 Hi everyone, welcome to San Francisco Public Library. Let me start with our land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramachishaloni people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As uninvited guests on their land, we affirm their sovereign rights as first people and we wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramachish community. I'm Michelle Jeffers, I'm here to welcome you today on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library. Thank you to those of you in our audience. We also have people on Zoom and YouTube tuning into this conversation. Tonight we bring you the book, End of the Road, Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City by William Riggs. Dr. Riggs is a professor and program director at the University of San Francisco School of Management and a consultant and advisor to multiple companies and startups on sustainable technology, smart mobility and urban development. Dr. Riggs has authored more than a hundred articles with his work featured in media outlets, including The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, PBS, The Atlantic and more. Dr. Riggs will be joined on stage by Jeffrey Tumlin, the director of San Francisco's municipal transportation agency. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeffrey prioritized service for customers who have the fewest transportation options and are most dependent on public transit. Under his leadership, the agency undertook innovative programs to make it safer for San Franciscans to bike, walk and socialize on our city streets, including the famed Slow Streets Program and creating a safe, car-free promenade through Golden Gate Park and alongside the Pacific Ocean. The agency also completed major construction projects such as the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit Corridor, which I adore. Also joining us is Tilly Chang, the executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. The authority plans, funds and delivers improvements for San Francisco's multiple operator transportation systems. Its mission is to make travel safer, healthier and easier for all. Ms. Chang oversees the Transportation Authority's administration of San Francisco's half-sent transportation sales tax and other voter-approved funding programs. She leads the agency's county congestion management program, including San Francisco's 30-year transportation investment blueprint. Welcome, everybody. We'll let our experts lead the conversation and then at the end, we will take questions from our audience, both here in the room and on Zoom and YouTube. If you're interested, books are for sale in the back of the room. Thank you. Thanks for the wonderful introduction and welcome to everybody in the audience. I'm Billy Riggs and as was introduced, I'm a professor at University of San Francisco and I'm joined by my friends and fellow transportation enthusiast, Jeff and Tilly. So thanks for engaging me with this conversation on my book, but also the future, I think of our wonderful cities transportation system. And I'm proud that I get to partner with you on this. As a local thinker on this and hopefully what I'd like to do today is just to maybe confront the book, but also just think about what do we do to keep our citizens moving through San Francisco in this kind of this era of change, but also as we come out of COVID and what is the future of our streets and our infrastructure and how do we do that? So maybe I'll start off with kind of just one thing, is the title is called Into the Road and what I'd like to do is really just kind of interrogate this idea of, we talk a lot about in the first couple of chapters in the book about this idea of the evolution of streets and how our roadways have really become throughputs for cars. And Jeff, I've heard you talk a lot about this before you were in your current role. And so one of the things that I really talk a lot about to start off with is this idea of, is a street different than a road? And this draws a little bit on kind of what we've talked about for many years with this idea of livable streets and there's many thinkers that have talked about maybe this idea that streets can be softer, they can be more human and they can serve many other functions. And so my idea is that maybe you walk us through that if that's okay, but maybe we can start off with just like what is a street in your mind and how do you approach what maximally, what function it should have in our city? That's a good question. I know, we're starting off with just like just really open ended stuff, Jeff. Who do you want to go first? Why don't you go first? You answer first. All right. Well, so there's no precise taxonomy for the public rights of way. And we call different corridors by different names and those meanings vary depending upon where you are. And particularly if you're in the suburbs, the taxonomy is mostly about what the real estate developers wanted you to believe the corridor would be rather than what it actually is. In my mind, however, I think that a street is something that is both a place as well as a corridor for moving people in goods across many different modes of transportation. Whereas a road is a little bit more just about the movement of cars. And obviously there's a lot of space in between those extremes and a lot of imprecision in our names. Yeah, that's a good way to, and if you both had a chance to look at the book and I know that one of the things that I talk about is this idea of, like Koubissier really talked about in his radiant city, this idea of moving cars in and out. And I think we know now that we've kind of, those were some mistakes we made in the evolution of our streets. And I talk a lot about this in the second chapter, but till you're in an interesting situation where a lot of your domain in terms of looking at the county are these bigger arterials that serve a different function. And so, is there a needle to be thread that it still can be soft? And how does that, what does that look like? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having us and congratulations on the book, Professor and our friend, Billy. I think that I love the name of the book as well, End of the Road, so shout out to Voice to Men. Yeah, there's a little narrative on that. There's a little story about how that came to be, which is End of Itself, really interesting. And what I also love about how you framed this is, it's, you're learning from the research that you're reporting, but you're also sharing experience, your own lived experience from having, I think, lived in tons of different places around the world in this book. Yeah, yeah, if you notice, you'll remember that I'm from Kentucky originally, did you know that? So, it's funny is a lot of what I draw on as a street and a road actually derives from these dirt fields or dirt roads that go through cornfields, and what you realize is that's just as normative in the U.S. as it is in Arusha, Tanzania. Exactly, exactly. And I think we forget, and my kids are half Indian and my partner is, she's got Indian heritage and we do, we talk a lot about streets of India as being an informality that maybe that we can draw on in places like, you know, Linden Lane or places like, you know, Chinatown here in our city. So there's learnings there, right? I think there's a universality of it that you kind of, you know, basically illustrate with all of your different examples. So wherever you're talking about, whether it's domestically or internationally, there's just this basic relationship of scale, you know, of sort of the speed of whatever it is that's moving, whether it's motor vehicles, bicycles, what have you, and the relationship of how much interaction is there, really on the street between neighbors, say, and you draw upon the history of researchers like Apple Yard and your own research, but those are such fundamental principles, you know, and I think that we're really proud in San Francisco that that has all informed our transit first policy, you know, about 50 years now, right, Jeff, of this policy that we get to inherit and carry forward, you know, whatever the demographic or technology shifts and we'll get to all that, that's our North Star. Yeah. And that's our North Star for a reason, you know, taking into account all the different