broken. A result of that is in our urban communities, it is a hunting license. It is not a tool for making sure that residents coming home at night can find a parking space near their homes. Changing that requires significant changes to state law as well as changes to a Court Decision called richardson v. Arlington. We need to figure out whats the optimal way for managing parking in our residential neighborhoods that provides some reasonable assurance that our residents can find a Parking Spaces near their home, at night, in the rain, makes it difficult for commuters to the financial district to park their car in the neighborhood to avoid paying in the garage and at the same time make it is it possible for the employees in our neighborhood commercial districts to find a place that they need to park thats not just in front of the business across the street. Its part of the complete madness of the rules governing that looked only at a single mode at a time. We want to think comprehensively across all modes of transportation and have the tools to manage the entire right of way in San Francisco for the public good. Again, would love to take care of that in this budget, but we really cant. I should add as well, on the parking meter side, again, it is our policy that the parking meter rates achieve a good rate in the communities. If we doubled the parking meter rates, we dont double revenue. Our rates for parking have a much greater impact on the demand for parking than our muni fares. So were trying to have a parking meter rate that optimizes revenue and accessibility to the commercial districts at the same time. These are some of the many things we struggle with as were trying to put together this budget that brings together the budget that we need and that does so in an equitable way for those who travel to San Francisco, whether by foot or bus or skateboard. Moving on to an email. What lowcost measures will muni undertake to improve service. For example, providing Faster Service to make the service cheaper to provide. Is muni willing to give more priority to buses through signal priority as an option or to eliminate bus stops that are spaced too closely together, i would add to that maybe doing transitonly lanes, and so on. This is a program that im so excited to move forward with. Most of that was developed before i arrived, but that we have new tools to move forward really quickly. This is called the Muni Forward Program. You can google that on our website. But just last month, our m. T. A. Board of directors gave us authority to implement our Muni Forward Program so much faster than before. As some of you will know, we have this thing called the quick build program. We applied it to bike lanes where we go in and engage with a community in the corridor and do some pilot implementation with some cheap and easily reversible materials with paint and plastic posts. Youve seen it and some of it looks ugly and slash dash in part because we wanted it to that way. We wanted to get data and make adjustments as we go along. In the corridors where weve made these bike lanes, weve seen huge increases in bike ridership. Weve also been able to generate trust with the businesses and residents in those corridors. Weve also been able to make adjustments in realtime based on the data. We then make a report and decide to make the changes permanent. Then there will be a separate project that uses concrete and trees and nice materials. We want to take all of that success and apply it to muni. Weve already seen the muni forward projects, where we did a thousand small projects, including implementing the five rapid. The result of that was a 60 increase of ridership and a 40 decrease in collisions on the street. This was a success for a relatively lowcost project. That project took us a couple of years to implement. We can now do many of these projects more quickly. Weve been experiments with that on the nine. We want to move faster than in the past. The Muni Forward Program and the new projects that were just approved by the m. T. A. Board on tuesday allow us to move forward. If we have any capital money and can maintain our current staffing levels, we are ready to move forward with dramatic improvements on the muni lines that our riders use the most. I have a specific question asking us when will the fare increases start. So if we get approval in april for the fare changes, those would be in effect on july 1 im sorry, im being corrected. If we get approval in our budget in april, the fare changes would go into effect on september 1. This is going to give us time to actually understand what are the implications of the financial impacts of the global pandemic. So again, i want to emphasize why were wanting to approve this budget now. We need a budget that is clear about its values and we need a Reference Point for making changes. Our current budget is not very rooted in values. Its pretty strict and rooted in values. One very important question thats not related to the budget that were getting, but its absolutely critical is from a youtube user asking are we cleaning our buses. Yes. This is definitely a question weve been getting almost every day. Were doing a couple of things. Every night when the buses and trains go to sleep at night, they are thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed and completed desanitized. Were fortunate, given all the guidance from Disease Control and global authorities is that the virus itself is fairly delicate. Its easy to kill the virus with straightforward materials. Were making sure were doing a thorough cleaning and similarly were doing a wipe down using simple chemicals four times a day. As the epidemic has gone on, were also gone on to activate what are Disaster Service workers. All of us who work for the city, one of the things we signed is that in the event of an emergency, we can become endeared to serve essential functions. One of those functions is increasing the sterilization of our vehicles during the middle of the day when operators are taking a break. I am doing my car cleaner trainer duty this friday morning. We feel sorry. We feel very strongly that all of us here at the sfmta are in the service of the public and that were not just going to ask our maintenance crews to step it up even more than they have. In fact, the thing that is making me most proud of serving this agency right now is the way our but operators, maintenance crews, communication teams, station agents, they are all here at basically a 100 level. They understand that they are in service to the public. It is my job and the job of the professionals to serve our operators and other frontline workers, which means we need to step it up to protect our operators and protect our riding public. So i will be serving my shift on cleaning down the vehicles in the coming vehicles and im expecting the same from my other managers. This is the time this agency has to come together and to remind our Service Mission to the public and to our frontline workers. Excellent. As you can see, i feel a little strongly about that. Yes, and im glad that you do. We will be working together and we will get through this very challenging time. Once we do and looking a little bit into the future, i want to talk to you about and bring you back to the budget. We talked about the structural budget and the fact that its going to grow over time. In the long term, were going to need to think about ongoing new revenue sources. Can you talk about what work has been done to identify new revenue sources, what they look like, and what are your thoughts on that. It was about a year ago, the 2045 work, its not like our structural deficit is a new problem, but an ongoing problem that all transportation agencies in california face. This program investigated all of the various ways that sfmta could either temporarily or, better yet, permanently create a Revenue Program that would close the gap and deliver the service that san franciscans need. There is a long list of those measures. San francisco now has the authority to create a special vehicle license fee that would go to transportation. That is a possibility that has not polled well. Here in california the things that tend to poll the best are sales tax measures for transportation. We could conside