To be responsible for Parking Enforcement . Why do we keep creating impediments instead of building on really one of the most popular successes of the last few years . When is the last time youve ever sat in this room and heard a near unanimous parade of merchants praising an mta program anywhere in the city . This this program has nearunanimous support from merchants on the 400 block of hayes that are directly affected. And its one of our citys most walkable and transit rich commercial areas. And for those who need to drive, theres a 600 space mta owned parking garage around the corner for everyone. Obviously, as youve heard, the shared space is not perfect, but instead of retreating, which will do nothing to address those concerns, we can work harder to make the shared space work better and live up to the values that we talk so much about. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. Board members. Luke bornheimer here. I urge you to amend the item today to keep the three day closure intact. Its wildly successful. It should continue. I also urge you to direct staff to work towards a 24 over seven pedestrian ization of this block of hayes street because its so successful. Many of the concerns about the closure have to do with barricades being moved and put back and where they go. Theres a great solution for that. Weve done it on a car free jfk. You make it 24 over seven and then you can install barriers that just stay there and you can actually engineer them, work with the Fire Department to make them work great. You can also install furniture, Street Furniture in the street and activate the street on car free jfk. We dont have concerts every day. We have some furniture out there and its activated by just people coming. We dont need to throw parties on every single car free street in the city, every single day at every single hour. You can install furniture tables shade just allow people to come to the space. So i urge you to amend this to make it a three day closure. But i urge you to go further and direct staff to work towards making it a 24 over seven, pile it, whatever we want to call it. We should be working towards that as a city. We know the crises we face. We know what our policies, our goals say. We know what we talk about in press releases or press conferences is we can actually act to fulfill some of those things that we talk about doing right here. This is a very tangible way to do it. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is pete wilson and i am a resident of district five Western Addition and something somebody said earlier today about other countries really made me think because as somebody who lived in italy, 20 or 30 years ago and rode my bicycle and was hit several times on the city streets and then went back a year ago and was just amazed at the little lanes that they have and how what a great job theyve done. And how much fun it is visiting places over there where you do have city sidewalk streets, not pedestrian streets. And so i definitely would support that every day. And i like the people who are saying 24 over seven, seven days a week. I would also like to see as a somebody who is certified as a trolley bus operator, i would love to see the 21 hayes trolley bus going downtown, actually going somewhere and providing for not only the tourists. I used to work in the tourism industry, but for the residents and to bring more people to hayes valley because it goes as far as hyde. Wed like to see it go all the way downtown and to say that we need diesel busses or electric busses to come in on the weekend is not true. Right now, the 31 balboa is going off wires. It could go all the way to caltrans on wires. It drives under the wires for 1. 1 miles, and theyre electrified wires and theyre choosing not to use them. And trolley busses use 30 less power than a than battery busses. Lets remember the mining of the lithium and all that other stuff, folks. So lets bring back the trolley bus. We can use it seven days a week and theres operators who love driving those. And thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your perspective with any other speakers in the room. Seeing none. Please open the remote comment at this time. Well move to remote Public Comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. Members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue each speaker will have two minutes. Moderator for speaker, good afternoon, this is barry taranto. I was surprised as well to see that you cut down the proposal from 3 to 1 day. I think hayes valley does need the help by having the street closure for the business, but there has to be some mitigation measures to alleviate some of the issues that are created by the by that block closure. Excuse me. Um, first, you need to have enough vacant space for our taxis and delivery cars to pull over and not block the intersection or not block the not double parked on golf street. You also need to also have some space on golf east of the intersection, not golf city. Hayes so because what happens is that light that that left turn arrow is not long enough and so you have cars stacked up at that left turn and you have cars double parked in the right lane. So what do you do . You so theres a problem there. So i think its important to actually put up permanent signage saying on this day during certain hours its a towaway zone. So therefore, when someone gets their car towed because its a white zone during that time period, then theyre not surprised. And i think its important to enforce it. Unfortunately, you dont have pcos at night enforcing the no parking zones. So this is something you have to rectify and maybe make that arrow a little bit longer. So that so therefore, the cars dont stack up to that left lane and so i think its important to may even add another day to this. And the last thing is that the grove street exit from the performing arts garage also creates a problem when the symphony or another event breaks before your 10 00. Like a lot of the time, it ends at 930. Thank you. So thats another time is up next. Speaker. Conservatoire minor. One concern i have is what access to close streets will the aged and disabled have now these are long these can be long blocks and physically impaired would have a difficult time patronizing business. So you really have to think it over as far as patronage goes aged and disabled. Also Byproducts Services on this on this street and youre actually shutting down your revenue and im concerned about that. Basically about access for everyone in the city. And you cannot favor one population over another. It should be open for business for everyone. And whats going to happen during the winter . Oh, its going to be great to be in the open air during the summer. What about the winter when it gets cold . So basically businesses might be freezing themselves out of revenue. And i think everyone loses in the process. So i think this over very carefully and make accommodations for everyone and be flexible to adapt to all, challenge changes. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Good afternoon. This is mitch records with the hayes valley Small Business association and hayes valley safe. We want to underscore that throughout the entirety of the street closure on hayes. Weve been advocating for a fair and equitable process. Our concern has always been that that process for a program that was rolled out as a temporary during a pandemic was never clearly defined. Now that weve been part of the process, we support the recommendations set forth for this pilot by sfmta. We also hope that you will not be dissuaded by others who have been trying to change the narrative for an initiative that has impacted Small Business operators and residents not always favorably, who have spoken up over the last couple of years with respect to their concerns evolving around scheduling traffic issues, signage and lack of activation. The current permit conditions at face value seemingly try to address these. So lets try it and reassess. I also want to express concern about the inability of Small Business operators to speak up and share their stance when it has become evident that there is another agenda being driven here which has hindered the much needed conversations about how to improve the vision of transit. First, in hayes valley, we would like to see the same synergy applied to optimizing the many open spaces in hayes valley and the Western Addition to try to really capitalize on the big vision we once had with the removal of the freeway. As it stands now, we have serious traffic issues. We have serious Public Safety issues, all of which weve been advocating for the last few years. All the focus has been on this one. Block thank you. Thank you. No additional callers. Okay colleagues, the item is before you are there, comments, questions. Director kahina, please. Thank you, chair, and thank you to everyone, all the members of the public and the Business Community that came out to give Public Comment on this item. Um colleagues, i do see this this particular proposal as a way to formalize a pandemic era program. And that alone has tons of growing pains to it, right . Like were trying to figure out how something where the economy was shut down, all activities were shut down, was quite successful for a lot of folks. A lifeline for a lot of folks. And how we can bring that back and formalize it with our new activities with all our different systems up and running. So i know this is going to feel painful for a lot of folks for some time as we figure out how to make this work. Now with everything active again, um, i do see the proposal before us laying the foundation for something bold. I dont see it closing the door to that and it gives us about a year to regroup and really understand how to rightsize a solution here. Im really grateful that staff worked with the office of Small Business. I think that was a very smart move, but also a very intentional move that i think we need to do more of in future projects as we work in commercial corridors. Ive worked with Mary Anne Thompson before when i did my work at the excelsior action group, and so i understand and a lot of the work that she does and the integrity with which she does that work. And so i was really grateful to see that she was part of this project and that she was part of the surveying process and truly want to thank monica for all the work that youve done to shepherd this this project. I did have a few clarifying questions, though, on the proposal itself. Um, you mentioned that that during the three day closure we rerouted the 21 right . I wanted to just get your sense, if there are any material changes in ridership during that time, if the closure affected ridership on the 21 and if in this proposal were mitigating some of those challenges. So a great question. Director unfortunately, i dont know. I dont have that information readily available, but can easily pull that the metrics and what i heard mostly from the working closely with the transit team were around reported passenger confusion about where to find those bus on those three days because for example friday is 4 to 10 part of the day part not and also the operator some of the operator complaints and confusion about where they need to be when. But the ridership number i dont have. And so i think as were evaluating this permit, that would be something id definitely be interested in understand more. I anticipate were going to see this item again in a years time. So it would be lovely to have that type of information available. Um, additionally, getting the operators perspective to i think that would be wonderful to also have to understand, you know, is it has it been easy to navigate any changes there . And as it pertains to the barricades, you know, ive thrown a few festivals myself. Ive thrown a few events myself and ive gone through the process and its quite intensive. And you have all these folks there from all these different departments weighing in on on a street closure for one day. And so i imagine we had that sort of level of inspection for this particular for closure in this permit process. And im so great that fire was part of this and they were part of the equation here. Who was responsible for setting up the barricades . I understand were purchasing the barricades and were setting that up, which is quite generous because its got permit holders have to pay that fee themselves and they have to pay fees for all the signage and all that stuff. So