functional things, all the different, you know, streets as public places factors, but when you balance it all out, that's really our North Star and that's for a really good reason. And I think we're gonna get to that as you kind of take us through how you organized the chapters of your book. Yeah, anything else, Jeff? You set us up on this idea of hierarchy, of a hierarchy of roadways, but with the grounding and really what a street can be. And I liked, I think we forget sometimes, and again, I talk a lot about the history of streets and transit in San Francisco and I think we forget that a large portions of our city actually were first generation immigrant suburbs too. And we think about like one thing that was magical about San Francisco is that we, when we were thinking about walking and cycling too, we thought about a unified muni, a unified transit system and we took all these suburban transit lines and we made them one. And I think it's compliments to you and the people that came before you that the citizens of San Francisco that were able to make that happen because you can't do, it's hard to do a walkable and a cycling friendly city without a transit first city. And I think we do a good job of that here. That's right, it was also a hard fight. Muni was born in a riot. A lot of people died to create the first municipal transit agency in the world here in San Francisco. And it was partly out of a reaction against really abusive labor practices by the private streetcar operators that were operating here at the beginning of the 20th century and that that situation got worse after so much of the system was damaged in the 1906 earthquake. So San Francisco municipalized, socialized transit was the first city in the world to do so when the voters of San Francisco voted to create muni which was created in 1911. Own our city, own our system. So I think I thought a lot about this idea of roads as conduit for cars. And so I'm glad you drew us that direction. And in terms of, if we were to walk through kind of the way I thought about this in terms of we really hit on this idea of moving people and this idea of streets for transport. And I think, well, what I challenge particularly in kind of as to do in my book is to think about street streets for other purposes. And I think until you know, we've talked a lot about kind of the time I've spent in the Netherlands and of course I, you know, Jeff, you just got back from London I think, or you know, I just got back from Brussels last week. And I think we've learned a lot about from our neighbors, not only in Europe, but also I think in other parts around the world about how street can be many other things. And so one of the things that I talk about is this idea that also streets can be economic engines. And some of that is like you said, tell you through my own work that I had this really interesting project in Louisville, Kentucky where we looked at like changing two roads from one way to two way and looking at the economic benefit, but also the reduction in collisions when you just actually changed the driving experience and made the roadway less hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. But one of the things that strikes me about our city is that we take time to, or we make a point to use the street for other things, for commerce, for farmers markets. And particularly we've used through kind of our slow streets programs that we rolled out for just activating that space. And a shout out to like Noe Valley Cafe because I have really worked with them about talk with them a lot in my own neighborhood about like really the power of slow chances, for example. And what that does in terms of encouraging commerce on the 24th Street Court or there. So I mean, what do you think the future of that is and how can we promote more of that economic generation through our transportation system, through our streets? What do you all think about that? Yeah, I think you have shared spaces coming back right on Valencia. So I don't steal your thunder there. But really the work that Jeff and SFMTA did during the pandemic has been fabulous and it's become a model for the rest of the country and a lot of cities have adopted this idea that the streets are where everyone comes together to linger, to meet up with neighbors, have a cup of coffee, get your errands done or just kind of people watch. And we'll get to the cultural aspect of that. But I think that what's fascinating is that when you slow people down, and this will be interesting because after Laura Friedman's bill, AB 43 and this speed limits are allowed to be lowered right on commercial streets. And I think Jeff's team has been doing that in groups of streets. It'll be interesting to see what happens to sales. What happens in terms of foot traffic because that's just that much more inviting. Like the commercial streets is really where now that not everyone's coming into work, right? They're having a lot more work from home and a lot of your trip chaining or your side trips that you're making throughout the day are now happening in your neighborhood commercial street. Maybe they were happening sort of half at home and half downtown previously, but a lot more of that is happening in our neighborhood commercial corridors which is our neighborhoods have always been the superpower of San Francisco culturally as well as in terms of the neighborhood commercial experience. So and we need that. So luckily, downtown as it's recovering we still have the neighborhoods generating sales. And we see that in the sales tax. As we see the month I wait for that report every month with interest, how is it looking? And it is rising steadily. And I think largely because thank goodness our neighborhood commercial corridors have been very healthy and resilient and robust. And that's also due in part to the transformative changes. I think the creative changes that SFMTA has done over the last three years. So I added a larger scale. Throughout human history, people have invested both businesses and governments have invested in streets and highways and train lines primarily for the purpose of creating land value. Ultimately in transportation that's our fundamental function. We pretend it's not but that's why we spend money on transportation corridors. We create land value. If you're building a highway you're basically exporting land value from the city center to the suburban edge and allowing homes to be constructed that would otherwise have no value if the highway weren't there. Here in San Francisco all of our neighborhood commercial districts every single one of them is there because a mostly private streetcar operator built a streetcar there for the purpose of real estate speculation. And there's also like funny patterns that are still visible today. There are bars are always clustered around locations where people have to change trains because not only do you have a concentration of people but you have a concentration of people who have a few minutes to kill. So why not? So like if my bus is not there why don't I have to stop in and have a drink? And we see these patterns all over San Francisco about the way in which transportation drives value and also strips value away from places particularly the highway widenings that happily we are not doing any longer. But this is accurate and I think we see the value and kind of what's happened with on-street dining and a lot of the parklet programs and things like that would really brought back that neighborhood commercial in a different way. But yeah, I couldn't agree more Jeff. It's funny to even when you think about the history of rail in the old West, a lot of that. You look at the structure of how a lot of those rail lines were designed and it's really to prop up real estate value in these small Western towns. That's right. Or even in the Southeast, like Atlanta only exists because three rail lines crossed there, like Birmingham. It's the same story. And here in San Francisco during COVID we spent an immense amount of time and staff effort creating the Shared Spaces program not only so that restaurants could survive by moving their commerce outside where it was safer but we also found that the concentration of people eating outside also attracted additional people to shop at other stores because nothing attracts