Good morning, everyone.

This meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the September 25th, 2025 regular meeting of the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

I'm Supervisor Bilal Mahmoud, Vice Chair of this committee, and I'll be chairing today's committee in light of Chair Dorsey's absence.

Today I'm joined by Supervisor Sauter and President Mandelman.

Our ever-capable clerk today is Monique Creighton, whom we thank for staffing us today.

And together we'd like to express our gratitude to Matthew Ignau and the entire team at SFGov TV for facilitating and broadcasting today's meeting.

Madam Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes.

Members, uh, excuse me.

Please make sure to install cell phones and electronic devices documents to be included as part of the file should be submitted to the clerk.

Public comment will be taken on each item on this agenda.

When your item of interest comes up and public comment is called, please line up to speak on your right.

Alternatively, you may submit public comment in writing in either of the following ways.

First, you may email them to myself, the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee Clerk at M-O-N-I-Q-U-E.

C-R-A-Y-T-O-N at SFGOV.org.

Or you may submit your written comments via U.S.

Postal Service to our office in City Hall.

Number one, Dr.

Carlton, be good place, room 244, San Francisco, California 94102.

Finally, if you submit public comment in writing, it will be forwarded to the supervisors and also included as part of the official file on which you are commenting.

Before we begin, I'd like to uh clerk make a motion to excuse Chair Dorsey from today's meeting.

Yes, and on the motion to excuse Chair Dorsey.

Member Mandelman.

Member Mandelman, aye.

Member Sauter?

Member Sauter, aye.

Vice Chair Mahmood.

Aye.

Vice Chairman Mood.

I have three ayes with uh with Chair Dorsey excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Uh, will you please call the first item?

Yes, the first item is a hearing on the state of traffic enforcement and street safety in San Francisco.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Uh, I want to start by recognizing President Mandelman, who first called for this hearing back in 2018, and to thank him for keeping the spotlight on this issue.

Since then, we've continued to see the same troubling pattern uh on the trend of traffic enforcement uh declining year after year as staffing in the police department has fallen short.

People often ask me, what would it mean to actually have a fully staffed police department again?

And my answer is simple.

It means officers once again on our streets enforcing the basic rules of the road, including speeding.

That return to visibility and accountability is what our neighbors are asking for, and what we are here to discuss today.

And with that, President Manelman, the floor is yours.

Uh thank you, Vice Chair Mahmoud, and um thank you, Supervisor Sauter.

I want to thank also Supervisor Cheryl, who um is also a co-sponsor for this hearing.

Um and uh yes, as uh as you indicated, um, this is a long time conversation indeed.

Even before I joined the board, um uh supervisors were having hearings on traffic enforcement.

Um that 2018 hearing was actually um called for by Supervisor Feuer, I think, and I I joined her.

Um, and even in 2018, we could see uh a very significant decline from 2014 levels.

I think in 2014, 129,597 citations were issued.

Um that number by 2022, notwithstanding our hearings had gone down to 4,006.

Um, and there were uh a number of newspaper stories about the 96% decrease in traffic citations since 2014.

Um I think we saw the impacts of that in lots of ways.

People uh San Franciscans uh see uh people driving through red lights, um, cutting folks off in crosswalks, um, behaving really, really badly.

And it is also worth noting that notwithstanding um significant investments in Vision Zero infrastructure, um, that investment coincided with a period where San Francisco basically went out of the traffic enforcement business.

The reasons for that were complicated, and we have explored that in prior hearings.

Um we are uh down 550, 600 officers or so.

18.

18.

Down to 18.

And on any given day, any particular shift, that number is going to be way lower than 18.

So you know that that's the bad news that we've been exploring over uh five hearings or uh five meetings of this particular hearing since 2022.

Now, there is some good news, and I think we're gonna hear more about that, which is that that decline, that graph that was so frustrating to so many of us has turned around.

We have leveled off, and we have seen um an increase in enforcement since 2022 year over year.

So it seems to be like this is a sustained thing, and we're hoping we're gonna continue to see that number go up.

I would note though that we are still, I believe, at an 88% decrease from 2014 levels.

So that's better.

We need to give credit where credit is due.

Leveling off is good, increasing, which is what is actually happening now, increasing citations is even better.

But we're still, I think, not um where I want us to be, where the board of supervisors wants us to be.

Where I think the police department probably wants us to be, um, and figuring out how to get there is part of what's what what I'm hoping to do in this in this hearing and this series of hearings.

The other potentially good news, or I think it actually is absolutely good news, is that there are technologies that can, particularly when we are short on staff, augment um what our officers are able to do.

We do have the red light cameras and have for a number of years, and I'm hoping we'll be able to talk a little bit about that with the police department.

As of this year, we have speed cameras in 33 locations around the city.

Um I was pleased a couple of weeks ago to be out with uh neighbors in uh the Castro on a block that had seen pretty horrendous speeding that had resulted in multiple crashes into cars parked along the side of the road, and even homes.

So people on this block were finding their homes getting plowed into by speeding cars, and then that stretch since the um since the speed cameras went in, there's been a 15 percent reduction um in speeding incidents.

Um I think on Fulton Street, there was a reduction of something like 63 percent, 65%, something like that.

So these technologies do seem to help, and it may be that we can get by with a you know somewhat fewer officers doing enforcement maybe than we had in 2014.

I still think we don't have enough doing enforcement for what we need, even with the technology.

We can talk more about that.

Anyway, that's where I think we are.

I think we've made some progress, and I think we're not where we need to be, but I hope we're heading in the I think we're heading in the right direction.

And I want to give um uh Commander Nicole Jones, who's moved on a lot of credit for that.

Of course, Captain Pete Shields, who's been working on this for a number of years, and I think we might be hearing from him in this hearing.

Maybe not, maybe he's just here to support Commander Luke Martin of this of the Special Operations Bureau, who's gonna present for uh police at the police department, and then we will be hearing from the MTA um Shannon Hake from the Liverpool Cities program, and maybe Janet Martinson will be uh the local affairs, the local legislative affairs program manager um may be uh addressing us as well.

And with that, I'll hand this over to Commander Martin.

Great, thank you, uh Supervisor Mandelman.

Good morning, other supervisors.

Uh, thank you for having me.

Um, you pretty much covered everything.

I'm not sure uh what else I can go over, but um I'll try.

Uh so I was here in 2018 uh sitting in Captain Pete Shields' seat there as the acting captain for that hearing.

Um so I remember it well and several others that we've had over the years, um, as I was there for about five years doing exactly what uh Captain Shields is doing.

So I'm Commander Luke Martin, I'm the commander of special operations, it encompasses MTA and our traffic division.

So we oversee um traffic enforcement and work with MTA on a lot of different uh Vision Zero related safe safe streets related um initiatives.

So when working through this PowerPoint presentation, I wanted to start with um kind of what drives our traffic enforcement and why we think it is so important to do that, and that's um you know, traffic fatalities and serious injury collisions.

So I'm just gonna try to provide some data just so we can see.

And this is a traffic fatalities by mode and by year.

So from 2014 through June of 2025.

