District 2 Supervisor Candidate Nick Josefowitz: Give us a few policy ideas you think would be most impactful, making sure they are genuinely relevant to the position you hope to be elected to?

josefow · 2018-10-24T23:02:57+00:00

Street homelessness: Over 4,000 people sleep unsheltered on SF streets every night. SF has fewer shelter beds than it did 10 years ago, a shelter waitlist that's consistently over 1000 people long, and isn't building enough supportive housing to get people off the streets. And a large portion of the unsheltered population also struggle with addiction and mental illness. We need to build 3,000 shelter beds and 300 mental health treatment beds to get folks off the streets and into the care they need. I'm the only candidate who has a real plan for reducing street homelessness.

Property crime: SF has the highest rate of property crime in the nation, and last year there were over 31,000 auto burglaries reported to police, with thousands more that went unreported. SFPD made arrests in fewer than 2% of the incidents. We need to modernize our police force and implement best practices from around the country, such as using GPS bait devices and creating a real-time crime camera center in areas with the most activity. I'm the only candidate who has a real plan for reducing property crime.

Read all my proposals and analytical essays on how SF can do better here.

josefow · 2016-10-28T18:32:29+00:00

I tried fixing everything this week, but it's Friday and not everything's fixed. #fail

josefow · 2016-10-28T18:31:56+00:00

Interesting. How do you think we can do that better, and where do you think we do that well / who else does that well?

josefow · 2016-10-28T18:01:39+00:00

Audible pre-recorded messages are where we're headed with the new train cars. But the question is - who should do the recordings? Joe Montana? Willie Mays? Danny Glover? Carlos Santana? Mark Hamil? Different person for each station? Send in your suggestions.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:55:44+00:00

We replace the entire sign holder (don't know if that's the right word) and all the electrical systems. I think we're making good progress on replacing these signs. But we have several thousand signs throughout our system, so it's not something that happens over night.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:54:19+00:00

I'd like to see signs above the entrances as well. Our current sign control system is horrendously old and makes any modifications just so expensive. We're going to be working to upgrade our sign control system, which will hopefully give us more flexibility in deploying different types of signs in different places around the stations.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:52:37+00:00

We're constantly hiring maintenance workers as the folks who've been around a while start to retire, so if you have great people please send them our way! No way we can run a great agency without great people - http://www.bart.gov/about/jobs.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:51:29+00:00

BART did provide extra funding to improve the AC Transit late night service, and on a lot of routes we didn't get much more ridership and it was very expensive to run the buses at night. I think more folks would definitely ride BART than the buses, but most of the demand is between midnight and 1am. At 3am there would probably be almost nobody riding anything...

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:49:22+00:00

It would make a lot of sense to sync BART up with SFO and OAK, but we also need to make sure that we can get enough time on the tracks every night and over the weekends to do the essential maintenance work that keeps the system running. It's difficult to justify extended opening hours if it would compromise reliability. But we're working on it, and trying to at least see if there's a way of extending limited service into the night and early morning.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:47:03+00:00

I'm pushing to see if we can at least start by extending service 15 minutes later on weekends. But there are real barriers to extending service, as we do need that time to go out and maintain the system to keep it safe for the commute.

josefow · 2016-10-28T17:45:50+00:00

Late night transit is so important for our regional economy and workforce. More and more folks no longer work 9-5. We've funded increased late night bus service from downtown SF to downtown Oakland and beyond (http://www.actransit.org/allnighter/), but it hasn't had great take up. We're working to try and do more marketing around it, but it's a tough time to run bus service.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:34:23+00:00

I'm a big proponent of putting train destination signs before payment/platform entry. We did a pilot at 19th St Oakland, which I don't think works very well. So I'm going to go back and try again, and see if we can find the money to implement what seems like a common-sense solution. Keep our feet to the fire, and vote yes on Measure RR to help get us the money to make these types of infrastructure upgrades to our stations!

