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 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."

TRANSDEF is clear that suburbanization is no longer a viable strategy for growth in the Bay Area. It stopped "working" long ago. Unfortunately, the public and its elected leaders have not yet recognized this alarming fact. 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.

MTC's continuing focus on expanding highway capacity wastes scarce resources and facilitates more driving, which releases more greenhouse gases, thus exacerbating global warming. We need instead to transition to a future where transit is the preferred way to travel longer distances.

MTC has a long-standing commitment to pursuing BART extensions because of their political popularity, despite their tremendous cost. TRANSDEF views this as a rejection of the basic principles of planning, which call for identifying the problem and serving it in the most cost-effective manner possible.

TRANSDEF believes the region's biggest planning problems are:
1). Congestion on I-580 and I-80 resulting from commuters driving in from the Central Valley and Sacramento.
2). The BART Transbay Tube is operating near its capacity.

TRANSDEF believes the most rational use of resources would be to design the Bay Area's future rail extensions to provide multiple services: High-Speed Rail, interregional commuting, and regional commuting, all using the same compatible infrastructure. Caltrain has provided a glimpse of what can be accomplished by heading in this direction. (Further details.)

Instead, BART-worship has severely distorted MTC's transportation priorities. MTC has thrown its support behind proposals to build extremely expensive duplicative infrastructure projects: High-Speed Rail via the Pacheco Pass, a BART extension to San Jose, and the cynical promise of improvements to the ACE corridor (which can't possibly be funded, due to the cost of the other projects). Meanwhile, MTC shifted funding for the Dumbarton Rail project over to the BART Warm Springs extension, thereby indefinitely delaying the most cost-effective new Transbay crossing.

TRANSDEF offers this website as a repository of ideas on how to achieve a better and more sustainable future by shifting where transportation funding goes. We start with a survey of Regional Transportation Planning and propose a plan for the Bay Area. We then look at the individual elements that comprise an optimal plan: making High-Speed Rail support multiple services, the folly of BART extensions, the inadvisability of Highway widening, and the need to do all of this in the context of climate change.