Oregon’s “fix it first” dilemma: what London’s transport planners can learn from a revolt against megaprojects

A series of surveys in Oregon has laid bare a stark disconnect between what the public wants from its transport agency and what the agency is actually doing. Residents overwhelmingly prioritise repairing existing roads and bridges over building new highway megaprojects, and trust in the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has fallen to a record low. While the story is specific to the Pacific Northwest, the dynamics it reveals – crumbling public confidence, a massive deferred maintenance backlog, and a political system that keeps funding expansion over upkeep – have direct resonance for London’s own transport debates.

The immediate trigger for the latest round of public consultation was a “Rebuilding our Transportation Vision Workgroup” convened by Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. As part of that process, ODOT fielded an open-ended online survey that attracted about 8,600 responses. The methodology was weak – it was not a random, scientifically valid sample – but the signal was unambiguous. When asked to rank six priorities from first to sixth, respondents overwhelmingly chose “maintain and preserve the current system and key assets” as their top concern. “Better traffic flow” came last. ODOT’s own analysis concluded that Oregonians want agencies to focus on stewardship: caring for what the state already has, improving reliability and safety, and demonstrating accountability in how dollars are used.

Por que importa

Yet the agency’s actual spending plans tell a very different story. ODOT is pressing ahead with three megaprojects that rank as the first, third and fourth most expensive highway projects per mile in the entire United States: the $15 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement, the $3.5 billion Rose Quarter freeway widening, and the $885 million I-205 Abernethy Bridge project. None of these has secure full funding. Meanwhile, the state has the second largest deferred maintenance backlog of any state in the nation, according to data analysed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. ODOT is simultaneously slashing staff and cutting basic operations like snow ploughing and pothole repairs.

The disconnect is not new. For two decades, ODOT has conducted a far more rigorous “Transportation Needs and Issues Survey” (TNIS) every two years, using random sampling. These surveys were not shared with the Vision Workgroup, but they paint an even clearer picture. The most recent TNIS found that 79 percent of Oregonians say maintaining existing roads, highways and bridges is “very important” – nearly double the 43 percent who say expanding the system is very important. Public approval of ODOT’s performance has fallen from 68 percent favourable two decades ago to roughly a third today. The share of residents who feel they get good value from the state gas tax has dropped from nearly 60 percent in 2006 to below 30 percent.

The most emphatic verdict came in May 2026, when 1.2 million Oregonians voted on Referendum 120. The measure proposed a modest increase in the gas tax and vehicle registration fees, ostensibly dedicated to maintaining existing roads. It was rejected by a margin of 83 percent to 17 percent. That is not a mandate for inaction; it is a clear instruction to change priorities before asking for more money.

What does this have to do with London?

On the surface, the comparison is imperfect. Transport for London (TfL) is a integrated authority responsible for the tube, buses, roads, cycling infrastructure and some rail services, not a state highway department focused on a single mode. London’s roads are maintained by boroughs, not a single agency. And the UK’s funding context – with central government grants, fare revenue, congestion charging and mayoral control – is structurally different from Oregon’s gas-tax-and-registration-fee model.

Yet the underlying tension is the same. London faces a multi-billion pound maintenance backlog on its road network. The London Assembly’s transport committee has repeatedly warned that boroughs are struggling to keep pace with pothole repairs, footway renewal and bridge maintenance. Meanwhile, major capital projects – the Silvertown Tunnel, the Bakerloo line extension, the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone infrastructure, and the ongoing modernisation of the tube’s Piccadilly line – compete for the same constrained public funds. The question of whether to fix what exists before building something new is not an Oregon speciality; it is a live political argument in City Hall and in every borough council chamber.

The Oregon experience suggests that when the public perceives a transport agency as ignoring its core maintenance duties, trust erodes rapidly and durably. That loss of trust makes it politically harder to raise revenue for any purpose, including the upkeep that everyone agrees is necessary. TfL’s own public satisfaction surveys have shown a gradual decline in some areas, particularly road maintenance. The 2023 London Travel Demand Survey found that only 52 percent of Londoners were satisfied with the condition of roads and pavements, down from 58 percent five years earlier. The parallel is not exact, but the direction of travel is similar.

There is a further lesson in the Oregon case about how agencies frame their spending. ODOT’s survey analysis used language like “preserve key assets” and “improve safety” – terms that can be stretched to justify almost any project. The Interstate Bridge Replacement is framed as a safety and seismic resilience project; the Rose Quarter widening is sold as a safety improvement, even though national safety experts have described that framing as profoundly misleading. London’s own megaprojects are not immune to this kind of semantic flexibility. The Silvertown Tunnel, for example, is justified partly on reliability and resilience grounds, while critics argue it will induce car traffic and undermine air quality goals.

Key facts

The Oregon story also highlights a political dynamic that London readers will recognise: the temptation to “extend and pretend”. ODOT has been criticised for starting megaprojects with partial funding, then using the sunk cost as leverage to extract more money later. The same dynamic has been observed in UK infrastructure, from HS2 to lower-profile road schemes where initial budgets are set optimistically, costs escalate, and the public is presented with a choice between writing a larger cheque or abandoning a partly built project. The Oregon workgroup process, which gathered public views but did not share the more rigorous TNIS data, also raises questions about whether consultation is genuinely designed to inform policy or to manufacture consent for decisions already taken.

For London planners, transport campaigners and borough officers, the practical takeaway is not that London should copy Oregon’s approach, but that the gap between public priorities and agency spending is a political liability that can take years to repair. When a transport body is seen as ignoring basic maintenance in favour of glamorous megaprojects, it loses the credibility needed to raise the very revenue that maintenance requires. That is a trap that TfL, borough highways departments and the Department for Transport would all do well to study.

The immediate next step in Oregon is the workgroup’s final report, due later this year. It remains to be seen whether Governor Kotek’s administration will embrace the “fix it first” message or continue to push for megaproject funding. For London, the question is whether City Hall and the boroughs can demonstrate, through consistent spending and transparent reporting, that they are taking road and pavement maintenance seriously enough to sustain public trust. If they do not, the Oregon trajectory – declining satisfaction, falling tax support, and a widening gap between what people want and what their transport agency delivers – may become a familiar story on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Source: City Observatory, “Survey says . . . Fix it first, we don’t trust ODOT”, https://cityobservatory.org/survey-says-fix-it-first-we-dont-trust-odot/