Portland’s transportation system is under real pressure. Service is being reduced, operating costs are rising, major infrastructure projects are disrupting how people move through the region, and many households have less room in their budgets to absorb higher transportation costs or fewer options.

Those constraints are real. What concerns me is the assumption that the answer is simply to keep reducing the system we already have.

When circumstances change, the system should be allowed to change with them.

I am asking TriMet, Metro, the City of Portland, ODOT, and other regional transportation leaders to develop a public Transportation Recovery and Accountability Plan (TRAP): a coordinated framework for improving transportation access under the conditions Portland is actually facing now.

This is not a request for another years-long study, and it is not a demand for one predetermined solution. Transportation is complicated. Decisions about service, funding, infrastructure, accessibility, and regional coordination require technical expertise, good data, and honest tradeoffs.

The good news is that expertise already exists.

Our transportation agencies already employ planners, engineers, operators, analysts, and policy professionals. They already collect extensive information about ridership, reliability, congestion, budgets, infrastructure, accessibility, and travel behavior. Portlanders have also spent years contributing through surveys, public meetings, hearings, comments, and everyday experience using the system.

We are not starting from zero. The question is: what are we going to do with what we already know?

Within 60 days, TRAP should give the public a clear view of the region’s biggest transportation-access problems, what can be improved under existing authority and resources, what requires new funding or policy changes, who is responsible for moving each issue forward, and how progress will be measured.

That work should be visible through a simple public dashboard showing what is being addressed, what has changed, what remains blocked, why it is blocked, and what happens next.

The 60-day period should not become a waiting period. If agencies already understand a problem and have the authority to address it, action should begin while the larger plan is being developed.

Public participation should remain part of this work, but participation cannot substitute for institutional responsibility. Residents should not have to conduct another round of unpaid systems analysis before government can act on problems its own information has already identified.

Keep listening to riders. Then act on what is already known.

A recovery plan also does not mean pretending every cut can be reversed or every problem solved quickly. Some constraints are financial. Some are operational. Some require legislation, new funding, or better coordination between agencies. Others may reveal that a route, policy, funding mechanism, or institutional arrangement that once made sense no longer does.

That is exactly why the system itself has to be open to examination.

If funding is the barrier, make the funding problem and the available choices visible. If agency boundaries are preventing an effective regional response, identify them. If old assumptions about where, when, or how people travel no longer match reality, reevaluate them. If something is working well, keep it.

Recovery does not mean changing everything. It means being willing to change anything when the evidence shows that it is no longer working.

That principle is bigger than any individual bus route, freeway project, budget cycle, or elected official. It also does not belong to one political party. Portlanders can disagree about taxes, spending, cars, transit, density, and infrastructure while still agreeing on something more basic: public systems should be evaluated against present conditions and measurable results.

That is what I mean when I talk about reinventing the wheel.

It is not about throwing away everything that came before us. It is about refusing to treat inheritance as proof that something should remain unchanged.

Portlanders do not need to arrive with a fully engineered replacement transportation network before we are entitled to question whether the current one is meeting our needs. The people entrusted with these systems have the expertise to develop and evaluate alternatives. The public should be able to see the choices, the constraints, the decisions, the people accountable for them, and the results.

The Transportation Recovery and Accountability Plan would create that expectation: identify what is not working, act where action is possible, make the real barriers visible, measure what happens next, and change course when the evidence says we should.

We do not have to know exactly what the new wheel looks like before we are willing to reconsider the old one.