In the blue, you have pedestrians, and that beige, you have a driver motor motorcyclist, scooter, passenger, and then that light blue a bicyclist.

So these are the fatalities that have happened over the years, and you can see it's um heavy on the pedestrian side.

So we've been seeing that as kind of a a trend over the years that the pedestrians are usually the most vulnerable in these fatal collisions, and I think for obvious reasons.

Next, and the next slide, this is total injuries.

Uh, we also have on the very top, it's kind of hard to see, but in a light blue, that's the the fatal collisions that compares against those uh serious injury collisions, and also year by year, starting 2014 through our uh June of 2025, and those numbers are fairly consistent.

We do have that drop-off in 2020, probably due to COVID lack of vehicles on the road.

Um, but you can you can see it's it's not just fatalities, it's it's the serious injuries that that lead to a lot of other you know complications for the victims of those incidents that we're we're also trying to mitigate.

Next, in the next slide, you can see this graph, it sort of highlights um both the mode, whether pedestrian driver, motor motorcyclist, or a passenger of a vehicle, but also the age of those victims, and we can see what kind of stands out is 65 and older seem to be um the most at risk.

Uh, and then when you couple that with being a pedestrian and 65 and older, so that's that's also um an area of note that we need to I think focus more on to address that more specifically.

And the next slide, these are our high injury networks on the on the uh left-hand side of your screen.

This is uh data compiled by MTA where where the injury collisions have happened, it kind of drives where our deployments for traffic enforcement typically go.

It's uh usually a pretty good measure of where we're gonna see a lot of serious injury collisions.

In addition to that, we also use the traffic fatalities that are that are most recent also as a way to kind of do deployment.

That map on the right kind of has an overlay of the fatalities up to June 30th over the high injury network.

So you can see a lot of them intersect with the high injury, but some don't.

So it can be unpredictable.

But when we see an incident, we definitely look into the specifics of the incident and then try to work with the district stations and doing enforcement through through our traffic division.

Okay, so here we're getting into our our traffic enforcement and citations.

So in this graph, you'll see that breakdown from 2014 through the end of August 2025.

So it's our most current data that we have at the moment.

And this is uh total traffic and dark green, and then the focus on the five violations in light green.

And you can see that breakdown.

Um, it reflects exactly what Supervisor Mandelman was mentioning.

How we had great number of traffic citations written uh back in 2024, 2025, but you see that kind of steady decline, and then that large drop-off right when COVID hit, and then we're we're starting to slowly pick it back up.

So in agreement with uh Supervisor Mandelman, that's that's our goal is to can continue building that that graph bar higher and higher up, and both total citations and the focus on the five citations, which we've seen over and over again, usually correlate with a serious injury or fate fatal collision.

So in this next slide, these are uh department wide traffic citations uh 2023 versus 2024 versus August through August of 2025 comparison, and uh as you can see in uh 2025 of you know, August of 2025, we're we're almost catching our last year total.

So, you know, we're projecting to outdo what we did in 2024.

I think we can pretty much count on that, and that and then obviously there's that huge jump jump between 2023 and 2024.

So I think a lot of that should be attributed to what uh Captain Pete Shields and Commander at the time, Commander Nicole Jones were doing to try to really change the culture within the police department and the focus on on more traffic enforcement as a department, not just within our traffic division.

Next.

And this this next slide shows kind of the breakdown that we we look at uh frequently between all the district stations, our traffic company, and some of those key citations around focus on the five that we see are usually factors in serious injury collisions, and just kind of look through those totals.

This is um January 1st, 2025 through through the end of uh June 2025.

So we see traffic company writing the bulk of the citations, and that's with you know, anywhere from where we're at 18 now to maybe I think the beginning of the year, we might have been around 20 to 22 officers.

So that number um is a lot less than what we see at district stations, so uh we really want to increase the numbers that we're seeing at the district stations.

Um I can tell you this having come from Southern Station as the captain, we really tried to focus on thinking outside the box to do our traffic enforcement in our district, uh, to get our numbers up.

I think we were the second lowest when I got there in 2022.

Uh I think Tenderloin was really close to us, as well as Northern and Central, all the downtown stations that typically experience the most calls for service, uh, typically don't have a lot of time for the traffic enforcement side.

But I think if you think about it in a different light, you can you can find ways to to get that done in those districts, and that's kind of what we're starting to see, which is great.

It's not enough, but we're we're we're starting to see that trend where the officers are now doing a lot more traffic enforcement.

Next.

So these are uh department wide this this graph kind of breaks down what that last slide had in a little more digestible manner.

So this is the department-wide traffic violations versus focus on the five violations, comparing year-to-date 2024 to 2025, and we are trending in the right direction.

We're writing more citations than we had in 2024 than we had in 2023, and so on.

So that's that's the really the big goal is to try to drive those numbers up as much as we can, but also do it so that it's in an effective manner that reduces serious injury collisions as much as we can.

So that's what we'll talk about a little more here on this next slide.

So this is just kind of a uh some of the specific operations that our traffic company does, and they do this in conjunction with the different district stations.

So we do wave operations, and this is a kind of a consistent attack on a particular incident.

So if we're seeing a pedestrian issue in a particular district, that's gonna have a consistent approach.

Um certain times of the day, certain days of the week, um, repeated over several weeks.

Uh, we also do LIDAR speed operations where we're actually measuring the speed of vehicles, uh pedestrian safety operations, they vary from doing a kind of a sting operation where we have officers dressed down in plain clothes as um decoys while other officers are watching to see if vehicles are behaving properly and yielding to those uh pedestrians.

Um they've resulted in over 1,600 stops, over 1500 citations issued with roughly 272 warnings.

Um give a little credit to Captain Pete Shields.

He was telling me that he noticed that those pedestrian operations were too low after they got the numbers at the end of June, and since then he's conducted uh 10 additional uh pedestrian related enforcement operations and various parts of the city.

So uh we had discussed this and and that should be um where the bulk of I think of our our operations should be around is is trying to protect uh pedestrians from bad vehicular behavior, and then uh this might not be common knowledge, but the red light cameras and the speed cameras uh are operated by two different agencies.

Uh SFPD, we control the the red light cameras, uh MTA oversees the speed cameras.

Uh so I won't steal their thunder, and uh I'll I'll skip that bottom bar there that uh we have here, but in between there, the red light camera enforcement in uh between January and December 2024.

There were over 11,000 citations issued.

And from January to the end of June of 2025, uh 5,596 citations issued.

So there are 19 cameras uh throughout the city.

There used to be upwards of 30.

The technology was getting old and um needing replacement.

So they've been slowly getting replaced by a new company.

Uh there are six more cameras that are going to be coming online uh pretty soon, um, but they are cost prohibitive.

So just those six cameras are going to cost uh over 1.8 million dollars to get them up and running.

So um I would agree with Supervisor Mandleman where I believe those would be a great uh tool to help reduce speeding uh running through stoplights, blocking the box on approaches to the freeway that cause a lot of havoc.

Also would help reduce pedestrians coming in contact with vehicles if people aren't going to avoid getting that red light camera ticket, but obviously we have to factor in budget and things like that.

And that will be the end of that slide show presentation.

