Assembly Select Committee on Downtown Recovery

Alright. We will begin this select committee on Downtown Recovery hearing, which today will be on the future of public transit. Thank you all for joining us, and good afternoon, transit lovers everywhere. We're very excited, for this very timely conversation. I wanna thank Assemblymember Krell for being here, and I know we have a committee members who will be dropping in throughout the day or also watching us, directly from their office on livestream here and participating that way.

And we, again, appreciate everyone who's here with us in chamber and who's following along, over the stream. As Chair of the Select Committee on Downtown Recovery, I wanna welcome you all to today's informational hearing on Downtown Recovery and its connection to the future of public transit. When we formed this committee in 2024, we formed it around a pretty simple question at the time that is still very relevant today, in 2026.

What can we as state policymakers do to help California's downtowns come back stronger after the pandemic? And you can't really answer that question clearly without talking about public transit.

Before the pandemic, millions of Californians relied on buses, trains, and subways every day to get to work downtown. Many of them still rely on buses, trains, and subways to get to work downtown. But when COVID hit, offices emptied, downtown foot traffic collapsed, and transit systems also lost a large share of the riders they depended on. And five years later, we know that our downtowns are changing. People are coming back to work.

Many are still relying on public transit, but some are not necessarily coming back five days a week. Downtowns are increasingly becoming places where more people live, eat, shop, and go to concerts and games and spend time outside of the traditional nine to five workday. And our transit systems are changing with them. The question is no longer just how do we get commuters from the suburbs to an office downtown every morning.

It's how do we make easy, safe, affordable, and reliable for people to get into and around our downtowns throughout the entire day, to work, to play, to eat, to go to school, to attend college, to get to see their friends, to get home, all of the things that we know, our downtowns require a public transit in order to be able to do.

And we also have the question on the other side, how do we build our downtowns so more people can actually use public transit? This means building more homes near stations, making it easier to walk and bike once you get off of the train or bus, and it means designing streets around people, not just cars.

Because our relationships go both ways, we know that because this relationship goes both ways, thriving downtowns create riders for public transit, and strong public transit brings people, activity, and investment to our downtowns. So we are here to talk about all of that today. We're here about to hear from our transit agencies that serve some of California's largest city centers about how ridership has changed, how they are adapting, how they're responding, and what they need from us as a state.

We're also here with experts about how walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly streets can make downtowns more accessible and more vibrant. And we'll talk about one of the biggest opportunities in front of us, building more housing and complete neighborhoods around transit infrastructure that we already have. Ultimately, we want to understand what the state can do to help cities build downtowns where people can live, work, visit, play, and get around without having to depend on a car.

We know that it is absolutely critical and essential for our downtowns to thrive and also for our state to thrive more broadly. I have a few housekeeping things.

We have three panels today. Witnesses on each panel will come up together to provide their testimony in the order they're introduced. And then after each has testified, the Members of the Committee will have an opportunity to make questions or remarks. At the end of the hearing, we will have public comment for individuals here in the hearing room, and public comment will be limited to thirty seconds per person.

We are not accepting comment over the phone, but written testimony can be submitted to the committee at [email protected], and this email is also available on our website.

With that, we'll bring up our first panel. Assuming all the folks are here, I see some of them out there. I wanna welcome our first panel, which is focused on rebuilding downtowns to rebuild ridership. And please join me in welcoming Edward Wright, Vice President of the Board of Directors for BART, Ray Sosa, Chief Planning Officer for LA Metro, who's joining us remotely, and Greg Fishman, Senior Community Relations Officer for Sacramento Regional Transit. Welcome.

Is it is yes. Vice president Wright, I think you're kicking us off.

Thank you so much, Chair Haney. Thank you Assemblymember Krell. Thank you to the committee for this opportunity to talk about the important role that public transit plays both in the present and the future of our downtowns. As the Chair mentioned, my name is Edward Wright. I serve as the vice president of the BART Board of Directors, representing Downtown San Francisco.

We'll have a short slide presentation for you. Oh, that's. Thank you. First thing I'll say is that the Bay Area really runs on transit, and the backbone of the Bay Area transit system is BART. BART spans five counties with 50 stations. We run on a 131 miles of track.

87% of transfers between transit systems that Bay Area involve BART, and we offer more than 300 connections from BART to different routes on buses, light rails, rail lines, and ferries. If you look at this map in purple, you can see that within a short walk of BART stations, you can reach 21% of the region's jobs and 9% of the nine-county Bay Area region's residents.

And if you consider connecting transit services such as Muni and AC Transit, the coverage as shown in orange on the map expands to 67% of the nine-county Bay Area-region jobs and 61% of its residents. BART allows people to access a large pool of economic activities, but, of course, also cultural activities, community, culture, jobs, and housing that really make the Bay Area what it is and make it operate. And we know that, sorry.

Alright. We know that BART relies on downtown. We also know that downtown relies on BART. BART connects businesses, workers, students, and visitors to downtown, helping fuel the local and regional economy. And an average Bay Area worker spends $34 a day on food and shopping around their place of work.

That translates to almost $1,000,000 a day in San Francisco spent on local businesses because of people reaching those businesses on parts. And at a time when we've seen a real softening in the office market in Downtown San Francisco, proximity to BART is still a must have for large scale employers and emerging industries. In this map, you'll see the top 15 San Francisco office buildings by monthly rent. All of them are within a short walk of our Embarcadero and Montgomery stations.

These are also the offices in San Francisco despite having the highest rents with the lowest vacancy rates.

And last year, approximately 60% of all BART trips began or ended in one of our Downtown San Francisco stations. Those stations are in Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell, and Civic Center. And I wanna note that through our night and weekend service, we also support downtown recovery outside of work-related trips and really try to support the future vision of a downtown that operates twenty-four seven and supports all kinds of activities and activations.

And we know that recovery for San Francisco's downtown is not possible without a robust, well funded, reliable public transit service that is also clean and safe. One example of the kinds of activities that are connect people to, beyond jobs are large scale events.

We see these in the Bay Area all the time. And without robust transit, the Bay Area would really struggle to host and benefit from these kinds of events. We provide solutions to solve congestion and roadway delays. We run longer trains during these events. We provide special event service.

We also coordinate with our transit partners to ensure a seamless experience for our passengers who are coming to and from these events. We also deploy staff to help riders to these events as you can see in the photo in the lower right, for the World Cup. And we make other efforts to make the rider experience the best it can be. To give one example, we partner with conferences and special events to post special wayfinding to direct attendees to the best station exits.

We make special train announcements, and we also have certain partnerships, with other Bay Area entities where your ticket to an event is your ticket on transit.

That's something we've seen in Muni, and it's been successful in San Francisco. And these events also support BART. It's not just BART supporting the events. June 2026 ridership increased nearly 19% from the prior year, and it was largely driven by trips to and from large scale events like San Francisco pride. And we also know that the future of downtown isn't just jobs or events.

Housing is a big piece of that puzzle. I know the committee will hear more about this in later discussion. But BART is one of the largest land owners in the area, And we take really seriously our commitment to do our part to address our housing crisis and support transit oriented development. The majority of existing and under construction affordable housing in the region is located near BART and other regional rail. We own 250 acres of developable land at 27 stations across 22 jurisdictions.

And our TOD program has the ambitious goal of constructing 8,000 housing units near stations, 35% of which which would be designated as affordable housing. To date, we have completed, transit oriented development projects at 15 stations, delivering 4,200 homes at 30% affordability rates. And there are eight projects in the pipeline with a further 3,800 homes at an affordability rate of 44%. We know that our downtowns, are adapting in a post pandemic environment, and BART is adapting as well.

We have made significant investments in the last few years in improving the experience of our riders to bring people back onto the system and bring new kinds of passengers onto the system to connect to different events, activities, jobs, and community and culture.

To give examples of that, we recently completed the installation of our next generation fare gates at all stations system wide. That project concluded last year. In addition to that, our investments in police deployment and non sworn police staff, including crisis intervention specialists, elevator attendants, bathroom attendants, and community ambassadors has led to a system wide reduction of crime year over year of 41% last year.

Due to these investments, we've seen ridership continue to grow year over year since our pandemic low point, and we have reached a customer satisfaction rating of 89%, which is among the highest we have ever reported for the system. And that is not something we accomplished alone.

I really wanna thank the Assembly and the state for their strong support for transit in the years following the pandemic and addressing some of the major challenges that we faced. And those challenges are not over yet, and we're continuing to face them and really appreciate the partnership with the state to do that. Specifically, we wanna take this opportunity to tell you how the state can continue to support public transit and our role in promoting downtown recovery.

We're working with a large coalition of transit, labor, housing, and environmental groups on budget solutions to support programs within a GGRF expenditure plan. And we are asking the state to honor commitments made in 2023 under SB 125.

For BART, that funding will help support our Transbay core capacity project to provide more frequent and reliable service to our downtowns into the future and protect tier three programs within the greenhouse gas reduction fund that benefit transit, including AHSC, TIRCP, and LCTOP. There are additional opportunities to support legislation and regulations that help us make transit safer for our passengers.

So we appreciate all and any and all legislative efforts in that direction, as well as the many efforts that the state legislature has made to streamline and support building housing on transit-owned land and also land near transit systems and services, and we ask you to continue to support that work as we look forward. Thank you for having me today. I look forward to future discussion and happy to answer questions after the panel concludes.

I think we're gonna go now to our virtual presenter, Ray Sosa, who is joining us from. He's the Chief Planning Officer at LA Metro. Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, members, committee, for the opportunity to talk about rebuilding downtowns to rebuild ridership. In Los Angeles County, Metro sees an opportunity in our ability to provide service to major events, which when focused on downtown, could increase activity and ridership. These are activities are above and beyond everyday service and, when done right, can begin to change perceptions about using transit for everyday needs.