people more than people. We are tribal social primates. We are infinitely curious about other humans. And so the neighborhoods that had the greatest amount of investment in Shared Spaces saw not only their restaurants and bars survive but also neighboring businesses as well even if that meant loss of some parking spaces because for all neighborhood commercial districts in San Francisco, the vast majority of the spending is quite local and it's people who spend money in stores, not cars. We know that parking is an important part of the retail equation but like everything that we do in transportation no, nothing is binary, right? In order to make a true street work it's like a sound board at a music studio, right? If you turn the treble up too high or the bass too low it's gonna be terrible, right? So in order to make the street as a whole work there are hundred dials that we've got to make adjustments for in order to balance experience and accessibility in order to make every motor transportation work in a finite amount of space. I didn't know you were a closeted recording artist there, Jeff. One thing that strikes me is that I spend a lot of time talking and I'm actually curious if you all have been there. I spent a lot of talking about Exposition Road which is one of my favorite streets in London in terms of what they've done there. And I think a lot of us do travel to England if you go there there's a lot of museums it's University College and it's what used to be a really automotive thoroughfare and there's some reasons why they were able to do a couple of things. And I think the difference is we've done a lot of tactical things here in San Francisco and using the native assets that the assets we have but what they were doing to be able to do there because of one thing Tilly congestion pricing. But they've used a lot of the fees they've raised from this cordon there to really transform this roadway and if you go you'll see and I'm sure you all know that there's no curbs, they do drainage in a certain way and it's really one of the more Woonerf to use a Dutch term it's one of the more Woonerf-ish places outside of the Netherlands that I've ever been and it has a lot of opportunity for pedestrian and cyclist engagement with cars in a much different way than we see here. As well as a way to really have a lot more spill over plaza-ish dining that I think we don't see here. So is there a future where we could have that kind of more radical plaza-ish mixing of modes in San Francisco certain places? Is that the future of better market Jeff? I don't know. So here in San Francisco we've got a lot of unique obstacles. Big part of it is resources with the loss of Prop A in June that stripped $400 million out of our budget for improving streets and improving street safety. So we and we have despite unprecedented amount of investment from the federal government little opportunity to fund exquisitely beautiful projects like Exposition Road. We also have some unique challenges here in both the importance that we place on emergency vehicle access and very specific ways of handling fire trucks. The Phoenix is on San Francisco's flag for a reason and we take a different approach for emergency vehicle access and fire management here in San Francisco than in other cities around the world. So many of those design techniques aren't available to us. And similarly, the importance that we uniquely place in the United States around liability avoidance also creates some interesting design constraints. Now that said, I think there is a lot that we can do and it's one of the reasons why the SFMTA for the last five years or so has been implementing mostly quick build projects. So in order to do anything experimental here, we start off with just paint and plastic. One, because we could afford it. Two, San Francisco is deeply resistant to change of any kind in the physical city. We all want San Francisco to be as we remember it to have been when we first arrived here. And so it's hard to imagine doing anything new in San Francisco because so much of the new that has been done here has harmed what we love so much about the city. So at SFMTA, we've been doing easily reversible experiments, making a lot of adjustments, using the quick build experiment itself as central to the community engagement process because nobody can read a plan diagram and imagine what it's gonna be like. Like you can imagine what it's gonna be like when you actually mock the thing up in real space. And then from there, we've been very successful then at attracting external funding to take our temporary experiments and make them permanent or take our temporary experiments and say, you know what, that wasn't such a good idea after all, why don't we change it and keep iterating until we get it right. And I think that's all true, funding and the difficulty of changing even like a parking space, right, to do daylighting. Those are not easy conversations but even despite that, we are pressing forward because our goals are so important. The demand is there for safety to close the economic and equity, equitable sort of equity disparities between neighborhoods as well. For example, we're partnering on Brotherhood Way. This is a traditional high volume, high speed, speedway really that needs to be rebalanced and with the community, with the community leading the conversation, we have a desire to kind of really re-imagine the circulation and safety and access in that area. And it's a legacy of just, you know, the sort of still the highway of 50s highway area because that's obviously a connection to highway one on the West side. And it's not just there, we just completed a similar exercise in Chinatown, you know, Portsmouth Square is Chinatown's living room, right? So we looked at all the streets around it and there were still things that needed to be done in terms of speed management and access and streetscape and even a sort of a raised sort of crosswalk there similar to what we have in Hayes Valley, you know, like a shared street design with nice pavement and it doesn't have to be super expensive, it's very meaningful. So even these small interventions with community sort of co-creating it together, you know and having us kind of be responding to that, the opportunities are vast and it can happen, it's happening on Ocean Avenue, for example. You know, this is all along ocean which is where the K runs and we got to figure out a bike solution and pedestrian safety, the community is bringing us dozens of ideas, you know, in that whole area which is the most complex area, you know, where you've got a major commercial street, you've got all important huge land uses, schools, universities and 280 and the Bart Station and a major park, you know. So how do you make it all work? And that's where all the creative sort of collaborative sort of efforts of not only the neighborhoods but with agencies at all different levels of government is required. I liked it. I want to come back to this idea of co-creation, you know, with government officials and professors and citizens and empowering citizens, I think we should come back to that because I think it's really important and particularly now that we have more tools and there's more technology to be able to do that co-creation and to hear the most vulnerable voices a little louder. So I think we should come back to that but one thing I wanted to flag and because it's something that I focus on a lot too in the book and I know I've heard both of you talk about this is, you know, this layer cake approach to funding and how, you know, it's, it is difficult to pay for this stuff. And when you go from, you know, tax authorization to tax authorization, but also you don't, you have dwindling gas taxes and things like that. And I think that we should, as creative as we want to be, we still, we need funding streams and we need new funding streams. And, right, and we need to recognize that our existing funding streams shrink a bit every single year. So the gas tax has not been indexed to inflation since 1983. Yeah. And it's still set at the fuel efficiency rates of 1983. Similarly, most of the sources of revenue that we rely on, they increase at best each year with inflation while our costs increase with the cost of living because our costs are driven entirely by labor. We