Happy to answer any questions.

Um thank you, Vice Chair Mahmood.

Um, and thank you for the presentation.

I have a few things I'd like to follow up on.

So I want to talk about stations because um I think it is important that stations take this, that captains take this seriously, and um I'm interested in how that message is communicated by the department out to the um out to the various stations.

But as you alluded to, there are stations that are just so buried by the the work that they're doing in other areas of law enforcement that the notion that they're gonna dramatically ramp up their traffic enforcement is you know a little hard to imagine.

And so a lot of this inevitably does fall to traffic company to to address.

And so when you say that we're down to 18, um, that's alarming.

It was alarming in 2018 when we were down to 30 something.

Um, and so can you talk a little bit about what, if any, plans there are in the department to beef up traffic company?

Yeah, so we just had a academy class graduate recently.

So that is gonna give us a little boost.

31 officers are joining the police department.

They're going through their field training.

That should allow us to get roughly out of about four officers to traffic company.

It's not much, but considering the rest of the needs of the department, uh the officers from that academy are basically going to be spread around to different areas that have the have needs as well.

So working with Deputy Chief Sawyer, who's right behind me, who's my boss at special operations, uh Deputy Chief Nicole Jones, who really understands the need to um upstaff traffic company, I think will have a steady flow of new officers working in traffic company over the next couple years.

So it's definitely in our conversations a priority to increase the number of traffic officers.

Do you does the department have a goal of what tra how many officers should in a fully staffed department be in traffic company?

We know we need we think full staffing is 500 something more officers than we have now.

Yes.

Do we know what full staffing of traffic company would look like?

Sure.

If we had that many new officers injected into the police department, uh traffic company should be around 80.

Around 80.

Yes.

And we're at about 18.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we got work to do.

Yes.

Um quite a bit.

Okay, so going back to the stations, and there's dramatic variability if you look at those charts and different stations, but some of it looks like stations that you would think of as being slightly sleepier places.

Not that any place is sleepy, crime's happening everywhere, but looks like places that maybe aren't dealing with quite as much violent crime on as regular a basis a regular basis have maybe more ability to get their folks out on motorcycles or in cars, kind of like keeping an eye on how people are driving, and then citing them when they're or stopping them, admonishing them when they're driving badly.

So nonetheless, this should be a priority at every station to the extent it can do it.

And how does that message, how does that prioritization get communicated out to the captains and to their stations?

So prior to myself in this seat, I know Commander Nicole Jones would would regularly address it at our various meetings that we have every month with all our captains and above.

And it's it's been a difficult shift trying to get some of the officers at the busier stations to focus on traffic enforcement over the years.

But it having been at one of the busiest stations in the department, we were able to get that shift going, going from bottom of the barrel to maybe number one or number two, depending on the month and traffic citations, it can be done.

So it's it's I think really infusing the leadership at those stations with that type of an approach and uh providing them some of the different tools that they have that they might not be aware of.

So we have almost a full group at the district stations that are all new captains.

So they're learning a lot of different things over the next year here.

And one of those things will be some of the tools that you have at your disposal to increase traffic enforcement in your district.

Um we actually addressed them when they first came in and were promoted, and that was one of the things we talked about is some of the things that that some of the other captains and I have done at our stations to not only uh increase traffic enforcement, just emphasize the importance of it.

So the goal will be to keep a close eye on them to continue messing it, messaging it, to continue the work that traffic company does and Captain Shields do on a regular basis and reaching out to those captains and saying, hey, we have officers that we can help work together with you, which I think not only does it increase the citations, but the expertise that the traffic officers have transfer over to the officers that are at the station that don't get exposed as much as they need to on traffic related issues.

So I think we just really need to continue doing that.

It seems like all of those new captains are both an opportunity but also a risk.

Like if they you know buy into the idea that traffic that traffic enforcement is important, you know, we could see them really become part becoming part of the solution.

You could also see some lapsing and falling back if people don't have to do that.

Potentially, yeah.

So what I would do personally is is have one-on-one conversations.

Um so there's I having worked in the department a long time, I know all of them on a personal level as well as work level, so having those one-on-one conversations and talking about it is pretty easy to do.

So I I find that to be very effective.

I think that for the, I mean, this maybe goes without saying, but I think it's worth saying for the public from for my constituents especially, there are types of law breaking that are particularly infuriating to people and that degrade their sense of um that they live in civilized society, and there are aspects of like the non-enforcement of traffic laws that I think fall into that into that category.

I just infuriate people, and so um the the PD public the police department being able to respond to that and show that oh no, we're actually doing it.

I mean, I I see the good the gratitude um from residents around some of the opera when they know that oh, yeah, we just you know, the mission station just did a thing at whatever intersection, you know, it's reassuring to people that oh that's great, I didn't know we did that.

Um, and you know, tickets were issued.

Um a measure of how much we prioritize things is how much overtime we're willing to throw their way, and in an environment of officer scarcity, we are throwing a lot of money at overtime.

Overtime budget for 2425 was 102 million for 2526.

The budget is 75.4 million.

We routinely go over.

Um, and so to what extent do we use overtime to um to meet our our traffic enforcement needs?

So we we do use quite a bit of overtime uh to do traffic enforcement.

So the good news is a lot of it comes through grants.

So the offices, Office of Traffic Safety, which is a California ran program through the state, they will provide a fair number of grants uh that are pretty substantial to do a lot of the different um enforcement that are around those focus on the five citations.

Uh in addition, uh MTA does also have grant money that we utilize to do traffic enforcement for other things to help transit.

Uh so there's a lot of those streams that we use that won't impact the city budget.

However, uh I can tell you when I was a station captain at Southern, that was one of the things we did.

Our stations had a budget that we worked off of for different overtime things that we had to accomplish.

And any time I had a surplus, I would I would run traffic operations on overtime since during our regular shift it was very difficult for officers to find time in between 911 calls.

So that was the one of the main ways we use to increase our traffic citations.

Does the department keep track of how much overtime goes to traffic enforcement?

Uh to be honest, I have not seen that number.

I guarantee you they do, or are Carl.

Is that a thing you might be able to try to run down?

I'm sure we can find that for you and I thank you.

I can almost guarantee knowing our our CFO, she's tracking that very closely.

Would love to see that.

Yes.

Um I have two more and then I'll get out of the way.

Um so uh one of the so the one big impediment to seeing the levels of traffic enforcement we would like to see is the staffing challenges that we have seen.

But the decline in traffic enforcement far outpace the reduction in staffing, and there could be some reasons for that.

What what goes first when you're when you don't have enough people and the reality is that traffic enforcement may be part of that.

But the other thing that we've explored in some of these hearings is the extent to which changes in state law or local regulations or requirements have made officers less efficient in their um enforcement of our traffic laws.

So a citation that might have been a five minute commitment ten, twelve years ago might be a twenty-minute commitment now.

And if you know station captains and officers themselves are making the calculation about how to use their marginal time, you know, it's it's not as valuable when there's other pressing um safety priorities.