Our presentation today focuses on three areas. Metro's dedicated to best service during the World Cup games, the focus on the customer's experience as part of this service, and the ability for transit to be a destination activating, the public realm, either on the way to a major event or at the station or facility itself. And if the presentation can be brought up, I would appreciate it. Just wanted to confirm whether the presentation is up. Okay.

Yep. Thank you.

For the World Cup, Metro hosted or the Los Angeles Stadium hosted eight matches, and Metro provided service for those eight matches. We used a point to point service or games enhanced transit system, carrying riders from a variety of park and ride locations throughout Los Angeles County and in some cases, beyond, in addition to enhancing our existing transit service on our bus and rail lines.

The success is in the numbers with Metro carrying, on average, a third of the attendees to the event, in some cases, almost half of or some of the most exciting matches.

Next slide. This was a partnership. It was all not just Metro. It was Metro partnering with other municipalities and transit agencies across the Southern California LA County region and really built a camaraderie and pride among the operators providing that service, something that had not been done in the LA area for a long period of time. Next slide.

The GET service, which includes the work performed by operators, technicians, and frontline supervisors, was key, but also riders needed to know where to access the gets from the park and ride lots or existing bus and rail stations as well as from the drop off and pickup locations at the venues itself. Signage and Wayfinding helped us brand the service.

At the venue, we coordinated with local and county on traffic and signal control and really made the trip from the initial start up to the venue as seamless as possible. Next slide. We also took a holistic approach to providing service.

Signage is important, but for a world class event event, we needed all hands on deck. And we enlisted office staff, our MVPs, Metro's Value and Practice staff from our headquarters to provide customer service for folks guiding in their location and answering questions about the service while wearing distinct branding, again, consistent with the signage. The interaction between customers and employees was beneficial to both parties as employees felt the appreciation from customers while providing them key information on how to move around.

Some additional successes that we had not anticipated was the fact, again, focused on customers and their needs, knowing that during the summer months, we would have hotter than expected temperatures. And especially if there are long lines, we provided a number of heat mitigations, some tents and fresh drinking water at each of the sites.

We also provide calming spaces at a number of our venues as large crowds and activities can become overwhelming for those with heightened sensitivities. This allows them a space to have some peace and quiet and calmness before or after the games. Next slide. And next slide. We also made sure we got the word out.

We can move to the next slide. Thank you. Right there. We had a strong social media presence, marketing, the get service to the community, as well as our own CEO documenting her experience in her blog during and throughout the World Cup on Substack. Next slide.

At historic Union Station, Metro hosted an official FIFA fan zone. This included a total of three large screens, one indoor and one outdoor in the ticketed but free area of the fan zone, and then a very large screen in our passenger waiting area in the historic Union Station where folks waiting for the Amtrak, Surfliner, Greyhound, Metrolink trains or metro trains themselves could watch games while they waited for their service. We had significant attendance over the four days. Next slide.

That day, Union Station was no longer a place where people passed through for four days.

It was the destination. Attendees for the ticketed area was significant. But considering our close proximity to the heart of LA, Olvera Street, our historical birthplace of Los Angeles, and in addition, the local venues, including breweries and restaurants, who were also showing games, the number of people moving throughout Union Station was almost 400,000 throughout that period, with about 73% of them using Transit First modes, 60% using Metro service, and Amtrak Surfliner experiencing a 22% increase over the average month, average ridership for that month. Next slide.

And we had great interest in our venue by promoters and performers, which we look to build upon, many who have reached out for additional events where they could participate.

At at Union Station, we had Warren G, DJ Quik, Travis Barker, and Men in Blazers. Notably, throughout the entire fan zone for Union Station, there was it was held without a single incident. So safety and security was important and it showed. Next slide. These are activities that are not something that Metro is unfamiliar with.

And we can see a tie to customer satisfaction and rider growth when we focus investments around our station during major events. Over the last couple of years, we've been piloting station takeovers during sporting events with specific stations next to venues rebranded for a big game, and also pull in our staff to support customers during those event times. Next slide. But it's not just sporting events. We continue to look at activations and stations for major cultural events, parades.

And speaking of the parades, next slide. We've seen a lot of of parades in Los Angeles lately. Our back dodgers have and their victory parades have helped us really test our system with significant ridership during the parades at Union Station on our system through downtown with a number of stations located around the parade route. We really have developed some good practices that we believe could help our downtown area really revitalize. Next slide.

We see more and more attendees at major events and activities. People know that they anticipate traffic jams and limited parking or very high priced parking, and they are more and more looking to an alternative. But we just don't wanna be a second choice. We wanna be the first choice. And we believe that by providing excellent customer service, something that is above and beyond providing our everyday service that we fund and operate.

We really need the resources to be able to to raise that level for these major events. Next slide. And with that, I'd like to thank you for your time and appreciate the partnership and support that the state has shown us through all of our efforts in trying to revitalize transit service and especially during major events. Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Greg Fishman. I'm the senior community relations officer with Sacramento Regional Transit Transit. Chair Haney and Assembly Member Krell, thank you for for being here and for asking me to testify today.

I'm gonna start with a quick overview of Sacramento Regional Transit. We have three light rail lines, 44 miles of track covering 55 stations. Our light rail lines run adjacent to the swing space over on O Street. We have 82 bus routes that cover a 600 square mile service territory. We provide ADA paratransit service and SACRT Flex micro transit service.

We provide about 90% of the transit rides in the Greater Sacramento region, equaling 18,000,000 rider trips in 2025. Since the pandemic, our bus ridership has recovered to about a 103% of pre pandemic. That's driven largely by our free ride program that applies for all students pre k through twelfth grade. So that's been very popular. It's grown from about a million rides per year, to more than 5,000,000 rides last year in that age range.

ADA paratransit ridership also fully recovered from the pandemic. Light rail has lagged behind. It's been at about 75% of pre pandemic ridership. It was designed as a commuter system to bring Sacramento's downtown workforce to and from work. The return to work order is having some impact, and I'll get to that in just a little bit.

We have taken some significant steps to try to increase our ridership, and that includes our light rail modernization program, which needed to be done anyway. We're replacing our aging fleet of nineteen eighty seven vintage legacy vehicles with new, low floor vehicles manufactured here in Sacramento by Siemens Mobility. They're cleaner, quieter, easier to maintain, easier to board. We have 37 new vehicles in service now, seven more in testing, 20 more on order to be delivered in a couple of years.

The gold line between Downtown Sacramento and Folsom is now 100% operating with the new light rail vehicles.

We will begin service with the new vehicles on the blue line next year. We have to do station modification work, some some construction to make them compatible with the new cars. We have two new stations about ready to come online, the Dos Rio Station at 12th And Richards and the Railyard Station, both just north of here at the Capitol. They will serve the Railyards development and the new soccer stadium there. The Dos Rio Station serves a new affordable housing complex, Mirasol Village.

We've added security measures as well, more transit ambassadors and more security officers. 90% of our light rail trains now have a visible security team member riding. Our goal is 100%. We also have more than 5,000 live security cameras that are tied to a PA system. So our security operators monitoring those cameras back at their, headquarters can get on that PA system, the voice of God, and directs, patrons to stop smoking, leave the station, the police are on the way, whatever that message might be.

It's been 85% effective at stopping bad behavior. Our criminal incident rate is down to 2.7 per million rider trips among the lowest in the nation, and our fare evasion is now below 1%. We're an open system. We don't have turnstiles to keep people from getting on the train. It's all on the honor system.

And then obviously, our our people are checking for fares once they're on board. We've received eight national safety and security awards in the past ten years or so. Another big step in that's has been mentioned is transit oriented development, a proven way to boost ridership, build housing, and mixed use infill developments at or near light rail stations and bus lines.

Several examples downtown that are all grant recipients of the affordable housing and sustainable communities program, La Valentina Apartments, adjacent to our La Valentina Station at 12th And E, the apartments at 15th And Aye, and Broadway Apartments at Broadway And 16th Street, the Sakura Apartments under construction now at 16th And T, all AHSC grant recipients.

Let me get and and within a probably a mile and a half or two miles of where we're sitting, there's literally dozens of other examples of transit oriented development that are taking place now at various, stages of construction.

The impact of return to office for state workers, let me start by saying Sacchar T does not take a position pro or con on the order returning, state workers to work at the office, but we are a resource for state workers who are now coming downtown somewhat more frequently. We recently compared ridership from July of last year to July of this year, and there is an increase of roughly 10%, in our morning and afternoon commute hours.

These are preliminary numbers, rounded numbers, so please don't take them to the bank just yet. But there are other factors in play as well. But the return to order office is a likely part of the reason for the increase that we're seeing.

And that also roughly agrees with numbers that we also just got today from the Sacramento Downtown Partnership. They monitor cell phone activity, not individual conversations, but the number of calls and, other things happening. And they they, note a roughly, 9% increase. So the numbers roughly agree. Sacramento is home to more than 90,000 state employees.

About half of them work downtown at least part of the time. And we work with the state and employee bargaining units to offer 100% subsidy fare programs. But they are individually, work with through the bargaining units or in some cases, state agencies. Obtaining a monthly pass can be somewhat cumbersome and it's a deterrent for some employees. We know that anecdotally.

We have proposed offering a a flat subsidy from the state that would then allow all state workers to access our system anytime that it's operating just by showing their state ID badge. So this eliminates a lot of the cumbersome process of getting the pass, using that on a daily

basis. Most state employees are gonna bring their badge every day. This we're still pursuing that with CalHR and we're trying to flesh that out and perhaps we'll get that implemented sometime soon. We believe it will make writing our system easier for the employee and ultimately less costly for the state as well. Special events, we we didn't quite get as many people coming downtown as LA did for the World Cup.

But we do well and and unfortunately, we have not had to hold a championship event for the Sacramento Kings recently. But the Golden One Center, basketball, concerts, full slate of other arena events, and we do run extra trains to coincide with the end of most of those events. We run special shuttle service for Golden Sky and aftershock music festivals that take place at Discovery Park. And we offer free ride flyers for many events that do take place downtown like Earth Day.