have to pay our workforce of living wage in a region where housing scarcity is always an increasing problem. So every year, our ability to deliver services shrinks by a few percentage points. Meanwhile, we're expected to not only keep delivering what we were delivering 10 years ago, but to also keep up with growth. And I think this goes back to me that we, my students, I talk a lot about tax structures and Tilly's talked in this class before and it goes back to, you know, we are a progressive city, but maybe we should be asking ourselves to you if we're progressive enough. Right, and also asking why is California the Republican minority rule tax paradise still living under restrictions from Governor Reagan and Howard Jarvis? That's prop 13. That said, that said. Prop 13 reference. That said, the voters in California did approve a pretty big gas tax increase. It's a federal government, I would agree, Jeff, right, that hasn't raised the gas tax since Reagan or somebody before, you know, at that era. But we have some new revenues at the state level and there's a historic infrastructure bill that was just passed, the bipartisan infrastructure bill was so nice to when Jeff hosted an event to receive Secretary Buttigieg recently. So there is historic levels of actual federal funding for infrastructure right now and there's even some state budget, right? From your class we've talked about the state surplus. Some of us going to transportation as well. So who's gonna get that? The local governments that are ready, the ones that have brought their projects up to a state of readiness to compete for grants. That means the planning and the cost estimation and whatever it is, the environmental review and they can provide the local match. So it's really, really important that voters here in San Francisco who are listening, please tell your friends and family that there is a ballot measure on November ballot prop L to renew the existing half cent sales tax, not to raise it, just to continue it for 30 years. And I'm not advocating anything, I'm just educating your public and your audience that this is on the ballot and it's quite important to be able to do those things is to pay for the investments we've been paying for with the sales tax for 30 years, but also to serve as that local match and to get our projects ready to compete for grants. That's right, and that's also the fund that we use for much of our traffic calming programs and neighborhoods for safe routes to schools programs, for many of the street projects that we do to help make streets better for commerce, better for people, safer for everyone. And we should shout out that there is a library measure, I believe on the ballot this fall as well, since thank you to the library for hosting us, but folks should be aware of that, that we have the most amazing library system. I would say in the world, but we serve people globally. So shout out to that too. So pay attention to your ballot folks. Well, maybe let's talk about, I mean, I think one of the things the library does for us here is kind of anchor us in culture, but I would argue, and I do argue that our streets anchor us in culture too. And I don't know that I talk about this in the book. I talk a lot about, I was a professor at Cal Poly and I talk a lot about the culture of ag and if you go down to San Luis Obispo and you go to the farmer's market and you see this just this revolution and they should really shut this down, every day of the week, but every Thursday night, you get 10,000 people that descend on this one street, Higuera Street in there. And then you see echoes of this in Paseo Bandera in Santiago, Chile, where you have this whole street that's been shut down for street art and for local artists. We have a little bit of that and remember a lot of that. I was gonna say, you just had to fool some street fair, didn't we? We have a lot of, right? I was gonna say one of my strongest memories when I moved here 20 years ago was finding myself immersed in this crazy cultural event in the Castro called Halloween. And it really was one of these life changing San Francisco experience because I didn't know who George Mascone was. I didn't know who Harvey Milk was. I ended up working with Ann Cronenberg and it was seminal and it instantaneously introduced me to the culture of San Francisco. And one of the things, we have a lot of it Jeff, it's triggering you, but does your organization manage that or is this something that you try to facilitate or is this all just organic community? When we go out and there's stuff happening in the street, how does that actually work from a nuts and bolts standpoint? Well, we're the owners of the world's greatest free public stage. And a big part of what we do is simply get out of the way and let community-based organizations do their weird, interesting, fascinating thing in the public realm. And that's everything from accommodating low riders on our mission street transit only lanes to rerouting the 24 for the Castro Street Fair or the Folsom Street Fair to facilitating farmer's markets in the Richmond district where produce that is aimed at the unique cultures, the Richmond district is available for sale on the street. Like, you know, every single week there are a dozen of these events of varying scale. So that's actually one of the most delightful things about my job is the little ones are easy. Sometimes just being able to facilitate, for example, allowing the Valencia Street merchants to close their street to cars and open it up to people every weekend required, you know, a thousand small negotiations among property owners, the residents in the block, the fire department very prominently trying to figure out what's the right level of management that is appropriate for maximizing safety for ensuring access for people with disabilities while letting the commercial corridor thrive. And that's, it's a big part of what we do is creating the container for safe, joyful expression. And I think it's really important to celebrate neighborhoods through their own ways of sort of marking that neighborhood. You know, a lot of them are now cultural districts like the African-American one, the Filipino one, in the Soma, you've got the Sunset one, and so many of them cropping up and they're all wanting to participate in that, which is really exciting. We're seeing the neighborhoods kind of, basically imagine different ways of designing streets. We were just talking about the Buchanan Mall in Japan Town and how wouldn't it be great for somehow connected through Geary, which I think we did a little bit with Geary Rapid Phase One that MTA did. And they did that and then now in the Fillmore, there's all this Buchanan street improvements, pedestrian safety and whatnot. So it's really about reconnecting, not only celebrating individual neighborhoods, but connecting them and connecting the communities across major arterials that divided them, such as Geary, bringing folks together. We would have never expected that there would be regular concerts on Page Slow Street or that when the Great Highway is closed to cars on weekends, that it would host protest marches and one of the most amazing Halloween events that I've ever seen, where hundreds of people came out with card tables and bags of candy onto a highway in the outer sunset. And I asked like, why are all you people here? Like why not have your Halloween celebrations someplace else? And the answer was number one, because the kids can run around safely and I don't have to worry about them. And number two, I live in a department and I've lived in a department for 30 years and I've always wanted to distribute Halloween candy and I've never been able to. And like all of these stories, like we didn't intend for any of that to happen, but when you build the stage in the right location because it's San Francisco, people invent entirely new and glorious ways of using public space. And if people are listening and they haven't been to San Francisco, you're in another city. We have a Great Alley Network too. That is incredible and green. And I talk one, I have a little vignette in the chapter about culture on a quinceanera that actually happened in the alley on the street. So they basically shut down the, the citizens shut down the alley. No permission, Jeff, sorry. But it was