And so I do want to extend an offer that I've sort of put out there in the past before, but might land a little differently now, in that I do think we have a board of supervisors that is more interested in safety generally, and I think traffic safety is included in that, and I think a police commission that is more interested in those things as well.

And so I just want to put out there for the department that if there are things that we can change locally or advocate for at the state level that would allow us to do traffic enforcement more efficiently, I think all of our doors are open.

Any of us would be happy to uh author urging resolutions for the state legislature or the police commission or change things at the board of supervisors to the extent that these are legislative.

Um that's a thing we would be down to do.

So the offers out there, department, all right.

Maybe take it maybe take advantage of this moment if there is if there is stuff that you know you think would make a difference.

That would be fantastic.

So I think there are a couple things.

But we're gonna be looking to you all to figure it out in terms of us because we're not of course good freelancers in in that regard.

Lastly, I want to talk about red light cameras because um how many are there out there?

Uh so there's uh I believe 18 currently.

Or 19 cameras.

And uh when you say we're adding six, is that six more, or we're changing out six?

Or we're adding adding six more.

So we should get up to twenty to twenty four.

Okay.

And they cost about two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars a camera, sounds like to install.

Uh yes, about that.

Um, and that is an insane amount of I mean, could you talk a little bit about why it's why it costs so much?

So uh yeah, I don't have the exact figures here.

I could probably get them to you of the breakdown of um where the different portions of that 200,000 are going to.

Um but I think a lot of it, the bulk of it from what I can recall is through in is the construction side of it and the infrastructure needed.

So we're going from an analog system to a digital system, uh still camera system to a video camera system.

So I think the technology and um what's needed for the infrastructure to get that technology working correctly and then the construction build out, uh, because some of these locations are brand new, so they're not they're not tapping into an existing infrastructure.

So um those are from what I can recall, I think the the biggest cost.

So potentially replacement gets cheaper, but that initial installation is believe so, but yeah, I'm not a hundred percent sure.

And presumably, and the other thing about these cameras is it's not there's maybe a two-three hundred thousand dollar cost on the front end, but then they do cost quite a bit each year because you're paying for yes, and I'm not sure what that figure is, but yeah, there would be uh I would imagine a software licensing that you're paying for every year um to access and get the data and so forth.

Um I guess I mean it is a lot of money, but also if you look at the results, I mean, there's almost as many citations being issued from the red light cameras as from the entirety of traffic company plus the stations each year, it looks like, right?

It's like 11,000 versus 14,000.

That's not far off, yeah.

And um, I mean that does seem I mean it's expensive, but officers are expensive too.

And if you can't get more officers, and collisions, and collisions are quite expensive.

So I do, I would, you know, like to challenge the notion that it's cost prohibited.

I know you didn't actually mean it's cost, it's it's like costly possibly, yes.

Yeah.

But I feel like we should do more of this and we should figure out ways to appropriate and for the department to be spending more on red light cameras.

There's not like a I mean in terms of like the offenses that are annoying to the public but also legitimately dangerous.

Blowing through a red light is pretty high on the I mean for bad collision bad crashes that's probably got to be high up there.

It is absolutely so I would like to encourage the department to look at trying to do more of that and um you know trying to and doing the analysis of like it's costly but as compared to the officers it would take to get that level of citations maybe it's not as costly.

No I'm right I'm right there with you.

I think we need to up the amount of cameras that we have for sure would definitely uh I think help the communities really impacted by some of these problems of running stop lights and um blocking the intersections and very unsafe turns and yeah and are we limited I mean we are limited on we'll hear about this on the MTA side on the MTA side we're limited the speed cameras we can do 33 and that's it right now I think and we can ask the state to give us authority to do more.

We don't have the same problem on I don't believe so I've never heard of any limitation.

But the red light cameras are more expensive because the technology has to be of a higher level right in terms of a criminal I think because it's a criminal citation.

I would believe so I think that kind of separates the the why the two different divisions are operating differently here.

Okay.

All right thank thank you so much I'll get out of the way thank you.

I had a couple questions to follow up from President Mandelman um mostly focused on geographic location of some of these services.

So following up on the question of the efficiency or efficacy of officers versus cameras I think one of the objectives obviously medium to long term is deterrence ideally you're you're doing the citations and it's reinforcing behavior such that they stop doing that behavior.

Do we have data or evidence to show the are there declining number of citations in the regions or neighbor or or blocks where you have officers do you have data to show if there's declining levels of citations there versus cameras which is a fixed post do we know whether those cameras are effective in reducing the number of citations over time I would have the same question actually for speed cameras as well.

It's an interesting question.

I think we can explore it but I don't think we'll have that data available I believe we don't have officers deployed in such a manner that would show a difference between citations issued in a particular area where red light cameras versus not yeah I'm I'm trying to think I I might have to think that one through a little bit more to see if we can produce something like that but off the top of my head I just based on the way we have officers responding to calls and working different parts of the city it's it's would be very difficult to to work through that.

Do you know in the areas either with speed cameras or red light cameras whether citations have gone down over time since they've been initiated pre-post.

That's a good question that we probably could get I don't have that with me right now but um could definitely look into that.

Appreciate it.

And then a follow up to that generally about distribution of resources um the how do you determine what locations to deploy officers for speed enforcement today.

I'm sorry, so how do we deploy officers for speed enforcement?

How do you decide which locations and neighborhoods to send those officers and allocate between different stations?

So it's a combination of things.

So one, we'll use the high injury corridor that's produced by MTA that will show um a certain number of speeding collisions that have happened in those areas.

So anytime we do a collision report, we're always looking for the primary factor of what caused that collision, and a good portion of them are speeding.

So we'll look we'll look to that.

And we'll go and do that.

And then the last would be officers' observations.

They'll see a particular problem and then they'll want to go out and address that problem.

So those are those are usually the ways we'll we'll deploy officers for for that type of enforcement and but most type of types of enforcement.

Um that's helpful context.

I guess the the concern I have then is just looking at the data, the Richmond station is responsible for over half of the speeding tickets in the entire city.

And just in the first half of 2025, it's 595 citations.

In District 5, where I serve, which actually has a lot more high entry corridors, we had 31 citations across three different stations.

So if we're prioritizing by speed and high injury corridors, that's a very wide gap.

I don't think the Richmond has those level of high the speeding or high energy corridors.

So how do we how do you explain the 595 citations in one station and 31 across three at the center of the city?

Yeah, no problem.

So this kind of goes back to what Supervisor Mandelman was alluding to.

So Richmond station typically sees um the lowest number of calls for service of all our 10 district stations.

So the officers that aren't responding call to call to call to call have more time to be proactive with traffic enforcement.

So historically, in the last 30 years that I've been in the police department, that station is usually led the department in the number of traffic citations.

So they typically just have more time on their hands to go out and do that.

Whereas if you're at Northern Station, Tenderloin Station, Central Station, you know, your your volume of calls for service are so great that you almost don't have time to do as much proactive police work as you'd like to.

So that really will change when we can get more officers into the stations, free up the amount of time the officers are going from call to call and collecting numbers of police reports and making arrests, and um so just to kind of go back before we started to see the staffing crisis.

Uh most district stations, we have we fill out our our different beats.