So, we are seeing a resurgence in our downtown traffic.

That's good. We'd like to see more. And there are some headwinds that we're very, very concerned about. Impact, including impacts to state transportation funding. As you know, the recent changes to the cap and invest program in the greenhouse gas reduction fund are resulting in a potentially serious hit to state transportation grant programs, including the low carbon transportation operating program, LC TOP, transit and intercity rail capital program, and the the ASEC program, affordable housing and sustainable communities that I've already talked about.

In addition to the SB 125 money promised to transit a couple of years ago. These put major projects that we have at risk. In addition to some operating funds, we use the LC top, for example, to help pay for that free ride program for students. So with those funds, in jeopardy, we have a street car project across the Tower Bridge into West Sacramento that's still on the drawing board, but that funding is, somewhat up in the air.

New stations that we have also on the drawing board, more new light rail vehicles and transitioning our bus fleet to zero emissions, and a bus rapid transit project along Stockton Boulevard, our busiest route that comes into Downtown Sacramento.

We also have, to be honest with you, a a lack of local funding. We get about a fifth of a penny in local sales tax. Many of our statewide pure agencies get a 0.5 of cent to up to a penny and 0.5 in local sales tax funding. And unfortunately, a measure to increase sales tax for transportation in the city of Sacramento just failed to gain enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. That was a citizen led effort.

I believe they will try again, but not sure exactly when or how that will take place. So like many transit agencies up and down the state, we are facing uncertain funding in the long term. The fiscal cliff is out there. We're not sure exactly where.

We are stable for now, but the loss of the GGRF and the SB 125 funding, the lack of local sales tax support does not bode well for our future and for our ability to continue serving downtown in a more robust and more efficient manner.

So at some point without additional funding, we will have to consider canceling projects, reducing service, that kind of thing out out in the future. That's all I have. And I did not prepare any slides, but I'm happy to answer questions.

No worries. We accept all all types of presentations here, but that was very, very helpful and informative for us for sure. And we we look forward to a Sacramento Kings championship parade sometime in the next, I don't know, decade. We're we're keeping our fingers crossed. We're rebuilding.

We're all rebuilding downtowns and the Kings. Assemblymember, do you have any question? You don't? Okay. I will ask one, and then I I I know we do have to move because we are some folks who got time crunches on our next panel.

One thing I wanted to ask, and it was sort of a theme of of all of your presentations, whether you are seeing a real shift in terms of when your riders are using the system. Are there more folks who are coming on the weekends than before, the evenings and nights than before, or sort of as a proportion versus the day? And has that led to either some challenges or some shifts in how you think about service.

Obviously, we were we know that we're all seeing somewhat of a reduction as we talked about since before the pandemic of daytime sort of office, like, you know, regular ridership. But but how is that being?

Are you seeing increases at other times or is it flat at other times? And how is that sort of changing how you're approaching, what you provide and and any opportunities or challenges you see there? Maybe we'll just if anybody? Bart, I know this is a a factor for you, vice president Wright.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the question, Chair Hany. Happy to speak to that. I mean, I'd say there's definitely been a proportional shift, to seeing a greater percentage of the trips taken on Bart, taken not during typical commute hours.

We've certainly seen that in our our weekend trip recovery rate and the, you know, number of passengers, number of trips that they're taking on weekends. And I think it really stands out when you look at events. We, you know, in a post pandemic environment, have seen a lot more people, shifting to taking BART to get to large scale events, which is driving a lot of that. In terms I I wouldn't necessarily say that it's presented challenges to us at this point.

It's certainly a development we support.

I think given the history of arts design as a system to shepherd people as a commute system to down out office spaces, there are inherent challenges in that in a, you know, post pandemic world where fewer people are making those trips. But we really see accommodating trips different kinds of trips at different times as as a key path forward for us.

I think anecdotally, yes. We are seeing additional ridership in in some of the off hours. We're still seeing especially on light rail, the peak hours are definitely the commute hours. And now we're we're seeing that increase again with the return to office order taking some effect. But again, anecdotally, we have seen some additional ridership on weekends, in the evenings.

There's somewhat more that there's more venues downtown. There's more activity downtown in general, and that's driving more traffic here. But we're also seeing, frankly, people riding out to some of our suburbs. We have more frequent service out to Folsom. There's some historical sites out there, a nice, you know, more walkable small historical downtown there.

And so we're seeing people riding for for other reasons other than just the commute as well.

K.

Yeah. I would just add in in LA, we've had the similar experience. Our ridership on weekends has returned very emphatically to the levels close to pre pandemic. And, you know, a lot of that, I think, also has to do with, again, coming out of the pandemic, a desire for folks to be together in their in their free time to participate in events and in activities. And we've seen during the week the peak hour spread where the peak of the peak is real narrow.

And, you know, our efforts have been to to really try to provide more service, more frequent service anyhow during those off peak hours where we are also getting a lot of interest in extending our hours of service or adding more frequent service in the later hours of the evening to provide that again time for folks who want to attend a night at the theater or at a local concert venue, the ability to catch a frequent train or bus service at ten and eleven at night during those those events.

Thank you. Well, again, thank thank, all three of you and for all of the folks that you represent here on on work for your respective agencies. We we deeply appreciate all that you're doing to be adaptive and innovative during, this time of recovery. I know for our transit systems and certainly our downtowns and all of the people who need to access them could not function, would would grind to a halt literally if it wasn't for the work that you all do.

And so we're gonna continue to advocate to make sure you get the support you need and support you in as as we see the the the opportunities for change and innovation as well.

So thank you again for being here. Thank you for joining us remotely and in person, and, we look forward to continue to partner with you all moving forward. Thank you. Alright. We will keep moving here.

We've got another panel, and I know, one of our panelists who, has a a hard stop. So we're gonna get to him immediately. Our second panel will look at a bit more about what happens when you, get, off of the train or bus and and, how we think about sidewalks, bike infrastructure, street design, public spaces, and how to get the most out of the valuable public space that we have, which is our streets.

And we are going to have as our panelist Jeff Speck, who's a city planner with Speck Dempsey and an author of Walkable City, who's joining us remotely. And Mark Vuksevich, the director of state policy for Street for Alls, who is here.

So we have Mister Speck who's there.

Alright. We can hear you.

I am here.

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Okay. What I mean I guess means I have to enter all the information again. So you'll see me in two minutes.

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Yeah. If you say next slide, then we can—we can move.

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No. I think the sergeant's doing that. I think we, we have it now as your first slide. And I think if you say—I think he's controlling it on our, our end. So, if you say next slide, he will move the slide.

But we see that "Towards a Walkable California Downtown" is the first slide.

I'm really sorry. I, I'm gonna have to say "next" 168 times. Are you ready for that?

Oh, really? That's impressive.

Yeah. I'm—it is a, it is a ten-minute presentation, but I use, I use slides like film, so brace yourself. So, alright. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my best to do a good job here, and I'm grateful to have been invited.

Let's do a little test. Next slide. So, it says—okay, so.

You weren't kidding.

Are you ready? This, this show, which is a ten-minute show if you're, if you're quick on your fingers, but do not advance when I do not tell you to advance. So, please go back to the—so, I see the book "Walkable City." That is not the slide that I was on.

Go. Okay.

So, go back one slide, please. Now, I'm gonna do this in ten minutes and—but that requires someone with quick fingers. It also requires someone to be on the slide before this.

Oh, you gotta go one back. There you go.

Okay. So, whoever's manning the deck, I thank you in advance. This will be a test of your reactive skill. I am grateful to have been invited. I use slides like film, so I'm gonna go super fast.

This, this talk was based on a talk. It's a, it's an edited version of a talk that I gave in February to the—on behalf of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership. I believe that is why I was asked to join you today. Next. I've edited it down to only 164 slides. I believe I can do it in ten minutes.

Next. And the, the—my book "Walkable City." Next. This is gonna be really awkward. My book Walkable City has what's in it called "The general theory of walkability," which asks the question, "How do you get people to walk?" Next. In order to do that, the, the answer is the walk needs to be useful.

Next. Safe. Next, next. Comfortable. Next. And interesting. So, that's the structure of my talk today. We're gonna start with the useful walk.

Next. This is a story that I learned from my mentors, Andrei Stwani and Elizabeth Peder Ziberg, the founders of the new urbanist movement who told the story of how back in the nineteenth century, people were choking on the soot from the dark satanic mills, and the planners said, "Hey. Let's move the housing away from the factories," next, and they did that, and life spans increased immediately and dramatically. And so, the planners were hailed as heroes. Next.

And we say they've been trying to repeat that experience ever since.

So, you—the, the onset of Euclidean zoning, what you see here in this image, separation of the landscape into large areas of single use, we know this is not walkable. We know this is the wrong way to plan, but it's still what exists on most land in the US. Next. This, of course, is the most walkable place technically in the US.

You can see that it's more confetti-like mix of uses. The finer grain, the tighter your, your zoning, the—I should say the, the less zoning, the more that your users are not controlled and the more that they can disperse, of course, makes a more walkable place. Next, please. And I was an art history major. I can tell you, you don't want Rothko planning.

Next. You want Seurat planning. Seurat was the—was the pointillist, as you may be aware. Next. So, this gets us to the fundamental new urbanist argument, which is about making useful places. Essentially, there's only two tested ways to make communities.

One is the neighborhood and the other is sprawl. The neighborhood is defined as being diverse, compact, and walkable. Next. Sprawl is, of course, the opposite. It is fun to break sprawl down into its constituent parts.

Next. You have places where you only live. Next. Places where you only work. Just keep going. Places where you only shop. And—next—even, sports fields are supersized.

And, of course, the distance from the nearby house to the sports field is not ideal if you're a pedestrian, a cyclist, or even a driver. And the part we forgot, this being a California image, that if you separate everything from everything else and reconnect it only with cars, then your highway system, it becomes a big part of your daily life. Next. And I always tell people, for many, this is the American dream. Next.