beautiful, right? Like you celebrated this, it was 15 years ago, so. No, but that happens every week in San Francisco. And another part of my job is looking the other way, knowing that we have the world's most amazing public stage and people should perform on it. But I think we, you know, we can also kind of say like some of those examples are also natural too. We've done a lot to green our streets. But one of the things I think it's important that we talk about is we talked a little bit about the fiscal challenges, but I think we'd be remiss to not talk about the housing challenges. And, you know, it's hard to talk about transportation when you don't talk about housing and when you don't talk about the fact that certain parts of our city are becoming tough for people to live in an accessible environment. Certain parts we do have places that have still been, that are still suffering from redlining and that we have historically with our transit systems underserved. I spend a lot of time talking about because that my dissertation was all about how our most walkable places in San Francisco even post great recession were starting to gentrify. And I was talking about this idea of urban displacement before I guess they called it displacement and this idea of migration in concentrated areas of poverty that weren't walkable, weren't bikeable and it's seen chronic disinvestment. And so what do we do? How do we actually solve some of those housing challenges at the same time we innovate our transit systems and we make our streets greener and more multimodal? This is a big issue for everyone in the Bay Area and beyond. It's not just unique to our area but I think we have a more pronounced and acute challenge here. The wealth disparity, the sprawl that has happened in the last 50 years is very evident. And by now what's nice is you do hear other jurisdictions talking about it's not just, San Francisco or folks, but really everyone has an appreciation for it and we also see the effects of it sadly for the unhoused and all the other phenomena that we're working on. So I think that this is a shared responsibility and I think it's not just planners talking about it, it's grassroots and grass tops and it's now at least accepted and understood priority. Now what to do about it? This goes beyond my pay grade in our lane in transportation but it really is the flip side of transportation. You can't talk about one without the other and I think we all are committed to supporting transit oriented development and even innovative things like what your agency is doing at the SFMTA's Petro Yard. As they rebuild their garages and their yards, what can be done to bring other resources, housing resources to at the same time potentially add hundreds of units on top of it and that's a replacement of the rebuild of the Petro Yard. That's really creative and that took a huge neighborhood conversation, not just transportation folks. So really credit to elected officials and all the other folks in that conversation at the community level. But I think that that's how it still always has to come back to that community conversation. And I was just at the 50th anniversary of the BART system, right? It was fantastic and it was right there at Lake Merritt and that parcel of land has been there since I was a baby planner at MTC. Now it's gonna have 500 units of housing finally. Finally, this is ridiculous that 50 years after BART was created we're finally doing the right thing and putting the right level of sort of land use and type of land use around that station. But finally we're doing it and that model is starting to really pop up through really creative models. I think it's gonna take innovative financing and delivery models and the whole community of smart people coming to that but how do you make that happen? I don't really know but I'm really glad to see that that's starting to become shared and that knowledge and that expertise and those resources. Larry Beasley who's the former planning director of the city of Vancouver very wisely said that the best transportation plan is a good housing plan. And that's certainly true here, here in San Francisco and much of the urban core of our region we're better than any place else in the world at job creation. We're amazing and we create phenomenally well-paying jobs but we're not legalizing sufficient housing production in order to accommodate those jobs without displacing folks who are already here. And so we're exporting our housing problem farther and farther and farther east and that has a huge impact and my ability to attract and retain transit operators. And so I'm actually very grateful that the entire Bay Area State Legislative Delegation agrees about the severity of this problem and that the state is taking action and saying like, look, in a local control is great and preservation is great but not at the expense of having this region no longer be able to accommodate newcomers. You know, this region has thrived because it has welcomed immigrants and weirdos. I wanna make sure that the next generation of immigrants and weirdos is able to move into San Francisco and that younger people, my nieces and nephews can have some hope of living in this city. All those little Pokemon Go players. That's right. Well, 100% agree and I think this is a little, this is again, like Tilly you said, this is a little, above our pregrade as transportation nerds but I think we as students of cities agree and I think if we think about construction technology we think about different ways of thinking about parking, different ways of thinking about accessory units, different ways of thinking about density. The state is actually giving us tools to address that and it's phenomenal but it's also an opportunity to really think about new ways of finance. Maybe thinking about, we've got new ways of thinking about teacher housing now on school district land, on city employer based housing for cities and I think there, I think it's a yes and thing and I think we're getting ahead of this as a city. So I talked a little bit about this in the book on strategies and identifying some of those vacant parcels but I think it's one of those things, we get blindsided if we're just thinking about making these beautiful, awesome high tech roadways if we don't think about the people that we're encouraging to live in those places. And to meter that the investment to be commensurate with land use, right? So if we are looking at potentially putting a subway underneath 19th Avenue and Urie, we've got to make sure that the land use makes sense in that same effort. That's right and that's why we're doing a lot of planning right now, planning for making sure that the west side of San Francisco can have as good or better transit access than the east side and it's relatively straightforward in the short run. We're working hard at trying to upgrade 19th Avenue so that the 28 isn't stuck in congestion, that people have a safe place to wait for the bus. That construction is ongoing right now. We're wanting to get started on a plan to upgrade the 29th sunset, what is arguably our longest bus line and one that is incredibly important for school kids as well as for North-South commuting on the west side. We're rebuilding the entirety of Terraval Street right now, partly to deal with 100 year old utilities underneath the street, but to also make sure that the L-Terraval trains are fast and reliable and that the quality of the infrastructure supports a really vibrant commercial street along the entire length of Terraval. We're hoping to do similar work on the Anjuda corridor. We're in the process right now of upgrading the 38 Geary. We're getting about 15% travel time savings given the current work that we've done on Geary. We're getting comparable travel time savings on the one California and we got two years ago when we did the five rapid comparable travel time savings in the Fife-Fulton corridor. So we're beginning the process of really upgrading all of the services on the west side and with a modest amount of additional resources we'll be able to complete that work which will ultimately culminate, we hope, in a subway, you know, cross the bay into the Trans Bay Transit Center and then out Geary and down 19th Avenue to tie the whole west side, not only to downtown but to also the