So we have sector cars that are patrolling a certain area within that police district.

We'll have footbeats walking certain beats.

We'd have uh officers that that um drove a wagon uh for arrests to do transports, and we also ran um a traffic car, and their job was basically do traffic enforcement all every shift, they wouldn't have to go to calls for service, and then they would handle collision reports.

So with that reduction in officers, that traffic car has gone away, the wagon has gone away, most of our beats, our beat officers have gone away, and we're left with mostly just officers and vehicles trying to get to call to call to call.

So if we can increase our our officers in the department, we can bring that back and we'll see that those traffic citations.

In the Richmond station, are there dedicated officers that are just handling traffic enforcement?

Are you saying holistically all officers are handling traffic enforcement?

I believe I don't know this for for fact, I'd have to reach out, but I I believe when they they're able to run a traffic officer on a more regular basis.

How many do they have?

How many officers at their station?

Doing the traffic on a dedicated basis.

I would usually be one or two officers per shift that are usually doing that.

I mean, just extending that.

If it's just one or two officers on a dedicated shift contributing to 595 citations, that seems like a relatively easy solution to then just have one dedicated officer per other stations?

Well, that's not the exact answer.

I mean, I'd have to do a little deeper dive to see how the breakdown of citations are written per officer at the station versus a traffic car and when they're running it.

Um, but I mean I can tell you from working one of the busiest stations at Southern Station, we're not able to do that.

We're we're we don't even fill out all of the sectors that we have, and most of the other districts, like Northern, Central, uh Tenderloin, they're in that same boat.

So they might have five different car sectors that they're trying to put officers into, but they're only running three or four, and that's how it is at most of the busy stations.

So if you subtract one or two of those officers to focus on traffic only, those calls for service will pile up, our response times will plummet even more so than they are now, and you won't have officers getting to more serious uh crimes in progress or people injured or things like that.

I mean, the point I'll just make is that I think a lot of people in our district and district five do see often these cases intertwined.

I know we have to tackle the drug crisis, we have to tackle the open air drug market, we have to tackle some of these safety conditions.

But people who live there, they see that these cases are interconnected often.

A lot of the speeding cars sometimes are people fleeing from drug deals.

Um we often see that uh, I mean, just down in the tender line, there's so many parked cars that and red car and red and red zones.

Um, and I know there's operations being done with A-frame operations that are helping there as well.

Um, but I think I just want to push that I think traffic safety is often how we also address some of the most challenging issues uh related to the open air drug market and public safety conditions as we more colloquially understanding them.

And I think I would um ask or push and would love to continue to collaborate to find ways that we can find ways to increase traffic enforcement uh and not wait for that because I do see these highly coupled.

So yeah, and I I 100% agree with you that traffic enforcement impacts a lot of those other crimes that we see, especially in the tender line.

So appreciate it.

Uh Supervisor Soder.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And um thank you, President Man, for bringing this back to us.

I know you've been consistent on checking in on this, it's very important, so keep doing it.

We'll keep doing it with you.

Uh, I want to acknowledge that we had a um enlightening and I think productive conversation uh in a lot of the similar items last week at our GAO meeting, um, the result of the civil grand jury's uh findings on Vision Zero.

So we spoke with um Officer Shields and we spoke with SFMTA last week on a lot of these same items.

Um the uh and one thing that did come up there that I want to ask you a little bit more about is everything related to the process of writing tickets and the technology of writing tickets and the follow-up of writing tickets.

Um it seems like there's challenges there.

Some of it maybe on a uh a technology uh point of view, some of it um maybe a process thing.

Um so maybe starting with this, I want to ask how do how do you and how do your officers feel about the process of writing tickets and what challenges did they encounter with that with the process and the technology.

Sure.

So there's essentially two different ways we write citations.

So we have a digital system, we have an app on our cell phones that we're able to work through.

Uh we have a uh portable printer that comes with us where we can issue the actual citation, and the other form would be our kind of traditional form that we've used over decades, and that's handwritten citations.

Uh so our traffic company will use exclusively the app on the cell phone to digitally write tickets.

Uh the majority of station personnel are still writing tickets by hand, and a lot of the reason for that is lack of familiarity.

It takes a long time to learn to get efficient working through an app on the cell phone.

If you can imagine if you're an officer, traffic stops are one of the more dangerous things that we do on a regular basis.

You can just never know who's in that car, what their intentions are.

And you want to have good visual on that vehicle almost at all times.

If you're working through an app that has little boxes on a cell phone, your face is buried into that cell phone and your your your attention is not on that vehicle as much as it can be.

Whereas when you're handwriting something, you can make better adjustments, see it a little easier, a little clearer, you're not zooming in, zooming out, things like that.

And then sometimes we'll see glitches on the the app and it becomes frustrating, and then you you're starting all over again.

Uh so it takes time to get proficient with that.

Um our traffic officers at uh in the traffic division didn't have an option, they were it was forced on them.

They had they're not responding call to call to call.

Their focus is to do traffic related um enforcement, collision investigation, so forth.

So for them, they had the time to be able to, you know, get more proficient with the with the app and the software.

So uh I can tell you from doing both, I don't feel comfortable um writing a ticket on my cell phone.

I I found myself my officer safety was not as good.

Um so I think that's one of the more prohibitive things for officers to switch over to that digital system.

Uh in addition to that, we have um different things we have to do anytime we stop anybody for any reason.

We have to go through a series of uh demographic questions for the state.

It's mandated as well as some other things that we do on a local basis that creates a a longer process for that for that traffic stop and in that officer shift.

Uh and and we also have our body cameras.

We'll have to download that data and link it up to the to the software.

So uh when you pile that all together, uh a traffic stop, it used to take um a short time after you were done writing the citation, or from writing the citation to when you were finished completely with it, has probably tripled, making it a little more difficult to focus on traffic enforcement for the officer that is already being tasked with uh a lot of different things at the district station.

So all of those changes coming together to result in this time tripling when did that happen?

I mean, approximately what year do you think that really starts to escalate in time?

So yeah, we had kind of the perfect storm.

So you saw COVID hit where basically we were told no traffic stops to one not impact the communities that were already impacted, two not expose our officers to potentially getting ill uh and and running no officers on the street.

So uh around that time, shortly after that in 2021-ish, between 21 and 22, I think.

I could be wrong, it might it might be 19 to 20.

Uh, that's when we introduced these um digital citations.

That's when we were starting to see body cameras come online, and uh it was all kind of relatively happening at the same time.

So you see that convergence, and and that was those were some of the factors in that large dip uh we see in traffic citations.

Doesn't seem ideal that you have you, you know, you have one side of the house, traffic company doing it one way, and you have the stations doing it the other way, app versus paper.

Um, and you're saying you'd prefer paper?

Well, I think I would prefer a system where it doesn't compromise officer safety.

Um the digital has a lot of pluses, so we can really track a lot of data that way, which is beneficial.

So we uh more real-time data is available using a digital system.

So that would be the if we had both uh ideal officer safety and that digital data collection ability, that would be that that would be what we would want.

That would be possible.

You think there's a way to get there with improving the app or improving you know the technology experience?