But the dream comes with a nightmare because of the separation of uses. This will be your quality of life as we know. Next. So, this is even in Massachusetts, where I am, but you can see the amount we invest in our surface infrastructure, so you never have to wait more than two signals at a light is an outcome of this way of planning.

Next. This is not photoshopped. This is a real slide. I have a number of slides that illustrate the experience of being in these places. Next, please.

You know, it's very difficult on families. The longer your commute, the more likely you are to be divorced. Next. And being—you know, I got this slide from the epidemiologist who remind us that when you drive to park to take the escalator to the gym to get on the treadmill to walk, something is wrong with the way we're organizing our society. Next, please.

So, driving can be a real drag. Next, being a pedestrian in these environments can be even worse. And next, just keep going. We'll see what happens. Stop for a second.

These are the two models. Go back one. These are the two models side by side. This cartoon reminds us it's the same stuff, but how big is it? How far apart is it?

And do you have a street network? Essential to walkable places is a network of small blocks, many streets. Next. This, this way of, of presenting has slowed me down a bit, so I may go a tiny bit over, but I'll try not to. When you look at existing places like Sacramento—next—you ask the question, what is our mix of uses?

Right? We're trying to satisfy this first category of the useful walk. Next, in most of these places, it is housing. Certainly in Sacramento, it is housing that is underrepresented. You're falling behind me.

When you invest in housing, you invest in making a place more mixed-use. I'm not seeing the slides advance and maybe you are, but I am not. Keep going. And Jane Jacobs reminded us that this isn't about asking people to come downtown. It's about putting more housing downtown.

That was the first category. The second category, the safe walk is where I spend most of my time as a designer and we spend most of our time as city planners. We're experiencing an epidemic in pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the US. Next.

The principal way we can impact this is by getting people to just drive the speed limit. Next. So, we spend a lot of time asking what gets people to drive the speed limit, and we look at the number of lanes, the width of the lanes, the presence of parallel parking, the presence of street trees, these are all really important things. You can just start going through this.

This is Oklahoma City where we were called in because they were called the worst place to walk in the entire country. Next. And we noticed why don't you just keep going at a reasonable rate? We noticed the car counts downtown. Okay.

Stop for a second. That the car count counts downtown only were enough for a two-lane road on many of these streets yet. Now you can give us the next five slides. These streets are all four lanes, five lanes, six-lane roads. And we said, well, we have this we have this mismatch between the number of lanes and the number of drivers.

Next. So, we actually did a plan that reduced the number of lanes down to the amount that were needed—keep going. And this was the plan. Next, please. So, I was responsible for designing the curb to curb.

We actually were able to double the amount of on street parking. We were able to add a bike network where there was no bike network. I'd like you to keep going because that's the only way we're gonna get through this. And so, this street—go back one. This, this street became—yeah.

Yeah. This street became—next. This street, and the next street became—you keep going. You can see the befores and afters of a number of streets. This street became that street.

Next. This is what you do when you have money to spend. A lot of towns don't have money to spend. Most of our clients don't have money. We say don't rebuild.

Restripe. You've fallen behind. Don't rebuild. Restripe. So, you know, keep going.

And this is my restripe slide. Next, please. So, now I'm showing you Cedar Rapids. This is a typical street in Cedar Rapids. They had no budget, but they were repaving their streets over the—over time. Next, please. And we turned this number of driving lanes into—next—this number of driving lanes, which means the amount of parking went from mostly parallel to mostly angle, from orange to red. Next, please.

The bike system went from just a few bike lanes you're, you're about to show, to many more bike lanes in our plan. Next. Now, we're gonna see the before slide again. This is the before. Here's the after.

Right? We're, we're one of many firms who's doing this all around the country, but this one was done just with paint. Next, please. And this is another issue in Cedar Rapids, which is all the one-way streets. Multilane one-ways are destructive to walkability.

They're extraordinarily dangerous. Next, Louisville has an almost entirely one-way pair, which we are currently reverting back to two-way travel. Before we got there, Brooke and 1st were reverted to two-way while 1st and—well, 2nd and 3rd—were kept as one-way. And on the streets that were reverted—next—on the two-ways, car crashes went down 48%, crime went down 23%. On the one-ways, car crashes went up and crime went up.

We're seeing this across the country whenever two-ways are—whenever one-ways are reverted to two-way. Keep going, please. We save lives and we and business comes back. This is Sacramento, where I, I criticized the current plans for reversion as being less than they could be—next—and recommended a more comprehensive plan. Why not do it all?

Well, one reason not to do it all is the cost of signals. Signals are very expensive. But guess what? When you get rid of signals—you went backwards. When you get rid of signals, you actually stabilize also.

When you replace a signalized intersection—keep going, please—with an always stop intersection—this is typical intersection in America, oversignaled. When you replace signalized intersections with always stop intersections—have you fallen asleep? You, case—you can do two more next. This is a huge study done in Philadelphia. And when they replaced signals with always stops, the number of pedestrian injury crashes dropped by 68% serious crashes.

Next. So, another thing we do is we save money by replacing—you can hold it here for a second—we save money by replacing signalized intersections with always stop intersections. What you see here is a 1960 subdivision, and the next image is 1980 subdivision. Look at the width of the streets.

We've lost the ability to design narrow streets in America as the rules have changed. We're working to change them back. Next. The wider the street, the faster people go. The wider lanes are, the faster people go.

We're reintroducing 10 foot travel lanes everywhere. Next, please. A lot of cities have 12 foot, 11 foot standards. NACTO recommends a 10 foot lane. Next, please.

10 feet is perfectly adequate as you can see. Next. So, this is another thing we change in cities. Parallel parking and essential barrier steel that protects the curb from moving vehicles. Next image in Fort Lauderdale, you could park on one side of the street. During happy hour, you couldn't park on the other.

The next slide is happy hour on the park side, and the slide after that is happy hour on the—this is the park side. Next slide is happy hour on the unparked side of the street. People need that barrier of steel. Next, the other thing they want is a barrier of street trees.

Next. Street trees slow cars down, sometimes dramatically, but that's a good thing rather than hitting a pedestrian. The data show that a street is safer with—for drivers as well when it has trees on it, surprisingly. Next, please. What else? Well, this is what a street feels like without the parallel parking, without the street trees.

Next, please. Bicycling, of course, the largest revolution only underway in some American cities. Those that invest in cycling infrastructure get cyclists. It's that simple. The cyclists follow the investment.

Next, please. But importantly, you need to protect your bike lanes. You can flip forward three or four. This is the data on Prospect Park West in in New York City—four, four forwards, please—where we see that when the bike lane was inserted and a lane was removed, everything improved, but driving did not get worse.

The road handled as many cars as before, and we see that very often that you can reduce lanes without reducing throughput, surprisingly. Next. It's important to protect your bike lanes. This is a protected bike lane. Next. More, more typical, you see the unprotected bike lanes, which, of course, you know, no one wants their daughter in the door zone.

And now, you can start flipping through this collection of slides I have of what people do when you—well, that's worse—what people do when you don't protect. The bike lane is, you know, the Uber parks in it. The—we get buses. We get—keep going.

We get dumpsters, trash cans, vans, police who will give you a ticket for leaving the bike lane. Bikes in the bike lane. Next. Give cyclists space. Well, that's not where that sign belongs.

So, you know, the new standard, of course, is to pull it out of the street. Many cities that we work with now insist—next—on the bike lanes being up on the edge of the sidewalk, which is the new great standard, trees between the bike lane—next—and the pedestrians. This is what we like to see in urban downtowns. Next, please. So, the, the, you know, what about our bike facilities tools of gentrification for the elite?

Next. Actually, 38.5% of people who bike for commuting and work are from the poorest 25%. Next, please. And the last two categories are quite quick, so I'm almost done, believe it or not. The comfortable walk next has to do with spatial definition.

We like to be in outdoor living rooms. We like a good ratio of height to width. We like our buildings up close to the street. Next, if you do not feel contained, you do not feel comfortable. This is Salzburg.

Pretty great. Next. The opposite of Salzburg is Houston. During the 80s—no, you're not Europe just because you put tables in your parking lot.

This is Europe. Next. The outdoor living room is something that most American urban designers forget to create, and we work hard to get those buildings up to the street and to shape space. Next. And then finally, the interesting walk.

Well, you know, the one-to-one ratio you see there on the middle left is—was the renaissance ideal. Next. But when your one-to-one ratio is exposed parking deck and a, a boring hotel facility, that's just not gonna entice people to walk. We gotta hide our parking decks. Next.

And we gotta, you know, line them with buildings where appropriate. You hide a parking deck with very little building. It's very easy to do. Next. Sacramento, like most American cities, has—this is Miami, did a good job here with the Chia Pet Garage.

Next. Sacramento has a number of exposed parking lots. Most cities do. We don't do this anymore. We hope you guys won't do it anymore.

You can keep going. But then, there's also the, the, the idea of hiding your parking deck—stop here. Go back one. Stop here with the—this is your new development across the river, and they've done the proper thing—one slide back, please—of this thin crust of building.

See that? The thin crust of building wrapping the parking so nobody sees it. That's the technique that's become standard.

You need to make sure that you're getting that. So, that's it. That's everything. I'm sorry that—I would have taken ten minutes if I had control of the slides. And I just wanna say that there is one thing, which is that among these four categories, the safe walk is the category that cities control the most.

Cities can control the useful walk and the comfortable walk and the interesting walk with their zoning, with their investment, but they can fix their streets now. And so, most of the work we do with cities has to do—and towns—has to do with street design, rebuilding, or restriping, particularly in downtowns where the other three things are pretty good. Right?

Downtown Sacramento, the walk is pretty useful, comfortable, and interesting, but it's not, it's not that safe, particularly because of the one-ways with a lot of speeding on them. So, this is where we focus.