jobs in the South Bay and jobs and opportunities in the East Bay as well. It'd be great for my students to step on the hilltop. Indeed. Well, let's talk about that. You just took us into the future and there's a lot happening and I do want to talk about, we're not in a situation where it's like it was 15 years because we had this thing happen in 2012 that was radical, they decided to put a ride on your phone and you could go anywhere and cities were shocked and they didn't know what to do because there were all these cars that were picking up people that weren't taxis instantaneously. So we had Uber and Lyft and other companies that actually entered into our markets and now we're seeing a lot more things in terms of automation and robot, you know, sidewalk robots and scooters and bikes that are privately operated. So how do we manage these really radical technological changing ecosystems as we move forward and what are those mean to the future of our transportation systems? You want me to start? I'll start. I've heard you deal here. All right. So we spent a lot of time thinking about the future of mobility technology here in San Francisco and indeed we're very much techno optimists but our experience with collaborating with private mobility companies has not necessarily been positive. So we'd like to start looking at desirable outcomes. For us, one of the most important questions is does this transportation technology allow us to move more people in the same street? So we need to make the transportation system more spatially efficient in order to allow the city to continue to grow in jobs and population. So that's question number one. And then question number two is how does this technology help people with the fewest mobility choices get access to employment and services and other things that they need in a way that is more affordable and more accessible and more efficient for them? And for the most part, our technology companies can't answer those questions in a positive way. For the most part, private technology companies are forced to serve the convenience of the privileged and they misunderstand the difference between convenience and efficiency or the difference between user efficiency versus system efficiency. Tilly, do you want to talk about your agency's research into the unintended negative consequences of Uber and Lyft on city streets? Yeah, thanks. I think we're in like the maybe still early stretch of a nine inning ballgame. The first few innings were pretty tumultuous. I think dropping down a bunch of bike shares or scooters or TNCs without really talking was not a great recipe for success. So the early stages were a lot of conflict and just disruption and that was intended. So and we did see a huge demand uptake from the privileged, from those who could afford that service and with pricing that was subsidized by investors. So you had, in some cases, Uber or shared Lyft line or Uber, whatever they call that shared version, it was priced lower than a Munifair. So that's really not okay. So we battled a bit and then the market evolved and at the same time, we could not get a taxi in the middle of the day. And it was just not working for a lot of folks who just need to get a taxi, especially in the outer neighborhoods. If you're not going to the airport and if you're in a brown and black neighborhood, maybe you weren't getting a taxi. So we have to acknowledge that there was a problem that needed to be addressed. So and a problem that arose from my agency's failure to regulate the taxi industry with the users in mind. So our regulations were solving the problems in the 1930s, which created space for Uber and Lyft to solve for the user interface design problem as well as for the operator availability problem. And so we've learned a lot of lessons, both good and bad from our experience with Uber. Keep both sides, yeah. So these opportunities to learn are tremendous, right? So then we get into the documentation phase of what really happened. What are these claims of benefit? And oh, these are just first, last mile trips. In fact, they were not. The preponderance majority of these trips were happening in the downtown, in the peak, in our core where we're trying for 30, 50 years to invest in biking, walking and making transit the priority, right? And then all of a sudden we're seeing, one in every four trips downtown in the peak be in Lyft or Uber. And that's not okay, right? Dramatically increasing congestion and therefore reducing the number of people that my streets could move, right? And this is before our massive investment in transit-only lanes. So the rise of Uber and Lyft were also slowing muni buses down. They were blocking the bike lane and the muni and whatnot and that's documented. And there were all kinds of other issues. Now that doesn't mean that we always were in conflict. We actually collaborated. We collaborated with the leadership of Phil Ting and Supervisor Peskin and the whole mayor and the board coming together around a per ride fee. So that was quite innovative. It passed the voters and Prop D passed in 2019 and that generates a 3.25% trip on every ride-hale trip originating in San Francisco. And so now- Glad you mentioned that. You said it's too low. Just gets half of it, we get half of it. So I think your half goes to muni that you guys put toward it and our half goes to Safe Streets which is basically MTA as well. So everyone can sort of see some benefit. It's not a huge amount of revenue but it's an important start. And I think it's a, I love the way you phrased it. It's the first part of the baseball game, right? This is a long stretch. The technology is evolving and you know that I've been working with crews on some of their initial pilots to serve these little gaps when maybe there's not as much transit service and things like that. But one of the things I like that you always say, Jeff and this is very in line with the 10th chapter in the book is that we have to think about dedicated right away. And that's for transit. But we also have to, and I would even argue we have to start thinking of our streets as real estate and it's really valuable municipal real estate that we need to charge rent for. And we need to charge rent for it and we need to zone it appropriately. And right, like so we think about zoning for other land uses. If we want to have a car free downtown and you're not saying this, I'm saying this. Maybe we need to think about a pedestrianized, more pedestrianized corridors or maybe we need to radically think about more space on many of our corridors dedicated to even more states that dedicated to bicycles and pedestrians and transit. And so I think that's, yeah. And then the curb is another thing like what do we do with pickup and drop off? And I know you guys, you all both spend a lot of time on that. Oh yeah, right. Including thinking about pickup and drop off for autonomous vehicles. Right. So one of the challenges that we're facing right now with crews is crews hasn't learned to parallel park yet. So all pickup and drop off occurs in the traffic lane. And as the number of autonomous vehicles increase in our streets, that is having the impact of wiping out a huge amount of our street capacity. It's like taking lanes off of our arterials reducing the number of people that those corridors can move. And we're very concerned about that. And we should reference that there are like DMV restrictions, for example, that restrict for pulling over, for example, in a private driveway. But I believe you're working on kind of relaxing some of those rules at the city so you can pull over, for example, just like an Uber and Lyft drivers for some of these vehicles that are algorithmically driven. Absolutely. And while I have no regulatory authority over autonomous vehicles, I do have control over the curb. And so we're eager to partner with technology companies to help them understand how cities work, help them to understand unintended negative consequences and help to capture the upside of technology while minimizing the downside. Like our job is to manage the public right of way for the public good. And that means welcoming any innovation in that can help us to achieve our goals without creating harm, right? And I think the unintended negative consequence part of it is really important to us as