Do you think that's possible?

Is that an is that an IT thing or is that not possible?

I'm sure it is.

I mean, I I I don't know enough about technology to intelligence.

Is there anyone telling IT here today.

No, um, um I'll leave it there for now.

What about voice-to-text transcription transcription?

Would that be more initially?

Safety safer.

Yeah, that that could potentially work.

Um there's uh probably some better scanning technology where you could just scan a vehicle played in a lice driver's license, insurance card, something like that.

AI could step in and fill out uh uh citation for you instantly with that data, and then you would just need to probably do a couple of different things to to complete it.

Uh I'm sure there's some technology options out there that could improve that system.

Thank you.

Maybe just one last comment uh to end on um to echo what President Mandelman said earlier.

This is this is absolutely a a widespread feeling from our residents that there are no consequences for running red lights and for speeding and so on and so forth.

And I know you're working every day to change that, and I know you don't want that to be the case.

Um I think of you know, just in this past week, some of the small but but important progress that your department made on dirt bikes and stunt driving.

And although it was, you know, one enforcement just being loud about that and being visible about that has, you know, very quickly, you know, there are so many people who have been so happy to see that news because they've been seeing for years no to little enforcement.

And so uh anything you're doing, I would just say work with us on it.

We are here to support you, be loud about it, um, you know, be visible about it.

It is something that um everyone in this this room and and I think uh almost everyone in the cities is very supportive of.

So thank you and keep pushing.

We're um I'm glad to see these numbers go up.

Uh I think we have to keep uh keep going though.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Commander.

I think we can go over to the MTA side.

And I think we do on on this on the speed cameras, I think there is evidence that at least on those locations we are seeing actual production in events.

It is hard, I think, with the red light cameras since they've been around for so long to know what your base I mean, unless they were keeping good records of baselines way back.

But as we install new ones, it probably is a good, it would be good to know like do these work.

Great.

Uh hi, I'm Shannon Haik, uh with the SFMTA.

I oversee our street safety work, uh, and I'm here to provide an update on our speed safety camera program.

So as a quick reminder, speed cameras are new to California, and we're able to implement them because of AB 645.

This law allows San Francisco and five other cities to participate in a five-year pilot program to use this camera technology.

The state law set the program basics so that each city was collecting consistent data and playing by the same rules.

The law set out how many cameras each city could install.

For us, it was 33, how the penalties would be enforced, and the fine amounts.

We were the first city in California to install speed cameras, and right now we're the only.

Uh Oakland will be installing their cameras later this year.

Uh San Jose, Glendale, Long Beach, and Los Angeles will also participate in this pilot program.

And the goal for each city is to uh collect and publish data about the how the cameras are working so that any future state policy uh on automated enforcement uh can understand their impact.

So we've been very busy with this program over the past several months.

In January, we kicked off a public education campaign to let San Franciscans know that speed cameras were coming.

I'll speak more about that in a moment.

Uh we launched the first cameras on March twentieth, and as more cameras came online, uh they all began issuing warning notices.

When all of our 33 cameras were up and issuing warnings in early June, our official 60-day warning period began.

And with every single one of the 360,000 warning notices that we mailed out, recipients learned about their fellow San Franciscans, Sharia and Judy, who showed the real life impacts of speeding in San Francisco.

And just last month, on August 5th, we began issuing actual speeding tickets, citations to drivers.

And since then we've issued more than 25,000 citations.

So the public information campaign that launched at the beginning of this year was very helpful in getting the word out.

We used billboards, bus shelters, muni stations, YouTube ads, digital ads, in language newspaper ads, and even door to door outreach along business corridors to spread the word that speed cameras were coming to San Francisco.

The whole point of this program is to get drivers to slow down, not to raise revenue.

So from the beginning, we wanted people to know that cameras were coming, where every single camera was, so that they would change their behavior.

And this was a really good way to raise awareness of the program and start slowing people down on our streets even before our very first camera captured a violation.

All right, so speaking of violations, between March and August, we issued more than 360,000 warning notices.

But not all of our cameras were issuing the same number of violations.

This chart represents how many violations each camera was issuing.

You can see there's a wide range in the number of warnings issued by camera, with Bryant Street and Geneva Avenue issuing the most warning violations, and Little Franklin Street and Turk Street issuing the fewest.

So this was the clearest picture of speeding in the city that we've ever had.

And even though we had taken speed measurements beforehand at all of these sites before we installed cameras, the sheer volume of speeders really took us by surprise.

Even our camera vendor who operates cameras all over the country in New York and DC had never seen so many violations coming out of certain cameras.

So while we were surprised by the warning data, we wanted to make sure that drivers were not surprised by our cameras.

So we've put up hundreds of signs all across the city related to speed safety cameras.

First, at most freeway off ramps into the city and major city entrance points, we've installed signs alerting drivers to the presence of automated photo enforcement here in San Francisco.

At every one of our cameras within 500 feet of both directions, we've installed speed limitless signs and photo enforced signs.

We've made sure that these signs are visible and clear so that no one's taken by surprise.

And finally, at our highest volume locations, the ones that are giving out all those warning violations, we installed larger speed limb signs, more frequent signs leading up to the camera, and even speed limit pavement markings to make sure the drivers were very aware of the speed limit and the presence of speed cameras.

We've been guided by data throughout this program, and we've been collecting and sharing many different data types showing the impacts that these cameras are happening.

First, we've been monitoring the number of violations we're issuing, and generally we're seeing some very positive trends there.

Every week since the middle of the summer, we've been seeing fewer violations issued than the week before.

We know that about two-thirds of people who receive a warning notice or a citation get one, and then they do not show up in our program again.

So that's one way we can really see behavior changing on our streets, and we'll be releasing several months of this violation data next week.

More importantly, we've been collecting data on how conditions on our streets are changing.

We use pneumatic tubes to see how many vehicles are traveling on a street and how fast those vehicles are traveling.

This is the method we used when we were selecting speed camera locations more than a year ago, and we collected additional data just last week at about half of our camera locations.

We're analyzing this data now, and we'll release it next week.

And this will really help us understand the changes in the rates of speeding and the speeds themselves that the cameras have helped affect.

And finally, in the longer term, we'll be evaluating whether these cameras are making our streets safer.

We'll be analyzing the number of injury-causing collisions before and after cameras were installed and comparing speed camera streets with streets that we considered four speed cameras but didn't ultimately select for a camera.

We'll be releasing our first report on the injury uh related injury causing collisions and safety impacts early next year.

And with that, that concludes my presentation, and I am happy to answer any questions about the program.

Thank you for the presentation and for um for getting these set up.

Is am I right that there was a little kerfuffle in kind of the in the rolling out of this?

They went up in March, but then what happened there?

Why were they not operational for several months after that?

Yeah, so we started uh so we had 33 different sites throughout the city, 56 actual different cameras, because at certain locations we needed two cameras to monitor both directions of travel.

So of those locations, some of them were on our own MTA signal poles or our own MTA property.

And for those, the permitting process was incredibly easy.

We just walked across the hall and got permits for um for these cameras and were able to get them installed and electrified very, very quickly.

