Screed or Savior?

Lawsuit-Happy David Schonbrunn Forces Bay Area to Reconcile Ideal of Air Quality with Addiction to Cars, Drives MTC Nuts--Court-Ordered $5 per Gallon Tax on Gas?

David Schonbrunn is President and Founder of Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, or TRANSDEF for short. Schonbrunn, 54 years old and formerly a video engineer, calls his creation a "legal offense fund" and is reluctant to provide details as to the nonprofit group's funding sources and governance make-up. However he's pulling it off, Schonbrunn is making big waves. His lawsuits charge that government agencies like the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have defaulted on promises to meet air quality and public transit levels. Of course, these agencies are simply doing what the general public wants, which is to say one thing (we want clean air) and do another (drive cars willy-nilly). Much as the political process broke down over the issue of civil rights, leaving to the courts the task of forcing desegregation through coercive busing and other hugely unpopular measures, Schonbrunn looks to the courts to halt sprawl, which means making people stop driving cars. Since it's generally regarded that would take much higher gas prices, might we see courts soon ordering $5 a gallon gas taxes? Is David Schonbrunn the Martin Luther King of the sustainable communities movement? Bay Crossings sat down with MTC's tormentor to find out more.

TRANSDEF is an active participant in three lawsuits. We are the lead plaintiff in the one you just described in which we sued to overturn EPA's decision that allowed MTC to start spending money again on highway projects. But before we discuss that one, let me mention a case that we've already won.

And that is a case that we filed against MTC, we and a coalition of six other environmental and community-based organizations. We asserted, and the court agreed with us, that MTC had failed to implement TCM 2, Transportation Control Measure 2, which called for a 15 percent increase in regional transit ridership over 1982 levels. MTC has still not accomplished this increase in ridership. And we won an order from the court requiring them to do so. So we've already had a victory. Well, they have issued an amendment to the regional transportation plan that says they will accomplish this increase in ridership without having to change anything that they do. MTC has insisted it will appeal. The issue here is MTC has spent untold billions of dollars on transit, and yet it hasn't even managed to increase ridership 15 percent above 1982 levels, which says that they've been making horrifically bad investments.

That's a very astute question. MTC has the responsibility for doing regional transportation planning. And yet it doesn't. The county congestion management agencies come up with programs of projects that just continue existing patterns of development. MTC has never been willing to look at the implications of these CMA plans on a regional level.

Partly it's blindness. "We've always done it this way." Partly it's fear of change.

I see it as looking at reality. And they've been unwilling to do that. We've been active at MTC starting with the 1994 regional transportation plan. The Environmental Impact Report for that plan was very clear that the implications of sprawl are horrendous for our region. And yet at no point, at that time or since, has MTC been willing to actually look at the consequences of its actions.

There's a dichotomy there, for sure. And the role of a regional agency is to act as the responsible adult. Let's get it straight, though, that we're not proposing measures like a $5 gas tax.

In some respects, the question is unfair. We've long been advocating, starting in 1994, that we have to look at "Where are we now? Where is this taking us? What is the dynamic? And what are we going to do about it?" There's never been a willingness to even engage in that discussion.

A recent report shows that between 1996 and 2002, there's been a 73 percent increase in vehicle hours of delay. And it speaks about how only certain very specific corridors are congested. Okay, it's not something that's universal around the Bay Area, but at certain key facilities, like Highway 80, for example, and 880, congestion is terrible. What happens when you start to investigate this is you realize these are facilities that have reached their physical maximums. They're not capable of being widened, and we don't have the money to widen them.

The reality is that our highway system has hit its limits in terms of what it can carry because these key links are the limiting factor. The significance of this, as we see it, is that we have to change the pattern of development for future growth so that people can conveniently take transit to get around the region. That's not how development is planned now.

Development is planned from a very local perspective, or, at best, a countywide perspective. But there's no taking into consideration the fact that people leave their county of residence and travel elsewhere around the region, thereby creating impacts on the regional network and basically driving it into the dirt. The pattern of sprawl that has been going on for the last 50 years, and is now in some ways accelerating, is essentially wiping out the highway system as we have come to know it. And so what we have is a resource, a highway resource which acts like a commons.

A commons, as in "the tragedy of the commons." A very fundamental ecological principle whereby if you look at a pasture land for sheep that's held in common by a town, because it's not owned by one individual, as town members keep adding more sheep to it, eventually there's no more grass for the sheep to eat.

And a highway acts in the same way. Each town is adding more development, whether that development is the standard subdivision or a standard shopping center, it just adds auto trips. And some percentage of those auto trips are going to be leaving the town and the county and going on the regional network. Well, there's only so much that can be carried, and we've already hit those limits. And that's why all the congestion occurs. It's a fundamental property of low-density development. Congestion is inevitable.

Is it fair to make an analogy to what happened in our country regarding civil rights? Do you want the legal system to pick up where the political system has broken down and order unpopular measures like higher gas taxes?

There are a lot of parallels, but I don't see that last item happening. We had to sue MTC for one reason, and that's because they would not respond to us. They basically put up a stone wall over the last nine years and were completely uninterested in anything the public had to say.

What I do see happening is MTC participating in the Regional Agencies Smart Growth Strategies process. This represents precisely the kind of thoughtful looking towards our future that we've been saying since 1994 has been absolutely essential and missing.

Now, the question is how does it become reality? And the answer is it's not going to be reality unless there are appropriate incentives and legislative changes made that create the conditions where cities approve a different kind of development.

But those conditions don't exist in the current political landscape. We think our litigation may create some of the incentives that can help bring this into existence.

With the new Republican-controlled Congress, do you fear that they might point to what you're doing as a kind of poster child for abuse, in their eyes, of the legal system that can only be addressed by scaling back the underlying environmental laws that permit you to file these suits?

Well, let's be clear. The Republicans don't believe that citizens should have the right to breathe clean air. Just fundamentally.

What they would like to do to the Clean Air Act is always a consideration. But the reality is the Republicans don't particularly care what happens in California, as far as I understand. They're already attacking the Clean Air Act. There's nothing new there.

We're not concerned about the Republicans, because we already know where they are. We're concerned about the Democrats, not just caving, but agreeing with them, so as to preserve MTC's unsustainable status quo.

We can't be concerned about what may or may not happen in Congress. We feel like we're doing the right thing, and we just need to keep on doing it.

Unfortunately, WTA did not listen to our recommendations in the scoping for their EIR. The problem with the EIR is it does not demonstrate in any way that ferries are a superior transportation investment. All they do is analyze different ferry scenarios. So that's useless in terms of deciding the merits of a ferry proposal. Now, there are some cost numbers included in the operations plan. Quite frankly, I don't believe the numbers. Ferries, at least in terms of the way that they've been run at Golden Gate, consistently require a higher subsidy than buses. And so I'm suspicious when the operations plan shows the cost being lower than express buses. Also, it makes no sense at all to me to create a ferry terminal in Port Sonoma when you have a rail line that goes south and on which, as far as I understand, people can travel faster by rail than by water to get to a ferry terminal in Central Marin.