Next, please. I guess I'm done. I, I always direct people to my books, which you could quickly flip through. I got a couple TED Talks as well that I would direct you to. And I'm sorry that it's, it's happy hour in Boston, and I'm fifteen minutes late.

Well, we hope you're—we hope you're walking over there.

I hope, I, I hope that my—I, I hope that my struggling was entertaining at least, and I am very grateful to whoever advanced the slides who did about as good a job as could be expected in this circumstance.

Thank you. I thought you all made a great team, all considering. So, we really appreciate your time. Thank, thank you for that, and we'll definitely be reading your books.

I've read a couple myself and we'll, I'm sure we'll have other ways to engage with you in the future. But we really appreciate you being with us, and enjoy the happy hour.

Alright. Talk to you later.

Take care. Alright. Bye bye. And thank you so much for, for doing all, what was it, 160, 170 slides?

That was actually quite, quite impressive. Alright. Back to maybe a—I don't know. Do you have a presentation too?

No. I do not.

Okay. Good. Thank, thank God. He was gonna literally get up and quit and walk out of here if you had 10 slides. Mister, Mister, Mister Vukcevich, for—Director of State Policy for Streets for All.

Thank you, Chair Haney, members who may be listening. My name is Mark Vuksevich, Director of State Policy for Streets for All. Before I get to my prepared remarks, I, I just wanna say, Jeff Speck is, is a legend. You know, I, I—some people might think of him as just a guy with a lot of slides or, or a, a, a fancy academic. No.

Jeff Speck's name has been a well-regarded name in pedestrian places and on walkable cities for a very, very, very long time, and I'm honored to share the digital stage with them. So, so, Streets for All works on statewide transportation, street safety, transit, and smart lane use policy.

And so, the central point I wanna make today is that strong downtowns are not simply a concern for the legislators that happen to represent them, like you, Assemblymember Haney, but for everybody, and that they're a straight wide economic asset. And so, it's tempting to hear downtown recovery and primarily think of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, or even Sacramento.

But whether you represent an urban area, a suburban or exurban area full of super commuters or rural communities, California has a really direct financial interest in making its economic center successful. And so, California's General Fund is extraordinarily dependent on economic activity. According to LAO, about a $147 billion come from personal income taxes, $45 billion from corporation taxes, and $35 billion from sales taxes, comprising 95% of projected state revenues.

That means California's ultimate—ultimate fiscal health—depends on people earning money, making money, business to—businesses working together—and people buying things. And that's where downtowns play an enormous role for where all that activity comes together, where jobs, retail, restaurants, tourism, conventions, entertainment, professional services, major employers, small businesses all come together.

And that economic geography does not stop at the city limits. Person working downtown may live much farther away from downtown, or the contractor, an employer, or the supplier may not live in that downtown. So, prosperous downtown, or prosperous downtowns in California, directly impacts really the entire state budget. And that means, you know, everything that we need, whether it be schools or health care or transportation policy or wildfire prevention, it, it really starts with California's cities. So, I wanna just appreciate the purpose of this subcommittee, briefly.

And so, yeah, I wanna talk about, the—really the main things I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about transit. I'm gonna talk about parking, and I'm talking about pedestrianization, but I'm not gonna talk on that as much as Mr. Speck just did. And so, first and foremost, so transit is a service that we need, and it's—we also need it prioritized.

And before I say anything more than that, everything the transit agencies said and that I will say with regards to transit will really not be relevant if we don't sort out this GGRF issue with a massive cut, cut that is coming to transit this year if nothing is done. And so, to the extent that the Legislature can deal with that, that is something that's prescient and urgent.

So, if downtowns can no longer depend exclusively on a five-day work week and office commuters, we need to make it easy for people to do different times—different types of trips at different times—and that means transit needs to be frequent. It needs to be reliable. It needs to be on evenings and weekdays.

It needs to serve people beyond just the eight to five commute. So, most importantly, funding a bus and then allowing that bus to just sit in traffic is kind of a terrible use of public money. And so, bus lanes, queue jumping, transit signal priority, bus lane cameras, all of those things make transit substantially more useful and attractive without waiting decades for a new rail project. And I, I love a new rail project. So, so, bus lane is not just transportation infrastructure.

It is downtown economic development infrastructure. It expands the number of people who can reliably reach a business, job, a restaurant, without requiring any more parking in a downtown. Okay. Now I wanna get to the parking section. So, the curb—the curbs of downtowns might be the most underrated piece of downtown economic infrastructure.

I, I'd encourage everyone to think just, like, fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, our cities did not have Uber and Lyft. They did not have DoorDash. They didn't have same day six-hour package delivery. They didn't have smart loading zones. They didn't have autonomous vehicles.

Didn't have scooters that were going through cities. We didn't think about accessible parking as much, bus boarding, zero-emission deliveries. All of that has changed in the last fifteen years. And so, but our cities are still working on managing their curbside with, like, 2006 tools for the modern day, and our curbsides provide a lot of value. Those are potential customers.

Those are potential deliveries. Those are potential business opportunities, whatever they may be. And so, a poorly managed curve means a delivery driver double parks. Someone blocks the bus lane or the bike lane, a rideshare vehicle stops in a travel lane, a customer circles the block repeatedly instead of, you know, doing the transaction that they want and serving a small business, and, and that means businesses lose reliable access for deliveries and customers.

So, the curb really needs to be managed according to its value and the immense value it provides in the downtown, not simply just the default to long-term private vehicle storage. And that—sort of teasing into the next part about parking policy, which is that parking policy should be about availability. You know, pricing parking, you know, I know it's lovely. Everyone loves talking about that.

But pricing parking is not about being anti-parking, but good parking, pricing park—parking pricing—is how you make parking actually available.

So, you know, at its core, if you ask a small business owner what's more useful, a free parking spot occupied by a vehicle that sits there for eight hours or a paid parking spot that turns over 30 times, that's the thing that our downtowns needs is we need turnover on those spots so that more customers, more employers, people can use those spaces. And that should be how you think about parking availability through pricing.

And so, the goal should be is that when someone comes downtown with a vehicle, that there's a reasonable chance that they have a space to go, that you don't need to build parking structures for them because you don't want your downtown to be a parking structure. You want it to be businesses. You want it to be retail.

You want it to be housing, but that there are ways you can manage the, the space to do that. And so, I think SF does this, this—does this rather well. I think there's more to be done and more to improve. I'm gonna mention, I think there's there's placard reform that needs to be done. I think there's dynamic pricing strategies we need to think about.

Yeah. And then, where does that money go? So, you price the parking, you price it so that you can maximize your customers, and you just put it into the slush fund, and you go and buy politicians trips and stuff. Now, you wanna go and I would really encourage people to think about a parking benefits district. So, a parking benefits district is the concept of you price parking, and then all of that money goes back into investing into the community, the specific community it serves.

And so, you know, I used to work at a small little coffee shop in my college town, and, like, my—the small business owner that I worked for would spend the money to power wash the sidewalk right outside of his small business. So, like, this sort of idea is that you price the curb in a downtown area, and you take all of that money and say, "Hey. This is gonna go to fix the potholes in that area."

It's gonna go to widen the sidewalk, power wash the sidewalk, you know, beautify the area, make it a hub that people want to go—to go to—that's attractive. We're talking about trees, public art, benches, maybe security, sidewalk repairs, bike parking, transit impute improvements, you know, events like parades.

You know, it's the sort of virtuous cycle where you have more people, you know, funding and creating a, a, you know, a beautiful thing. And so, this changes the conversation from, like, the government's charging me to park here to our parking is paying for a system that makes our commercial district better and our small businesses more prosperous. And so, you wanna create that cycle. Also, price—pricing parking—makes spaces turnover.

You make that—you make those parking spaces easier to find, and then you generate revenue from that extremely valuable public asset to reinvest into that community in that district.

And that's just—that, that's not just like a, a transportation policy, which I think is good transportation policy. You stop idling. You stop circling. You reduce VMT, but it's also an economic development strategy, and it makes our downtowns more prosperous. And then lastly, you know, like I said, everything that disrespect covered, we—once you think about a downtown, you really should think about the pedestrian experience.

At some point, if you arrive in a downtown, you walk. Whether you arrive by car or a bus or a scooter, you're walking at some point. And so, you know, cities really should encourage to do better street design and better designs in general in ways that that planners could speak better than I can.

But, like, some of the high-level things that are simple are daylighting intersections, leading pedestrian intervals that allow people to enter the crosswalk before turning cars, shorter crossings and curb extensions, pedestrian priority, or even pedestrian-only spaces, like in State Street and downtown—downtown State Street in Santa Barbara. Excuse me.

Shades and seating. Storefront economies really work at walking speed, and that's really the—what I'd encourage people to think about. So, we shouldn't really think about how fast cars are going through downtown. We should think about how, like, slowly people are walking through downtowns. Because fast cars mean people are just driving through. Slow walking people mean people are spending and enjoying and recreating our downtowns.

So, to close here, downtown recovery cannot simply mean just recreating commute patterns or transportation patterns of 2019. It should mean building town—towns—that are useful really twenty hours of the day, I would say maybe the—minus the four hours past bars closing to residents, to workers, to tourists, to families, to customers, and to businesses.

And to do that, California should keep transit frequent and give it priority, give cities modern tools to manage their increasingly complicated curbside space, price scarce parking to create availability and turnover, return that parking revenue to the neighborhoods and the cities that are generating them to create that virtuous cycle, and make the pedestrian experience, maybe some—with some of that revenue—safer and more inviting and more beautiful.

And so, our streets and curbs are in high—especially in high demand downtowns. They are economic infrastructure, and we should manage them in, like, economic infrastructure.