So those are the the ones that we launched in March.

All of our cameras were installed by then, but we had to go through a process to get electric electrical service for them from PGE that required an application process, and that's why we brought cameras online in phases over the summer until all of them were up and running by June.

And there was no way to anticipate that early.

I mean, I do remember conversations throughout 24, because this law passed in 23.

That's right.

And with the TA, we were having, you know, a lot of conversations.

We're gonna be ready to go, right?

And um, was the was the PGE kerfuffle unexpected or?

It was an expected issue, and we had been working through it, and uh we believed that we would get all of the necessary approvals by the time our program launched.

Can you talk about cost?

How much do these things cost per site location?

Yeah, so these run a little bit differently than the red light cameras, although we actually use the same vendor for both programs.

So the way these work is um we pay one monthly flat fee per camera per month, it's about $3,500 a month, and that includes everything.

It includes the installation and maintenance of the roadside equipment, the camera itself.

It includes an initial screening of all of the violations that come in to make sure that there's a license plate that's visible to make sure that it's enforceable.

Um, to uh to have an actual human uh review the image, look up the uh drivers or the the license plate information and find the associated address for that uh vehicle, and then to actually send everything over to us at MTA where one of our staff members can review it, say, yes, this was a violation, and if that's the case, then they actually prepare every violation, they print them out, they mail them out, and they have kind of an online portal in which people can pay.

So it's kind of an all-in-one service that we pay per camera per month.

About $3,500 per camera per month.

It's about $125,000 a month.

Or for the sites where you need two, that's $7,000.

Is that right?

Uh no, that's um, it's per site essentially.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so that's not cheap, actually.

I mean, I actually thought there was more of a differential between the pull the um red light and the speed, but actually, I mean, depending on how that plays out over time, like that's, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life cycle of each camera.

Yes.

Right.

I still think it's worth it, but but it's not quite um the deal as compared to it might it may not be quite the deal as compared to speed cameras.

Um, and so in terms of getting like where is the conversation, is there is the conversation in the state legislature anywhere about the possibility of doing more than what we have?

Because these results seem quite good.

It doesn't seem like we should wait five years to do another 33.

Seems like we should be doing a lot more soon.

I wish we could.

Uh, I think we're gonna need to get other California cities to have their programs up and running and for them to see similar results as well.

Uh, because right now we're seeing great results.

We are seeing people slow down on our streets.

We're seeing really, really great behavior change, but we are only one of the cities, and we're the only one with program with a program launched right now.

I think we need to see other cities also get their programs up and running and uh see similar results, and then I think there might be more of a more of a potential for a legislative change and how many cameras each each city can use.

And the opposition to this historically.

Although I think they may have dropped it in the end, statewide law enforcement, and then uh civil libertarians.

That's right.

The typically um folks who don't like speed cameras are concerned about some of the financial impacts that they will have on on folks.

So one of the things that the state law required us to do, and that I'm very glad that we were able to do, is from the beginning of the program, literally the day after the governor signed the legislation, to um the state law required us to reach out to advocacy groups that focused on economic justice, racial equity, and privacy protection to get their input on the program and how to make it better.

So we were having those conversations before we were even thinking about locations, before we were even thinking about what this program was going to look like, so that we could address those concerns head on, and many of their concerns were built into this program in terms of making sure there aren't escalating uh payments or escalating interest rates on people who don't pay, um, making sure there were low-income discounts available, or even community service in lieu of a fee.

So all of those conversations and those aspects really helped us build a program that it was find a hard to find fault in.

Um, and I think we've been we've been very lucky in that there's just been a lot of support for these here in San Francisco and a lot of need.

People are really recognizing the need for this.

All right, thank you.

Um of the 33 cameras, are there any locations that you are ready to move based on early data?

You're not seeing them as effective or as needed as other locations.

Are you there yet?

We're not really there yet.

We have the opportunity after 18 months of running the program to uh move around cameras if we would like to.

If if some of them are not working, we can use our 33 and maybe take five off and add five more in five different locations.

So that is an option that's available to us.

Uh, but at this point, we're not necessarily looking at it because we really have seen numbers go down at just about every single camera site.

And right now we're still in that data gathering phase.

We've only been issuing citations for about a month.

So we really want to see that number continue to change, continue to stabilize, um, and then I think we'll we'll have a little bit more information about whether we should move them.

Okay.

Um I'm so happy that we are the first in California to do this.

And I know you have your hands full with making sure that this initial rollout continues to be a success.

Um, I would also encourage you to again echo uh President Mandelman.

Um, I don't think we should wait five years and and maybe we'll do our part by talking to uh some of our colleagues at the state, but this is successful.

Um, it's working.

There's you know, I think we could put our heads together, and you have the data that show immediately another 33 that really could use it.

Um, the um the the low-income uh uh fines withstanding.

I think the fines here are are very modest.

Um so I think there's more to do, more to expand.

Um, and so I look forward to working with you on that.

Absolutely.

Supervisor Sauter took my question.

So it's fine.

But yeah, thank you again for the presentation.

Really excited to have these cameras up and district five as well.

So, and looking forward to seeing the results on how it's improved or changed uh traffic citations over time.

The next presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um, so thank you, President Mandelman and to our presenters.

Madam Clerk, may you please open public comment on item one?

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on this item should line up now along the side by the windows.

All speakers will have two minutes.

I'm sorry.

Can I project something?

Yes.

Okay.

Great, thank you so much.

Hi, Vice Chair Mahmood uh and Supervisor Saturn and Mandelman.

I'm Luke Bornheimer, executive director of Streets Forward, the local charity making it safer and faster to walk, bike, and take public transit in San Francisco.

I also helped Stephen Braish analyze SFPD traffic enforcement data in 2022 work that was featured in the Chronicle and on KQED and SF Gate and presented at this committee after Supervisor Mandelman called for a hearing about traffic enforcement.

Today's hearing is the fifth Board of Supervisors hearing about traffic enforcement since our analysis was released, and yet roadway safety remains a rampant issue in our city.

Our city has an ongoing roadway safety crisis with around 40 people being killed and 500 people being severely injured in roadway crashes every year, unchanged since 2014 when the city adopted its vision zero goal for zero roadway fatalities and severe injuries by January 2024.

Critically, the number of fatalities and injuries is statistically unrelated to the number of traffic and traffic citations, as you can see in the two charts I'm projecting, and I can share with you afterwards.

More funding or staffing for SFPD will not solve this crisis, nor will more armed traffic enforcement.

More than 90% of roadway fatalities and injuries in San Francisco involve a car.

To increase roadway safety, we need to help people shift trips from cars to biking, walking, and public transportation.

The most effective way to do that is to install infrastructure and implement policies that make it safer and faster to walk, bike, and take public transit.

Infrastructure like protected bike lanes, transit-only lanes, and car-free streets, and policies like a citywide no tron red policy, a fully funded e-bike incentive program, and eliminating cut-through car traffic on all residential streets.

I urge you to work with Streets Forward on proven infrastructure improvements and policies that will increase roadway safety and help people shift trips to walking, biking, and public transit by making it safer and faster to walk, bike and take transit.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

My name is Paul Wormer.