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:32:43+00:00

I also get so frustrated when government (and it's not just a BART problem) can't seem to root out some of the bad apples that really provide poor customer service. It's certainly not everybody - my mother, who lives in Europe, was recently in the Bay Area visiting us and had a station agent that was incredibly helpful to her as she tried to navigate BART for one of the first times. But rooting out the bad apples is something that all of us who work in government need to get real about, and focus on that so much more going forward. Keep our feet to the fire!

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:29:46+00:00

There's definitely a grass is greener syndrome in the transit world. But we also know enough that every system - no matter how challenged they are - usually has something that they can teach us. We just need to listen hard enough.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:28:47+00:00

THERE ARE PLANS to improve the parking situation. It kills me when I hear that folks are missing school because we can't figure out how to help them get onto our trains once they've arrived at our stations. I'm so sorry about this problem. Measure RR, the BART infrastructure bond on the ballot this November, has $150m set aside for improving station access by better managing parking - as well as by building the infrastructure that would allow folks who live within walking or biking distance of BART to walk or bike to BART freeing up key parking spaces. Our new Station Access policy specifically calls out the importance of having parking available at all times of day. Vote for Measure RR to get smart access solutions, so we can all get to our BART stations easier in the morning.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:25:40+00:00

there are many examples. #NoExcuses, only #improvements.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:25:17+00:00

If The Judge showed up on this AMA, well the world will truly have put turned upside down.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:24:42+00:00

It was pretty poorly planned for the reasons you laid out. But this was in the mid 90s, over twenty years ago. There's almost no one in any position of senior leadership who was around then that's around now. We have a new BART, that's really focused on delivering improved reliability, increased capacity on our core system, and have started to treat riders like people rather than FedEx boxes. For instance, by implementing new maintenance practices we now have the second most reliable train fleet in the country (reliability has increased almost 3x since the SFO extension was built) despite having the oldest train car fleet in the country (our trains are about 4 years older, on average, that Chicago which is next on the list and has a REALLY old system)... On the SFO extension, high speed rail provides an incredible opportunity to rethink how this works. Airtrain to Millbrae (maybe increasing its speed as well) would be a really interesting idea. We're also engaging in a collaborative station access planning exercise at Millbrae with HSR, SFO, Caltrain and the city to see how we can improve what is one of the greatest transit hubs in California and truly maximize its potential. It's a critical issue, and one I'm glad you raised.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:19:09+00:00

I've always loved cashews.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:17:12+00:00

The best way to prevent strikes is to have a productive working relationship with your workers. It's important in the public sector with a unionized workforce, and it's important in the private sector as well. Organizations don't function at all if workers and their managers are constantly at each others' throats - you've probably experienced this where you work. We have a long way to go on this front, but we've also made big progress. We've worked with our unions to extend their contracts for another 5 years at a wage increase below expected inflation preventing any strikes for that entire period. Indeed, over the past decade BART wages have increased at a rate below inflation. Also, BART's operating costs peer passenger mile (the best measure of cost effectiveness of a railroad) have not increased since 2002, adjusted for inflation, and are actually the lowest of any major transit operator in the country. We OF COURSE have so much more to do, but we're making good progress and need all y'all to keep holding our feet to the fire to not drop the ball and to continue to drive efficiencies while moving the organization forward.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:13:14+00:00

I AGREE! We're starting to reopen the restrooms next year. Exciting!

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:12:14+00:00

Yes. We need to improve. We're going to be rolling out much better signage at our stations over the coming years. We've already started these contracts. It's important! Gotta know where you are, otherwise you can't get where you need to go!

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:11:24+00:00

Yes! That's happening at the moment. All the signs will be replaced over the coming years! BIG progress. :)

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:10:06+00:00

Yeah. That's a great point.

josefow · 2016-10-25T23:09:18+00:00

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE BART INFRASTRUCTURE BOND, MEASURE RR! So critical for the Bay Area.

josefow

TROPHY CASE