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.