Uh, first, I'd like to thank you, uh, supervisors for recognizing the importance of getting the state to authorize things that need to change because there are a lot of things that can't be done because of barriers in state code.

So I'm glad to hear you recognize that.

The second thing I want to say is to endorse what Luke Bornheimer said.

Uh I've talked to a lot of scooter riders, uh, many of them tourists.

They're scared to ride on the street.

So they're riding on the sidewalk.

Um third thing I'd like to point out is a whole lot of what we're talking about here with traffic safety is behavioral change and getting people to genuinely change their behavior.

And I know from when I was commuting on a daily basis, my driving behavior changed dramatically depending on specific conditions.

So it's great we're seeing a reduction on those car in speeds and those car riders with the speed cameras are.

How do we know that that carries over?

It's great to see that that's if stoplight cameras uh are working or generating citations, but how does that behavior carry out elsewhere?

And I would like to encourage the city, and I don't know if it's SFPD or SFMTA or public health, because it's definitely a public health issue.

Look at monitoring what's happening in other parts of the city.

And I hear huge prices for the cameras that need to meet legal standards of traceability and reliability.

There's a lot of data gathering that can be done on stop sign running on other streets where you don't need that high resolution calibrated stuff, and you don't need the legal compliance accords, but you can do nice blinded studies on behaviors and figure out where perhaps to target police enforcement or have mobile enforcement activities.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good morning.

I'm Marta Lindsay with Walk San Francisco, and uh want to really thank the supervisors for putting this in focus today and really to Supervisor Mandelman, who has brought it into focus and keeps bringing it back, and this is a conversation we need to be having.

Um as Commander Martin pointed out, it is pedestrians who bear the brunt of dangerous streets and are being hit every day in our city, and sometimes they are killed.

It is the wild west out there.

I can't believe some of the things I witness now.

It is shocking what drivers will do.

Um and it scares me, and they're also in bigger and heavier vehicles, and those vehicles can accelerate very quickly.

So we just have a different beast.

We have a multi-headed beast, and we have behavior norms that again are really frightening.

Um, and so I think everyone has a role.

I'm grateful that the SFPD is focusing on this more and things are turning in the right direction.

Um, we need you to focus on the five, uh especially speeding and doing speeding in a way that really complements the speed camera program.

I really hear Supervisor Mandelman on the red light camera situation.

The cameras we're waiting for right now, those were supposed to be in in 2020, and we're still waiting, right?

Um, technology is gonna be crucial to what has to happen on our streets, and so is the SFPD's role in a strategic way.

Um, the speed camera program is fantastic, and I am also like I cannot wait to grow it.

Uh, it is showing again the scale of this issue, and so we got to take it on as the multi-headed piece that it is.

So thank you.

And the Street Safety Act, fantastic.

It has pieces in here that we are looking to these agencies to embrace and run with.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Hello, Lisa Platt.

I'm often here talking to you as a pedestrian and transit rider and the safety involved with that.

I also have a 25-year career in user experience design, and a lot of what we see today is because drivers feel like they can drive those speeds.

It feels comfortable, it feels easy.

Enforcement is a small portion of that, but behavior change comes from a change in street design.

And so we can do all the enforcement in the world, and we absolutely should because people need to see that there are consequences, but ultimately, if we don't change how easy it feels to fly down an open road, and we don't change how easy it feels to uh to speed through those lights or whip around those corners in very heavy cars, and as long as we have streets that are car centric, we will continue to see these fatalities.

So I would like you all to uh think about going beyond what we're doing here, which is important, but also put twice as much energy into the pushing for better street design and safer street design.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Do we have any additional public speakers?

That closes public comment.

Seeing no other speakers, public comment is now closed.

President Mandelman.

Thank you, Vice Chairman Mahmood.

Um, thank you, uh, Supervisor Sauter, and um thanks to our presenters uh uh to SFPD for um the progress, not yet enough, but the progress that we're seeing.

Um to MTA for uh getting the speed cameras up and uh for the work that you're doing, not just um uh this initiative but on trying to make safer streets generally and uh to walk San Francisco that uh advocates around um uh pedestrian safety and uh every day.

Uh thank you for keeping that focus, and to the other advocates, thank you for turning out, especially Luke uh and Stephen Breach, uh, who uh helped start this conversation in 2022.

I think we have, you know, obviously some different conclusions about where to go from the information and um and the necessity of enforcement.

I continue to just believe it is critical to get uh more SFPD folks doing more enforcement um and I and I think there's a direct relationship between the the chart showing the decline of that enforcement um and the unsafety on our streets, and I think unless we fix that in some way, um it it's gonna be hard.

I take the point, I think the board is committed to the improvements uh in um in infrastructure, and I think we'll we will continue to try to support that, but I don't think that's gonna get us there without um you know a credible belief by drivers that there's gonna be a bad consequence for um for doing bad stuff on the road.

I just think that's kind of human nature.

But um uh the the uh buzz of the beep wants me to stop.

So I was I'll stop.

But um, oh well I guess on the last point, uh I am gonna ask that the that uh the committee um continue this hearing to the to the call of the chair, and I anticipate we'll be back in another half a year or so and we can check in on on the data, and I hope we continue to see improvement.

Would love to see that improvement accelerate.

Um I do want to pursue this question of like whether we're using overtime to the extent that we could be for um to get uh enforcement.

Um I'm hoping that we will see a beefing up of traffic company over the next six months year, that the stations will get you know the the message that it's really really important to supervisor or vice chair Mahmoud's point.

Um there is like a pretty profound equity problem here, which is that more affluent and more peaceful neighborhoods get the added benefit of traffic enforcement because the police in those neighborhoods don't have as much stuff to do, and so if you happen to live in a neighborhood that is beset by crime of other kinds, not only are you having to deal with that, but by the way, your streets aren't gonna be safe when you're walking around.

There's a feeling about that that's not great, which shouldn't lead to a race at the bot.

Shouldn't mean that Richmond does less.

Um that's not that shouldn't be the message.

The message should be that we, and I think everybody kind of knows this, we need to get to a place where if the stations can't do it, the traffic company can step in and do that work in uh, you know, in the parts of the city where um, you know, unfortunately there's other kinds of crime that are like occupying all the time.

Um uh we'll work with walk San Francisco and PD on red light cameras because we'd love to see more of those.

Um, and again, the offer is out there to uh PD.

If there's stuff we can do to make this easier for all of you and make make traffic enforcement a more efficient and therefore more desirable project for officers and and uh and the department, we're I think available to try and pursue that.

So thanks, everybody.

Thank you again, President Mandelman.

I'd like to now make a motion at your request to continue this item to the call of the chair.

Yes, and then that motion to continue this item to the call of the chair.

Member Mandelman, Member Mandelman, aye.

Member Sauter, Member Sauter, aye.

Vice Chair Mahmood?

Aye.

Vice Chair Mahmood, I have three ayes, which are Dorsey excused.

The motion passes.

Um Madam Clerk, are there any other items before us today?

Um that concludes our meeting agenda.

Today's meeting is now adjourned.

Thank you, everyone.

Okay.