And our cities are gonna be stronger and our state budget will be stronger and California itself will be stronger if we do so. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate—I appreciate that. And I think it's a, a, a part of this conversation that's, that's really critically important. A couple of things that I wanted to ask you about the, the curb—some of the ideas that you put forward. One is, is there the—this idea of sort of a parking benefits district, is that a, a concept that currently exists within the law and the, the places have something like that?

Or is it authorized to create something like that already within state law? And then, if—maybe if there's anything that you might wanna highlight in terms of how the state kinda interacts with some of these opportunities and decisions. I know, you know, there's been some areas where state policies have been proposed on some of the things that you mentioned, but it's an area where the localities like to hold a lot of their own independence and autonomy.

And where are—do you see opportunities for the state to support or initiate some of the types of changes that you, you laid out?

Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for your question, Chair Haney. So, with regards to parking benefits districts, really, at, at this time, they, they are completely able to be done by cities. But I do think there's quite a bit of a role the state has to play in terms of helping facilitate that. And so, something like, like a model enabling legislation where a city doesn't have to write, you know, their own parking benefits districts from scratch.

If there can be a model that's adopted that's, you know, maybe exempt from CEQA and a little bit less onerous or has some clear parameters that we know work that a city cannot use.

You know, this, that you, by the way, I'll just wanna flag as well as not from Streets for All, this comes from the rate—the late great Donald Shoop—another, a person well known in the urban space of UCLA parking professor who really established parking as a field to look into.

And so, I think there's work that we should be taking from academics and from researchers, maybe adopting it as model policy and state law so that it can be adopted maybe a single, you know, a single ordinance that doesn't have to be recreated by every single municipality in California. So, I think that's the answer to your first question.

I think to answer your second question, I think there's a lot more the state can do to enable cities to be really creative in terms of how to manage their curbside.

I mentioned sort of placard reform. I think that that does need to be probably done at a state level. But also, ultimately, like, these cities, to your point, like, they, they need to have autonomy in this, but because of how sort of preemptive the state is with regards to, let's say, like, camera-based parking enforcement, it sort of stops cities from being a laboratory in this way, and you have to go to the state every single time to authorize something.

And, and I understand that that gets into some of the politics questions here.

But, like, I would love to see what, you know, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, you know, all tried to maximize their downtowns and all work using different technology or different, different legal solutions and, like, come back to the state and said, these worked, these didn't, let's adopt this as, as state policy. But right now, the way that our, our legal structure works is it's, it's, somewhat—it's sort of onerous. It doesn't really allow for that sort of experimentation.

Instead, we need to, like, authorize a pilot that usually in the political process gets highly structured in California. And we don't really learn much about, you know, what could be tried.

We just learned about one particular thing, you know, with a lot of reservations and holdbacks at the same time.

Great. Well, thank you for that, and look forward to working with you on this and, and other issues, and really appreciate your focus on, on those particular issues that I think sometimes get lost in kind of these, these bigger macro questions, but on a day to day can really determine how our streets are available for the types of uses that make them livable, and promoting safe and accessible walking and biking and public transportation.

So, I really appreciate your, your support here and your partnership and thank you for sharing.

Thank you for having me.

Sure. Alright. So, we will now move to our last panel, and our last panel is focused on thriving neighborhoods built around transit. Our final panel gets at another fundamental part of this conversation, which is who actually lives near our transit systems, and one of the most straightforward things that we can do, of course, to support transit is to support more people to be able to live in them and other types of uses that bring people to our downtowns and connect them with transit in the process.

With us today are Aaron Eckhouse, Policy Director for California YIMBY, and Adam Van de Water, Executive Director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Whoever wants to...

Alright. Well, hello. Thank you to the Chair, to the committee, for having me here. My name is Aaron Eckhouse. I'm the Policy Director for California YIMBY.

Our mission is to make California an affordable place for everyone to live, work, and raise a family. California YIMBY has always believed that housing and transit go together. Transit will be more successful the more people can live near it, and putting new homes near transit gives those residents access to greater mobility and economic opportunities, all without having to get in a car.

The California Air Resources Board estimates that people who moved within a mile of rail transit drive 10% less on average, and other studies have shown the impact can scale up much higher up to 50% when people are very close to very high quality transit. That means less air pollution, less traffic, less carbon pollution.

Properties near transit bring in more property tax—revenue for local governments to fund infrastructure and services—and are more cost efficient for those governments to serve. And families who live near transit can save an average of 20% on their transportation costs, adding up to savings of over $1,000 per year. Nowhere has better quality transit than our downtowns, which are the hubs of local and regional transit systems. Living downtown means living near transit connections to every part of the city and Metro Area.

And it's not just transit.

People also want to live near jobs, retail, and cultural amenities, and downtowns offer those in abundance as well. That all holds true from Downtown San Francisco to Downtown Redlands, from Downtown San Diego to Downtown Chico. That's why California YIMBY is proud to be working with Assemblymember Haney this year on AB 2074. They built the names to go big on housing in the downtown, California's largest transit-rich cities. Really big with buildings as tall as 400 feet.

Downtowns thrive on density and intensity of use. That will make them such a great fit with transit, and it also makes them the perfect place for new housing at a grand scale. I'm happy to say that the cities where the bill would apply have seen it the same way. In fact, every single one of them supports the bill. Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Long Beach, and Oakland, and a few more as well actually.

They all agree their downtowns are great places for our housing and a lot of it. They see the potential for new housing to bring new life to the heart of their cities, filling neighborhood at all hours of the day, not just nine to five. They see an opportunity to capitalize on the infrastructure they already have, including transit, and to build a stronger tax base. Many of these cities have already been doing it.

Oakland, where I live, had a boom of residential high rises downtown over the last ten years. Eight of the 14 tallest residential buildings in Oakland were built since 2019, and the number of buildings over 200 feet tall went up from 30 to 41 in that time period. The city built thousands of new homes in a short period, most of them downtown. And all that new downtown housing benefited renters across the entire city, keeping rents low for years after the pandemic. Now, those apartments are filling up.

Rents are starting to rise again, which means it's time to build more. I hope I've convinced you that downtowns are a good place for more housing and that more housing is good for downtowns. So, how do we get more housing downtown? Unfortunately, building new high rises isn't as simple as just saying yes to them. They require costly steel frame construction and complex financing.

The good news is the state has policy tools available to solve those challenges. Let's start with financing. A feature in AB 2074 we were very excited about was creating a revolving loan fund to support mixed income high rises built with skilled and trained labor. The fund would replace the most expensive part of the capital stack, private equity with low-cost mezzanine loans.

By funding only a portion of total development cost, the fund would leverage private capital to magnify its impact and bring investment back to downtowns.

By providing loans instead of grants, the money could cycle back through to keep that investment flowing for years to come. And because the state would be directly financing the projects, it would be in a stronger position to secure policy priorities like on-site affordable housing and high road jobs. That revolving loan fund model is growing in popularity across the country. The Center for Public Enterprise identified seven states that have created revolving loan funds for mixed income housing since 2024.

While we have to remove the fund from AB 2074 and replace it with a study, we continue to believe that this is a good idea that could accelerate home building in California.

Another way to help finance downtown housing development is to remove California's unnecessary barriers to financing multifamily ownership housing, AKA condos. A downtown condo can be a great alternative to drive until you qualify, offering a walkable location with a shorter commute. Unfortunately, we don't build them. This year, California YIMBY is proud to be working with Assemblymember Wicks on AB 1903, which would perform construction defect liability standards that have largely driven condo development to extinction in California.

We also worked this year with Assemblymember Ward on AB 1406, which would have allowed condo builders in California to make better use of pre-construction sales.

This is a model that's very common in other states and many other countries, and it can offer savings to both builders and home buyers. Multiple developers who build condos in other states have told us that California is uniquely challenging standards around pre-construction deposits are the #1 reason that they don't build condos here. That bill died in the Senate, but we still believe those standards are in need of reform. High construction costs are also a major obstacle to high rise housing in particular.

Those high costs are a fact of nature that we must simply accept.

The US Building Code is full of standards not required by our global peers that drive up costs. Our elevator standards are out of sync with virtually the entire rest of the world. As a result, installation and maintenance for elevators here cost three times as much as in other countries. US building codes outside New York prohibit more space efficient scissor stair configurations, used to great effect up the coast in Vancouver.

Together with the requirement for elevators to have a separate lobby, this leads to larger and less efficient floor plates.

Our plumbing standards prohibit more cost-effective designs used in the rest of the world. The list goes on, which is why the US is globally unique in having higher per square foot construction cost for multifamily housing than for detached houses. The savings here are potentially enormous. Five, ten, even 20% in an industry where margins of 6% are common. Other states have started to pursue building code reforms that reduce costs while maintaining high standards of safety.

California should as well. Thank you again for the opportunity to present here. More housing downtown at the heart of our cities and our transit systems is good for those cities, good for those transit systems, and good for the people who will get to live here. We've made a lot of progress making that possible with zoning reform and permit streamlining, but more policy reforms are needed to get us all the way there.

I look forward to working with you to make that happen and to realize the vision of a California everyone can afford to call home.

Thank you. I'm, I'm convinced.

I appreciate it.

I know it's a tough crowd, but, Adam.

Good afternoon, and thank you, Chair Haney, Assembly members. My name is Adam Van de Water, and I'm honored both to serve as the Executive Director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority and to share what our agency continues to do to create a vibrant, sustainable, and connected downtown San Francisco. I think we'll pull on some of the wisdom you've been hearing from the previous six—speakers—in a case study here in Assembly District 17.

The Transbay Joint Powers is a small public agency created under state law in 2001 to complete three primary tasks.

And we do have a, a PowerPoint here that has visuals to go along with, but is not necessary. So, the, the three tasks are—really are the 1939 Transbay Terminal replacement, and we've now opened and are about celebrate the eight-year anniversary of the modern sustainable civic, and now iconic, Salesforce Transit Center. The second is to allow for the southern expansion of Downtown San Francisco and to reimagine it for enhanced connectivity, sustainability, mixed-use, and open space.

