One week ago, City Councilor Mitch Green broke the news that autonomous vehicle company Waymo wanted to operate on Portland streets. Sharing a link to a story about a Waymo robotaxi hitting and hurting a child near a school in in Southern California, Green wrote on Bluesky: “You should know that Waymo wants to come to Portland. You should know I don’t support that.”
Two days later the Waymo news was confirmed by Willamette Week and now there’s a bipartisan bill up for debate in the Oregon Legislature that aims to smooth the road to full deployment of robotaxis statewide.
This news could lead to a collision between Portland city councilors, Alphabet (the corporate parent of Google who owns Waymo), city staffers, and state lawmakers.
Councilor Green is opposed to robotaxis based mostly on labor-related issues. He’s worried robotaxis would make life even harder for existing rideshare drivers. Beyond that, he says data privacy is also a concern. Green has said he’s open to learning more about how robotaxis would impact traffic safety and congestion.
Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Millicent Williams is also taking a cautious approach thus far. Thanks to reporting in the Willamette Week, we know that Williams has expressed to city leaders via internal emails that AVs may bring safety benefits, but, “They may also have significant impacts on our local transportation system. They may add additional miles driven on our streets, cause curb zone conflicts during pickups and drop-offs, present challenges for first responders, and more.”
Down in Salem, State Representative Susan McLain, a Democrat and chair of the House Transportation Committee, has introduced a bill with Republican House Rep Shelly Boshart Davis that appears to have been written by AV lobbyists (since November 2025, lobbying firm Google Client Services, LLC has donated $2,500 each to bill sponsors Senator Mark Meek and Rep. Hai Pham, as well as $2,500 to Rep. Ben Bowman, $1,000 to Sen. Floyd Prozanski, $1,500 to Senate President Rob Wagner, and $10,000 to Governor Tina Kotek).
House Bill 4085 would lay a legal groundwork for the operation of self-driving vehicles in Oregon. Typically during a short legislative session, lawmakers only consider bills that are non-controversial, have been vetted in a previous session, and/or have no fiscal impact. While lawmakers have considered AV-related bills in the past, HB 4085 goes further than anything before it.
One of the provisions in HB 4085 that’s raising eyebrows is section 13 which states:
“A local government or local service district may not: (a) Prohibit the operation of an autonomous vehicle or on-demand autonomous vehicle network; (b) Impose a tax, fee, performance standard or other requirement specific only to the operation of an autonomous vehicle or on-demand autonomous vehicle network.”
That “specific only” part means that taxes and fees can be charged to AV network operators, but only if similar types of fees are levied to other competing types of taxi companies. This exception would allow Portland to levy a fee on any potential robotaxi trips because we already charge a service fee for Uber and Lyft rides.
But other provisions in the bill could kneecap the ability of local policymakers to regulate robotaxis as they see fit. Given that PBOT Director Williams recently said, AVs, “Will have the greatest impacts on local jurisdictions and it makes sense that the city of Portland would want to ensure that we could maintain an AV regulatory framework to meet our needs and to be able to mitigate any negative local impacts,” I doubt she’ll be too happy about HB 4085.
In a statement to BikePortland this morning, Councilor Green made his stance on HB 4085 clear:
“I oppose this bill’s effort to preempt our ability to locally regulate autonomous vehicles. It’s particularly appalling that the Oregon State Legislature would even consider introducing new factors that contribute to VMT, congestion and potential road safety issues after their catastrophic failure to deliver a transportation bill, which has undermined the viability of our transit agencies and the ability for municipalities to deliver basic, routine upkeep of our transportation assets.”
Fortunately for the City of Portland, they are not new to the AV question. Back in 2016 PBOT was tapped by a US DOT “Smart Cities” initiative to be one of the testing grounds for AV fleets. That let to the Smart Autonomous Vehicle Initiative (SAVI), a plan that set some ground rules for what many thought at the time would be the imminent deployment of robotaxis. One outcome of the SAVI effort was Transportation Rule Number 14.34, “Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.” That rule requires AV operators to have a permit, pay fees, and so on. (Last month, Director Williams said that rule is now outdated and needs to be amended.)
In April 2017, Portland city leaders were falling over themselves to welcome these driverless cars to our streets. “To the inventors, investors and innovators, I’m here to say that Portland is open for business,” proclaimed former Mayor Ted Wheeler. “By working with private industry, we can make sure that cutting edge technology expands access to public transit and reduces pollution and congestion.”