it seems like were were doing our good faith effort and supporting this by also doing that. But who is responsible for setting up those barricades . The sponsor for . Yeah, thank you for asking that. To clarify for every shared space street closure it is the sponsor the permittees responsible city to store and set up and take down so store the barricades throughout the year they get one set of barricades and put them out so we make sure our job, in addition to providing the barricades, is to educate them. We hornbostel our amazing engineer is here. He works on all these renderings and does this assessment for us. Hell draw up the barricade schema, get on the phone with sponsors, talk about them, talk about the spacing, why we need them. Weve often gone out in person and marked up maybe the crosswalk for them, but ultimately they have to set it up every day and take it down every day and. If this was an issue with a three day closure, just wanted to get a sense from from the team on what were going to do to ensure that this is being set up in a compliant way and how were working with the permit holder to ensure that theyre compliant with that piece. Yeah. Um i think like i mentioned, the education the most we could do up front. So theres, theres this Technical Information so that they understand it. So theres no discrepancy from the get go. But ultimately, yeah, we dont have bandwidth. We are not going out every week. We are surveying, we are out on the ground all the time. Ive gone out there, jared has gone out there. The fire marshal and well take photos and we can like share that back with them. Sort of like, hey, this is the tweak needed. And we dont have an official Enforcement Team at the mta to do that. It kind of has been on our own time, but i think thats Something Else i can think of is sort of as theyre rolling it out to be kind of monitoring and reporting, but ultimately, again, it is a lot of the responsibility that these sponsors are taking on when theyre applying for a permit. And so if in the event the permit holder does not comply with that, what do we do then . Or how do we learn about it and what do we do then . Yeah, this is New Territory for shared spaces because they are recurring. My understanding for escort is special event when there are compliance issues, its more reflected on when a sponsor comes back the next year. Kind of like maybe are we permitting them again . So weve developed revocation thresholds and we can and we will iron that out more for transparency and working with the sponsors. We havent had to use that yet, but having a documentation of, ah, you not closing the street when you said you could, thats one problem, like having im permitted for fridays, but some fridays im not and some fridays i am. So having that sort of when we will on what grounds and how we would communicate at first communicate verbally and then youre on. You can be revoked. We have the ability as mta to revoke a permit. So we want to make sure that that is kind of that process is documented so we can do that. Its just a matter of how and we havent had to do that yet, but were still sort of new and rolling out the shared spaces program. We werent doing much of that type of enforcement during the pandemic as we were more lenient. Yeah, i would definitely say like as we as we start formalizing this process more, i think it would be helpful for us to understand what what sort of compliance measures we have and what sort of enforcement measures we have. So that we could support more projects like this and make sure folks are given the proper guidance and the tools to succeed and see these succeed. Right so thats the hope. And lastly, this is more for jeff, but i did want to acknowledge a letter that we received from supervisor prestons office and hoping that you could address some of the recommendations that were in that. And ill point them out. So one of them, i think, was was already addressed by by members of the public. But also with your presentation, monica, of why a restoration of three day weekend closure to private vehicles. It would be challenging at this point. So i think youve addressed that pretty well. But understanding the time sensitive of this proposal, there was a request to entertain an idea of continuing the item until december to give the community an opportunity to address outstanding issues. And so i just want to get a context of is there a time sensitivity in deciding this now, now and have we do we think within a months time we would make any material changes to the project at with more outreach and more engagement with folks . So. Well, first of all, the timing issue is just that the previous permit has long since expired. And we need to formalize the permit for a whole variety of reasons, including liability. What is clear from all the engagement that weve done is theres near universal agreement on the desired outcome. The only question is how do we best get there . The staff recommendation is very clear that the best way to achieve success, to achieve the desired outcome of a vibrant, car free, active street is to temporarily shrink the number of days we work with the community in order to figure out how to one, comply with the rules of the permit to figure out activation and three continue engaging with community and getting support from merchants and then expand from there. Once were able to achieve success. So thats that is our primary reason in terms of the desired outcome. Um, staff and supervisor prestons office are in agreement and i think generally what weve heard from the community is, is mostly agreement about the goal that were trying to get to where theres disagreement is on how to get to the goal and delaying this item simply delays our ability to work with the community to get to the goal. Weve weve heard loud and clear the various voices. Thank you, jeff. Colleagues, are there other questions . Okay, director henzi, i see you. Go ahead. Um, director kikina actually, actually only asked my questions. I was curious if these permits were revocable and how we were measuring compliance with the, the, the, the, the to configure them weighing out configurations. I did want to and this is mostly for my colleagues i did want to and i think maybe dir