And then, what we continue to work on looking forward is to connect Caltrain and eventually the California High-Speed Rail System into the heart of downtown via what we call "the portal," one of the region's top transit improvement priorities. So, these three pillars of our work, have had a profound impact on Downtown San Francisco over the last two decades, transforming transit connectivity, development capacity, sustainability, and quality of life into one of the most successful neighborhoods in California.

This 24/7 neighborhood now connects nine transit operators serving the entire Bay Area and has created over 6,000,000 square feet of development with 15,000 new residents, many in deep restricted affordable units, and the largest elevated park in the Western United States. After years of COVID-induced delay, we are finally entertaining renewed interest in the remaining development parcels and working to create additional open space to meet that growing demand.

The transit center itself, and I, I don't know if we're able to pull up any of the visuals to go with this, is the civic anchor of this burgeoning neighborhood and hosts over a million annual business...

You have the clicker.

Oh, I have it. Can I advance?

There you are.

Here we go. Alright. Let's go here. So this really shows the before and after. And the incredible thing to me is the photos here from left to right is only about a twenty twenty year difference.

So on the left, you see the old Transbay Terminal just north of the center of the photo, which was there since 1939 and the large elevated ramps that both serve that building and then parallel that along the Embarcadero Freeway in front of the Ferry Building, which we consolidated into one ramp seen on the right, and then the circulation within the building, which freed up many acres of former state owned part parcels that we are now some 800 foot towers and some of those 15,000 residents. Okay.

So the the transit center itself is the civic anchor of this neighborhood and hosts over a million annual visits to the five and a half acre rooftop park, about a 100,000 square feet of retail, 37 bus bays for AC Transit, Muni, Golden Gate Transit, SamTrans, Westcat, Greyhound, Paratransit, and we're working to bring back Amtrak into that bus deck. They're, on the street below. As well as over 600 free annual programmed events from concerts to yoga, toddler programs, bird watching, opera, circus.

It's a pretty wide array and many holiday events. You can see the Assembly member here with our mayor, and some of our Board Members Oh. At Christmas time. I'm not one of the trees just for You

are not one of the trees. All this activity is facilitated through a dense and innovative architecture, seamlessly mixing uses over nearly four city blocks. Four floors of the LEED Gold Center are open to the public above a two story basement train box designed to accommodate the recently electrified Caltrain trains down the peninsula and ultimately serve as the northern terminus of the California high speed rail system.

The six track train box beneath the transit center is a constructed and awaiting rail connections via the portal, a project of state and national significance and a long held priority of the California State Rail Plan, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Plan Bay Area '20 50 and major project advancement policy, and the Federal Transit Administration's capital investment grant program.

Once complete, the portal will connect 11 operators in one of the densest neighborhoods on the West Coast, saving travelers, an estimated twenty plus minutes each way eliminating the equivalent of 44,000 cars from Highway 101, one of the most economically productive and congested corridors in the nation, responsible for approximately a quarter of California's annual economic input output, excuse me, at about $1,000,000,000,000 annually.

As I mentioned, we're about to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the the transit center, but we've been hard at work, on the next phase, which is to connect the portal, get it into construction, and to complete the vision of what the entire neighborhood can be. As the former owner of the Transbay terminal, the state has been a key partner in both efforts.

And I want to thank Chair Haney for his leadership shepherding AB 2308 through the legislative process to allow us to capture the value of delayed downtown construction.

And I wanna thank both the governor and the legislature for what you've heard about earlier today, which is the concept of extending both, both extending the cap and invest program last year and then considering augmenting the transit and inner city rail capital program, which we have applied to so we can unlock critical matching funds to finally build the portal.

Within the next year, we expect to acquire property for the portal, award a contract to the tunneling contractor, and complete some of our design to begin relocating utilities.

These TIRCP and state funds are critical to moving these efforts forward, and without them, we cannot truly make dirt fly as our speaker Emerita often likes to say. We're also working with our partners at the city and county of San Francisco and the Eastcutt Community Benefits District to provide diverse programming in and around the transit center, to convert parking lots beneath our bus bridge to a new neighborhood park with active recreation and to construct the last remaining parcels to complete the neighborhood.

So thank you for allowing me to share briefly our vision, for creating a vibrant, sustainable, and connected Downtown San Francisco. We, welcome the continued partnership of the state to complete that vision, and I remain available should you have any other questions or comments.

Thank you. And thank thank both of you for your your work and your partnership. Obviously, there are a couple bills mentioned in both of your presentations that are very important to us here. We hope that we see see through and they're a part of this in terms of how to make, you know, this all come together. You know, I wonder, you know, this obviously what what was able to happen in the Transbay neighborhood took a lot of different elements.

I mean, some sort of direct funding coming from the federal and state and local, some, you know, opportunities for significant private investment for building towers of various types when those types of investments were more active possibly than they are today.

Is there is there any you know, in terms of the the the the challenges that we heard, and the need that we heard from, from the prior presentation about getting housing unlocked and built in our downtowns, is there any sort of lessons that you might share in terms of, what we were able to do in Transbay that may be instructive in terms of other places that are trying to think about similar opportunities and what kind of financing might be needed or particular sort of public private tools that are more creative, I think, that have allowed, for what has happened in in in that neighborhood, in particular, to occur that, I think in other places, if you we just sort of rely on pure private investment for building some of these types of projects that it's not gonna happen.

Yeah. The, that many lessons learned. In our particular case, we had highly valuable real estate that was undevelopable because it was, base value zero and, surface parking lot with an elevated ramp of, of traffic above it. By consolidating that, we freed up several acres of the southern edge of downtown, which then we parcellized, sold off the value of, and created a community facilities district for an ongoing payment stream for those developers, which collectively have contributed about $750,000,000 towards the construction of the the terminal itself.

The city and county, which is the majority of of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority Board, has been making a a lot of progress over the last several years to simplify the permitting process, to reduce some of the impact fees that have accumulated over many decades, and to try to get projects into penciling.

You heard, the previous speaker speak to some of the, in, the, challenges of building those in terms of, codes and compliance with plumbing and egress and other things that drive that cost. But we're happy to see, and I'm in active negotiations on some of those remaining parcels, the developers are now coming back. They're seeing demand not only for housing but for class a office. Even though we still have high downtown vacancy, that vacancy tends to be an older, product, class b and c.

And class a, particularly transit rich, class a near the transit center, is hard to find.

There are long term leases. We've got, some of the fortune 50 companies in in the world right there, within, stones throw of the building. So there is a demand, and as financing, starts to back that demand, I think we're gonna start to see some cranes on the skyline. There's really only one in the neighborhood, which is the Spear Street, which is really reskinning an existing building.

But there are I think can think of at least five within a short walk of the transit center that are are working to get to construction.

So that's an exciting time after about five or six years of COVID induced delay, where it was uncertain how many people would be coming into downtown, at what frequency, how many days a week, and that really impacted demand. And it feels like we're finally starting to turn that corner this year.

And if you would maybe just provide us with a brief update of of where things stand with the portal right now and whether, you know, any of the other things that we talked about today in terms of some of the other challenges facing transit and ridership and such is affecting that or the the the the level of support that that that is available for it?

Yeah. So we currently serve eight bus operators, as I mentioned, and we're working to bring Caltrain and and eventually high speed rail, into the building, and then we have a sub service connection into the Embarcadero BART Station. So a total of 11 connected through the center.

The eight bus operators, as you've heard from, some of our previous presenters at our location is about two thirds to pushing three quarters recovered, and that's, you know, depends on day of the week and and, time of day and and operator. Caltrain has experienced some of the fastest growth of any transit operator in The United States, in part because of electrification and in part because there was a a real remote work that occurred in the early twenty twenties.

But we're getting that back. So in terms of the portal, we are working to get all of our preconstruction work done. Everybody likes to see the bulldozers come in and and big projects come start and then to be there at the ribbon cutting. Truth of these projects is they're very complicated and it takes a lot of pre construction work.

So for that that us, that means acquiring some limited right of way where the stations are and the egress are and things, relocating some utilities underneath the street.

So we are gonna go from the rail yards down at 4th And King underneath Townsend Street. Townsend Street, as the name implies, was the edge of town and there are some trunk utilities there. We've done some slot trenching there. You've got, asphalt concrete, cobblestone, and utilities from, high speed fiber to, you know, vacated sewer. We need to sort that out and move it out of the way before we can construct a tunnel, for those trains to get in.

So the sooner we can do that with with funds, the more certain our schedule is. The more certain our schedule is, the more certain our funding is, and our overall budget. So we're working to get that work done as soon as possible, and to align, matching funds. For for the state, AB 2308 allows us to harness the value of those unbuilt parcels that we hope are getting near construction now. So thank you again for your leadership on that.

I understand that's going to the the Senate floor this month. And then TIRCP, you've heard a couple of speakers talk to cap and invest and the importance of cap and invest both for operating and affordable housing, but also for transit capital. The transit inner city rail capital program is a major source of funding for us. We have an active application for $750,000,000 in that. This project is one of the most cost effective, cost per metric ton of greenhouse gas reduction in all of Northern California.

We would bring 90,000 average daily riders through that portal into the station and then connect those systems. So it would allow you to be a North Bay or an East Bay resident and work down the peninsula relatively seamlessly in ways that now takes many transfers and has enough time that it's a barrier to that kind of employment. So it has economic development, benefits, sustainability benefits, mobility benefits, and all kinds of benefits is why it's a program of state and national, historic significance.

Thank you. Thank you for that. I wanna ask Aaron a question. You know, obviously, it's something that I've worked on a lot, and we've worked on together, the office to housing conversions and, whether, you know, what you are what you're seeing across the state and whether there are other, you know, policies that you think that we need to be considering. You know, we've we've I did together with with you all a couple of different pieces of policy last year.