That was a different era in Portland politics, and the general public is likely much more skeptical of AV companies today. Councilor Green is likely to find support for his concerns among his colleagues, especially Councilor Steve Novick. Novick made headlines back in 2014 when Uber tried to bully its rideshare vehicles into Portland without permission.
12 years later, we might be on the cusp of yet another showdown about the impacts of corporate transportation on our streets.
— If you’d like to weigh in on HB 4085, there’s a public hearing scheduled for Monday, February 9th at 8:00 am in the House Committee on Transportation.
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Safety being an afterthought is infuriating. As a daily cyclist, someone who’s ridden in an AV, and–most importantly–having looked at the now-robust Waymo safety stats, it’s a cut-and-dry case: if we prioritize road safety for passengers and vulnerable road users, we should race to embrace AVs. 80-90% fewer crashes!
Good on the state, shame on Green.
Hi Garrett,
Trust is a big issue for me. I don’t trust a corporation to have my best interest at heart. It’s that simple to me. And I am very worried about ceding control of these public spaces to a product owned by a corporation and that’s run by an algorithm and where we have murky accountability laws. I can feel the temptation for why these things make sense, but I am personally not convinced and not enthusiastic about them.
Was this comment written by an AV?
Waymo is not doing what they are doing for altruistic road safety purposes, they are doing what they are doing for labor replacement.
I trust the safety stats Waymo posts about as much as I trust any other industry propaganda organ: it’s probably true, but it also likely lacks the context needed to draw a useful conclusion. Anyone can publish stats about their own company that makes that company look great.
I am always struck by the simplistic way that people think about robo-taxis. Most address this question of thinking that one human driver trip will be replaced by an autonomous driver trip. What is ignored is that robot-taxis substantially increase the number of cars traveling on the road. Requiring a human to be present in a car has always been an important natural limit to the number of cars on the road. This space limit has already been stretched by most trips being only one human per car and the ballooning size of cars and trucks. With robot-taxis, the limit becomes much more fluid. It relies on the market, on regulation, on small city governments pushing back against deep pocketed corporations.
David Zipper and others have written extensively on the over promise and failings of autonomous vehicles. So far, the claims that they are safer are dubious. The regulatory framework to truly handle them at scale is non existent, and we have already seen Tesla and Waymo make them more aggressive by tweaking features. The vast majority of imagined improvements for AVs could be achieved by better regulation of human drivers and vehicles.
Finally, it is unlikely that robot-taxis will be taxed to the extent that they pay for their negative externalities. Importantly, expect that every pedestrian and bike infrastructure improvement project will now have to go up against a Waymo lobbyist with direct access to to the legislature or city hall in addition to all of the usual car-centric cranks.
Portland should not be an early adopter of a shiny new object that is essentially tripling down on antihuman car-centric planning. And giving up our largest public spaces, i.e. roads, to the control of corporations that will be motivated to fill as much of that space as they can with their cars and have an appetite for more and more space and speed with as little liability as they can get away with.
Oh come on. The Council and City can’t regulate expired license plates or illegal parking and they have the egotistical gall to think they can regulate autonomous vehicles separate from the state?? If AV’s cause problems on the streets it will because they will actually follow the rules of the road. If that causes chaos, then so be it.
One more thing. If Green is so upset by an AV hitting that kid, where’s his anger at all the Portlanders killed by cars? Let’s regulate vehicular killings out of existence before we turn our attention to the next shiny distraction.
I’m pretty sure Mitch Green is upset by the Portlanders who are killed by cars. I believe the name for this rhetorical device is “begging the question”. Mitch Green, like all of us, is presumably capable of holding multiple opinions about multiple issues.
And this may be obvious, but it’s easier for a local government to regulate a permit for a taxi company that it is for them to enforce regulations on the entire geographical area of said city.
We have legislators bringing in a bill written by the AV industry. This is preemptive regulatory capture. It’s now on the agenda in a short session. Nothing to see here folks, just a normal way of doing business.
I’d like more public transit, please.
Sure, and 120 years ago he would have been worried about the farriers and nobody is wishing we would have listened to those folks.
Spend five second searching, “uber driver hits pedestrian” and there are limitless articles.
This is an interesting vibe prognostication. It does seem likely though that Portlanders, a group known for missing the forest for the trees, would be more skeptical of AV options coming to their city than a councilor who goes around current day Portland and comes away with fois gras and AVs as issues that need attention right now.
Whether it passes or not, I’m amazed that $20k worth of campaign donations can buy sponsors for legislation that will cost at least that much just to draft. Maybe we’re looking at lobbying the wrong way.