well. Another thing that we found with Uber and Lyft, they never intended to harm access for people with wheelchairs in San Francisco, but that was a direct impact at their service. So before Uber and Lyft, the bulk of trips by people in wheelchairs occurred in our regulated taxi cab system. And so when Uber and Lyft arrived and decimated the taxi industry, the people who bore the brunt of the cost of that were people in wheelchairs who lost regulated cab service that we could require be wheelchair accessible when Uber and Lyft did not have a plan for achieving wheelchair accessibility for their managed fleet. So that was a huge unintended consequence that could have been predicted and we could have partnered in order to solve, but did not. Now things that we are partnering in now piloting are things like shared autonomous services and shared shuttles basically that are gonna be soon on Treasure Island through a pilot that's federally funded as part of the Smart City Grant that we got with SFMTA. So this will be a first demonstration in California of shuttles operating autonomously on public streets carrying members of the public. That's right, and our goal again is about allowing our streets of limited right of way to move more people. And so that means prioritizing the modes of transportation that fill the most seats and deep prioritizing those with the most empty seats or the most empty cargo space. We can't afford to waste street space. And I don't care whether it's a privately operated transit service or a publicly operated transit service. What I really care about is moving more people in the same amount of space and prioritizing those with the fewest choices. I think you all have both hit on this idea of the public good and that focus on public and citizen action, listening to citizens. Now that's really where the book that I wrote ends and it's really about calling people to action. I believe our streets are really important to helping us address the climate crisis but also empowering people, giving them social mobility but also really moving us, creating job opportunities, moving us through the city. And also I think there are places for experimentation but I think you hit the nail on the head. It's got to be safe, sustainable and shared. And those kinds of public values are things that I think we can all agree on. So I don't know if you have any final words but we should probably see if anybody that's here, anybody online has a question. We talked more than what we thought we were going to. With us, we can go on for another six hours, I'm sure. Anybody in the audience? The anticipated plans, is there any anticipation for Carfree Market to expand? I'm sorry, for what? Better Market Street. For Better Market Street and for it to expand beyond the current bounds. Yeah, so the Carfree Zone, so right before the pandemic, like in January, about six weeks before the pandemic, we launched a quick build project on Market Street that removed almost all private car traffic from the street in order to help make walking and biking and transit all work better on Market Street. This is something that folks have been talking about for decades and decades and decades and everyone thought that the world would end if we did that and we did it and everyone's just like, oh, why didn't we do this 20 years ago? So it's been working fairly well, there's been some hiccups, so we're increasing the infrastructure in order to help make it work better. We're continuing to step up the enforcement and then the other question is about shifting the Carfree portion west to Venice as part of the hub implementation planning. So that's currently not yet scheduled but we're doing the planning for that and then thinking about a whole variety of other improvements from Market Street, everything from a lot of basic infrastructure upgrades to expanding the transit boarding islands to make them both wheelchair accessible for the first time as well as more welcoming and as well as accommodating multiple buses at once and a lot of additional pedestrian improvements and potentially some significant bikeway improvements as well. And I know this is not in my purview so I can just say whatever I want but I think better market is just gonna get better as we see more housing, particularly downtown, like in Moncay and Marie-Anne-Marcadero, I think as we see more people living adjacent to Market Street, it's gonna become more lively and it's gonna be used after hours, it's gonna be commercial, it'll become more vibrant. Yeah, I think this economic cycle that we're in, so we're in a bust cycle now in San Francisco's classic boom bust pattern, about every 10 to 15 years since 1850, San Francisco has gone through this pattern of booms and busts. We're in an interesting bust cycle now and what happens in these is an incredible unleashing of creativity that happens as we begin the boom. And so one thing that I would expect is the pre-war office and retail buildings to clear around Union Square will start to convert to more interesting uses that will bring more and more diverse people downtown. I'm waiting to see what on earth will happen to some of the boxiest 1980s office buildings. I'd be worried about some of those properties but I think that the downtown is going to be going through a quite an interesting cycle. And I think there's some Tishman Steyer projects down there and there's some other stuff that's happening near the old, the temporary Trans Bay admission that could be really interesting. I have a Zoom question. I really appreciate Billy's focus and previous research on transitioning one-way roads to two-way roads. In San Francisco, we have a lot of one-way roads, particularly in Soma, where cars speed between lights. Tillie and Jeff, are there any plans to transition away from one-way streets? And Billy, what do you think of a shift would do for our city? So generally speaking, I much prefer two-way streets and I think the research on that is very positive. However, I would also point out that arguably the safest and most walkable city in the Western United States is Portland, Oregon, where all of the streets are one-way and all of the one-way streets are timed so that cars and bikes never have to stop at red light. What's unique about Portland is that they use their one-way streets not to maximize vehicle speed and traffic flow, but really to maximize safety and experience. So their lights are timed for a 12 mile an hour progression. You can drive all the way across downtown Portland without ever having to stop, but only if you stay at about 12 miles an hour. And what's interesting about that speed is that it's the design speed for the human body. That's our peak sprinting speed and our bodies are designed so that when we trip on a route while we're running away from a saber-toothed tiger that if we hit our head, we're gonna be bruised but not killed. And so one of the things that I want us to think about as a city is how can we make the city make traffic flow smoothly but not necessarily as fast as we do today? That's a really amazing opportunity. Another thing that stands in the way of massive conversion of one-way streets to two-way streets is it requires that we have to redo all of the traffic signals, which then requires that we have to rebuild all of the intersections, which then triggers a bunch of underground utility upgrades that end up costing many millions of dollars per intersection and creating years of disruption. So one of the things that I've been focusing on at the SFMTA is how do we do more faster in order to achieve our social equity, our economic recovery and climate goals and public health and safety goals? How can we do more quickly given our limited resources? Well, it's not a panacea. I think that's what Jeff said. To be honest, I've loved this work of mine looking at these two-way street conversions but I think what Jeff identified is speed and geometry and you do have case studies and we have one in San Francisco, it's called Lombard Street, it's amazing and it's a big tourist attraction and people drive slow on it. But we also have, I think that when you look at the case studies, there are opportunities to do lane narrowing and potentially switches but Jeff hit the nail on the head, sometimes you have to look at the, you have to do a benefit