Happy to see that some of that is being taken advantage of in San Francisco. We've seen actually finally some office to housing conversion projects announced. But I know that the the particularly connecting the two things that were said, you know, there's still a lot of what would be more class b office space that remains pretty empty across our downtowns, and we're gonna have to have a a reckoning at some point of what do we do with that?

Do we do we is our office to housing conversions or other types of conversions gonna happen? Or are we gonna have to think about demolishing some of them?

I mean, it just it doesn't seem like there's the demand coming back for some types of office space, and the result is that it's really affecting the vibrancy of our downtown, which, of course, also affects transit and all of the things that we're talking about today. I don't know if there's anything you thoughts you have on on that and and what what what we need to continue to do on that front.

Yeah. I mean, I think office to housing conversion is something that the potential varies so much from building to building.

I think the good news is some of the older office buildings are can be some of the best candidates. But the the sort of the floor plate demands for office versus housing are very different. I think the easiest way to think about this is to think about, like, how many rooms in an office building you've been in that don't have a window versus how many rooms without a window you would accept in your home. And it's a very different number.

You know,

But some of the older buildings, you know, like, talking like a 100 years old, so Downtown LA has had success converting those buildings from office to housing.

And there might be potential in Downtown San Francisco where they those buildings have a floor plate that's better suited to housing conversion. The buildings from fifty years ago, my understanding is are often more challenging. And so then, yeah, we might need to think about, at some point, what does it look like to demolish and rebuild on those locations?

One of the largest office to housing conversion projects I'm aware of in the Bay Area is in San Ramon, and the way it's working is they're tearing down the buildings. I know they have the advantage of these are, like, low rise office parks with a lot of surface parking, so that's much easier to replace than a high rise office building.

It's it's painful, I think, to tear down, an existing large building. There's a lot of work that went into that. But sometimes that's gonna be the most still gonna be the most cost efficient way to do it. So, yeah, I think it really it it varies a lot from building to building, and we need a flexible set of policy tools that can let people pursue either one of those paths.

Makes sense. Yeah. It's something that we, you know, I think we had hoped, of course, that we would see folks come back into, you know, work in various capacities in downtowns. It seems like we're a number of years out now, and I think we're we're we're gonna have to have a bit more urgency in terms of what the options are and can't just simply wait to see what happens.

The other the other thing that I was gonna ask about was these kind of surface level parking lots, you know, and and and what we do to actually get some of these projects that have even, in many cases, been, you know, put forward, approved, ready to go, but they're kind of not actually being built.

I did a walking tour of Downtown LA, including a lot of around their transit areas and Union Station, everything. They have a, you know, probably tens of houses of of of units of housing, at least it seemed like. Definitely thousands approved all in that area. Massive projects, a lot involving surface air parking lots that they have there that that really are an inefficient use of those spaces. And but they really are having a hard time, it seems, getting things actually going.

Is there is there thoughts that you either of you have on on that and kind of, you know, and and even the the example was given that we just one crane there. I mean, we just really do have, an issue even where we've allowed for certain types of projects to happen, but they aren't happening.

And and I know you talked about you gave some examples of things that need to change on policy, but any other thoughts on that, as I think about what I saw in some of the other cities that I visited?

Yeah. I mean, I think the number 1 thing that we can do to get those tall projects moving is find ways to bring down costs. And so, you know, Adam mentioned work around impact fees in the TransBay Area, and that's a huge cost that is directly imposed by government on new housing. You know, housing downtown is a huge influx of property and sales tax revenue to local governments. It's much more cost efficient to serve than housing and outlying areas.

But the fee schedules that local governments have generally aren't taking either of those realities into account. They're they're not drawing the distinction that, you know, dense infill housing is cost less because it makes use of existing infrastructure, because it's already being served. That area is already being served by the government, and it doesn't take into account the fact that it brings in new revenue.

You know, the other thing I would say is that a lot of those surface parking lots are actually receiving tax subsidies from the state through prop 13. So California and me wrote a report, back in 2020 when we were advocating for prop 15 to reassess commercial and industrial properties to their full value for property tax purposes and looking at all of the surface parking lots in the Los Angeles area and how much their taxes were being discounted due to Prop 13.

It's a huge amount, and that means that the owner has often no incentive to do anything different with the property because it cost them almost nothing to just hold it in that current form. So if we if we reformed our property access, then we could both encourage, like, a more productive use of those properties, and we could also bring in more revenue to local governments in a way that wouldn't require them to charge new housing all these fees.

Yeah. I'd offer a a couple of examples. One, we should all be encouraged by the the market is returning. And so you hear a lot about vacancy in downtown commercial office space in particular. We really need to segment that market within class a in south of market, right near the transit center.

My understanding as of a month ago is that vacancy is more like 7% as opposed to the overall citywide downtown core at more like 30. So that 7% is because it's relatively new class a construction, transit accessible. So that's starting to drive demand. On the housing side, particularly on the rental side, you hear more and more stories reported of the difficulty of finding housing, people paying one year advanced notice for, for a rental property paying more than asking for rentals.

So there's a real demand to be in the innovation hub that is San Francisco, and that's also driving demand.

So there's many factors to drive development. One is impact fees and the entitlement and permit process. The other is the cost of construction, and then the third is the demand. Once you get it to market, you have a customer at the office or residential side and that is returning. Within our footprint, within the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, there's really sort of three elements.

One is in phase one, we up zone some of those former state owned parcels that were were ramps to much higher height, which increases both the value to the developer and the value of that property to the TJPA to construct its replacement of the Salesforce transit center. So that's why we saw 800, even a thousand feet, for Salesforce transit center. Two is when we constructed that transit center, we used several surface parking lots as a temporary terminal. We've subsequently turned that temporary terminal into local activation.

So our partners at the Eastcutt Community Benefit District, put pickleball courts and outdoor bars and movie nights and concerts and all sorts of things to activate that area as an outdoor living room for the neighborhood.

And that's slowly being constructed. There are three parcels there. Block 2 is just opened as a, a dedicated affordable family housing and dedicated affordable senior housing. So that's changing the mix of affordability in this otherwise fairly high rent neighborhood, which is also part of that twenty four seven diverse sustainable kind of neighborhood. And then the third is, we talk a lot about the transit center because it's constructed and we're operating it.

But once we can construct the portal, we'll be able to move trains into the that existing basement I showed a photo of, but it'll free up about 19 acres of a surface parking lot at 4th And King, which was designed as a temporary train station sixty six or sixty eight years ago. And you come in at raid, there is no ADA access, and you go through a very small head house and hopefully get on your way. For many people, that's a transfer. It's a lift.

It's a bike.

It's a transfer to Muni to get to the downtown density. This would be the one seat ride. But then Prologis, the city, and Caltrain are planning seven to 8,000,000 vertical square feet of development on that site, and that's new construction.

So that'll be a mix of office retail amenity with the operable window with the natural light you're looking for, that'll bring people in to a stop that'll have Caltrain access, walkable to Mission Bay, to the Giants Ballpark, who hopefully will also win their own World Series at some point again, and we'll be able to celebrate downtown.

We don't know if it'll be the Sacramento Kings or the San Francisco Giants that win first, but I don't know. I would hopefully, in in our lifetimes. But I I I appreciate all of that. I think one of the points you made that is very important that we should underscore and I and, you know, sometimes we hear some folks who express doubt as to whether people want to live downtown or work downtown, they absolutely do.

There is a huge, huge advantage and a big part of that is access to transit, access to all of what transit can provide access to.

And then in addition to all of the other things that make living downtown such such a great way to live for many people, the the community, the culture, the restaurants, the events of everything that all of our downtowns across the state are doing. But in order for that to happen, we need to build housing, in downtowns.

And one of the things that we've seen in San Francisco for sure as and I say this as a as a downtown resident who lives on Market Street, there's a lot of people now who who increasingly wanna live downtown. And, because of the scarcity of of the housing that's available, rents are starting to go up pretty significantly. But, again, all over our state, whether San Diego or LA or otherwise, what I have not heard, is that people don't wanna live downtown.

They do wanna live downtown. What we need is more housing downtown and and also companies and people do wanna work downtown, but we need to have, I think, the type of office space and the type of office environments that attract them, and maybe not at the same scale or type that we've seen in sort of past types of office office space.

Hence, the the really dramatic difference between the, class a office space that's that's located right near transit, and the more class b or c that's that's located away from transit or a little bit out out a bit as having a hard time in terms of vacancy. So we do see the path forward, and it's a path forward that includes more housing, and it definitely includes, a significant investment in transit, and maintaining it and also growing on it.

We can, we can imagine, the impact on our downtown, in San Francisco, at least, when we complete the portal project, when you have ultimately high speed rail and everybody takes high speed rail to that, San Francisco Giants championship parade in the year twenty something or other.

So hopefully, again, in our lifetime. So, God willing. So but appreciate both of you and your partnership and your work and for being here with us today, and I look forward to continuing to work with you on all of these issues moving forward. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Alright. We are at just over 03:00, so we've we we are gonna be wrapping soon. But if there's anybody here who wants to provide any public comment, we'll call you up now and just identify yourself and share if you'd like to share anything. And if not, then we'll we'll call it to an end.

Well, again, thank you everyone for being here. Thank you, Annie, for for from my staff or staffing this committee, and we could not have a downtown select committee without talking about transit.

And I think we demonstrated why that is the case today, and we need more more leadership at the state level to really amplify the importance of supporting and funding, investing in public transportation, but not only in public transportation, in the broader set of, investments and and and strategy and planning around, building downtowns that are, neighborhoods where people can live, work, play, travel, and, and that requires us building them for, folks to be able to get around, not necessarily with a car, but by, by train, by bus, by walking, by bike scooter, and all of the above.

So thank you so much for all your work in helping us make that happen, and I look forward to continuing to move forward many of the policies and and strategies that we we discussed here today. This meeting is adjourned.

Alright. So I I'm gonna go back to office for you to see in the office. I'm gonna go back to office before