The Transportation Solutions
Defense and Education Fund, known as TRANSDEF, is a
non-profit environmental organization created by transit
activists to advocate for better solutions to
transportation, land use and air quality problems in the
San Francisco Bay Area.
TRANSDEF promotes cost-effective transit, Smart Growth, and
market-based pricing as fiscally and environmentally
preferable responses to traffic congestion. These
strategies represent a major departure from the prevailing
policy climate of suburban sprawl, ever-widening highways
and overwhelming dependence on the private automobile.
TRANSDEF’s activists were concerned about the long-term
trend toward traffic congestion, loss of open space and
overall deterioration of the quality of life of the much
beloved Bay Area. With millions of new residents
coming to, or being born in the region, it was clear that
living here is likely to become ever more unpleasant if
current development trends continue.
We decided to focus our efforts on the obscure regional
agency that administers all federal and state funds for Bay
Area transportation, the Metropolitan Transportation
Commission (MTC). We figured that the
billions of dollars that flow through MTC could be the
key to shifting the region’s development pattern to a
more sustainable direction.
When Commissioners were unwilling to consider any of what
we had to say, we recognized that the only way to get
through to them would be via litigation. Check out
our Litigation Report.
Over a dozen years later, MTC is now considering strongly
supporting Smart Growth. While TRANSDEF is gratified to see
MTC move in the direction of making better decisions with
its vast financial resources, the pace of change has been
slow. Even with a heightened awareness of the importance of
global warming, MTC and the rest of California are still
moving ahead with fully funded projects to widen highways,
in the vain attempt to "relieve congestion."
All these projects will accomplish is encouraging Bay Area
residents to continue believing that all is OK with
sprawling out to the fringes of the Bay Area, and expecting
to be able to drive long distances to commute to work.
TRANSDEF is clear that the era where suburbanization worked
well ended over a decade ago, but unfortunately, the public
and its elected leaders have not recognized this alarming
fact yet.
TRANSDEF believes that the simultaneous problems of global
warming, rising oil and energy prices, and congestion
require a strikingly different approach to transportation
planning: one that relies on cost-effective transit, Smart
Growth walkable/bikeable communities and higher priced
driving, to create incentives to use alternative means of
transport.