cost analysis. In one of my previous jobs, we actually literally did the analysis at UC Berkeley on switching bankrupt and Durant. We did it with Citi, I was a transportation manager for UC Berkeley and then worked with the city and Farron Pierce to do an analysis there. It was gonna cost us about $12 million and Jeff hit the nail on the head. It's signalization and painting utilities and per intersection, sometimes it doesn't pencil but there's some anomalies there and I'd encourage you to check out a paper that Jeff Boeing and I just wrote, the person in the audience, that it does look at the potential network benefit that when you look at network performance, there is a GHG benefit from the network functioning as a network because of increased throughput you see. So if you're to price that carbon savings on an annualized basis, that you might actually be able to justify the cost. So that's some stuff that's a little more on the academic side but thanks for the question. I really appreciate it. Also a question about any future plans for the Excelsior district. Yes, so a lot is going on in the southern part of San Francisco, it's actually a lot of where we've been making our major investments. So, you know, well, it's not my, it's one of my favorite best lines in the city and certainly the most productive one is the 14 mission which we've been investing heavily in the entire length of the line and it serves the Excelsior really well, the whole commercial corridor of the Excelsior. So the 14 mission has been operating more quickly, more frequently and more reliably. We believe that it has in its entire history. So we've made major investments in transit only lanes and transit prioritization, the entire length of Mission Street and by abandoning schedules and switching to what we call headway management during the worst days of COVID, we've been able to dramatically expand reliability along the 14 and the 14 rapid. So that rather than having five buses come every half hour, you know, there's one bus every five minutes like clockwork and in fact, we're actually running buses about every two minutes and improved the overnight service in the 14 for running every half hour to every 15 minutes all night long. So that line runs 24 seven and it is a true workforce line. So we go ahead. Oh, so we've also been investing in pedestrian safety and beautification along the corridor and particularly at the Mission Geneva intersection which has historically been one of, you know, one of the greatest concentrations of particularly pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Also the intersection of a whole slew of transit lines that are super important in very high ridership. There's also, we're trying to extend the safe and slow streets network into the Excelsior so that folks can safely bike from the Excelsior to other neighborhoods, both to the North as well as to the West in particular. And that includes some of the changes that Tilly discussed earlier, including really rethinking not just Brotherhood Way but Sagamore and Sickles as well to better connect the Excelsior to some of the amazing investments that have happened in the Southwestern part of the city. The Excelsior is a remarkable neighborhood to me because of its deep diversity and the fact that it is a neighborhood that truly still welcomes newcomers. And so fostering the small business formation and wealth development among the immigrant populations the Excelsior very important to us as well as connecting the people of the Excelsior to opportunities whether that's jobs downtown or in Mission Bay or in the peninsula. Extending the 14 rapid to Daily City Burt Station was also very important to us to connect the neighborhood to growing jobs to the South. And to that, I'll just add that at the Transportation Authority this week we approved funding for the design of Sickles, speaking of Sickles, and it'll turn into a capital grant as well next year to the state for big capital construction funds and the 29, you left out the 29. Well, I talked about the 29 and before. Oh yeah, yeah. So that's definitely coming. We just funded or recommended funding for the Western part of the 29, the North South and then the East West, including through the Excelsior is phase two. That's right. No, no, I thought phase one is the East West part. No, all right, you got it right. The O-Bag funds that we just prioritized in the city was the North South at least that's what I understood. Yeah, our goal at the SFMTA is to really bolster the entire 20. The whole 29. Yeah. We create a rapid service for that whole corridor because it connects so many critical neighborhoods and like how many schools, 15 schools? Yeah. So I'm very large numbers. Huge number of schools, the 29 rapid. Yep, let's do it. The 2017 subway vision plan had some really, really neat ideas. How do we make that a reality to get people moving quickly on separated grades? Well, the very first one, well, certainly they're gonna be opening a central subway in November 19th. And then the next one in the wings is the downtown extension of Caltrain and High Speed Rail into Salesforce Transit Center. So just please let your elected leaders know up and down the state and the federal government because we're gonna be relying on state and federal grants in addition to the local money that's in the Prop L measured in November. So please let folks know it's on the ballot here as well. So that's the very next major tunnel project. And then thereafter, I think we're collaborating with Bard and Capital Corridor and then locally, we mentioned the Geary 19th. There's also central subway potentially further going pushing north. There's a new baby Caltrain station that's in the works to replace the old Paul Avenue that was, that's not a tunnel, but just gotta throw that in there. That's right. You can find the overall transit strategy for the next 20 to 30 years. If you do a search for connect SF transit strategy, there's a document from last year that'll come up and what's the adoption process for the overall transit process? So the county wide plan is the next piece of connect SF, the San Francisco plan, transportation plan. And that'll come to our transportation authority for adoption by the end of the year, December. That's right. So if you go search for those projects, you can figure out how to get involved in the approvals process. And then the other longer range plan is the big regional plan called link 21. That includes some significant investment here in San Francisco. That includes the new subway line from daily city station at 19th Avenue to Geary to Soma to Transbay, across the bay and to Oakland and then beyond into Sacramento. I have one last question, which is what is your favorite part of the book, Billy? Oh, well, this is interesting. You know, I think it's always good to have a first, a good first chapter and a good last chapter. So there's some really, I think Tilly had identified this earlier that my tone, I tried to make the tone of this book really personal and there's some personal stories in the first chapter that really made me a transportation planner. One of which was I ruptured my Achilles tendon in college and I was planning this big trip to the Netherlands and I had to cancel the trip. And just being able to, for the first time, really tell that story and link it to my career as an academic and a transportation planner and engineer, it's important. But then we know what I tried to do with this book and this, so I like that part, but I really tried to tie that to the end. And so since I'm in a Jesuit institution, I really thought it was important to reference La Dato Si, which is Pope Francis' call for thinking about our connectedness to the planet and seeing God in nature. And so for me, that connects this idea of the mission we all have to care for our common home and how we do it here on stage is by making our transportation more sustainable. Yeah, so thanks everybody if you're being here, really appreciate that. A great question. All right, thanks everyone for coming tonight. There are still books for sale in the back of the room, so please take part in that, thanks. And Billy can sign. That's right, thank you so much and thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it, it's a great conversation. Yeah, thank you.