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.
Thanks for reading.
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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.
Totally get it, really. Maybe a better way to think about it and a good suggestion for improving the marketing here is to frame it as a public health issue.
“We have the opportunity in the face of a novel plague of human inattention, cognitive decline through hyper-aging demographics to inoculate ourselves from the risks we are well aware of. Though only 127 million doses have been administered so far, the data suggests a roughly 90% rate of decline of injury and death from coming into contact with the plague inside a vehicle, and about the same for those outside a vehicle. We get you’re uncomfortable at this stage because it feels like this solution has only been worked on for a few months, but it has been in the development stage for many many years. It is important that we realize we are in this together and for everyone to trust the science.”
Goes down easy, and at least by getting in a Waymo you’re not signing up to have your heart fucked up for the rest of your life.
I was more or less with you til the word “heart.” Whaaaat?
Thanks for the comment, Jonathan. I hear those concerns. However, the (1) growing number of peer-reviewed studies showing an order-of-magnitude safety improvement combined with (2) the safety crisis we all experience on the streets make a pretty good case for proactive, forward-thinking public policy, though… as compared to Green’s apparent instinct to go full luddite from his bully pulpit.
NIH: “We find that when benchmarked against zip code-calibrated human baselines, the Waymo Driver significantly improves safety towards other road users.”
Traffic Injury Prevention: “Data was examined over 56.7 million RO miles through the end of January 2025, resulting in a statistically significant lower crashed vehicle rate for all crashes compared to the benchmarks in Any-Injury-Reported and Airbag Deployment, and Suspected Serious Injury+ crashes”
Garrett,
It’s still not conclusive whether or not widespread use of robotaxis would be a net safety benefit. A few studies doesn’t persuade me. And if only safety data were the only issue at play here! There are many many other things that we need to consider when making an opinion about these things. And like I said, at the end of the day, they are operated by companies with profit motives and extremely dubious histories of putting that profit before people. I’m not against the tech, I’m against the outcomes and the companies behind the tech. And there are tons of negative externalities that come into this as well, like increased VMT, storage space for the vehicles, taking urgency away from transit investments, environmental toxins from tires and brake dust and batteries, creation of more billionaires, and so on and so forth.
“…they are operated by companies with profit motives and extremely dubious histories of putting that profit before people“
You’ve just described every car corporation I know. Is there any car corporation that give a dang about any humans external to a vehicle? Pretty much all your concerns are the same as I have with any and all car/vehicles already unleashed on the roads…and sidewalks…and MUPs….and anywhere they can be crashed into. Those are already all over the place and relentlessly killing people.
What makes Waymo so much worse than the present that it requires a sudden flurry of activity from the Council? Are they going to see how much money they can squeeze out of it for another Vienna junket? How much money Waymo will contribute to street repair (that we’ve given up on)?
All fair points! And that’s why we need _thoughtful_ engagement by our public servants. I’m not seeing that from Green; instead it seems like blindness to the realities and externalities of the status quo.
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.
Not just corporations but governments and especially individuals. City of Portland is notorious for cherry picking data and massaging it to reflect what they want it to say.
For sure, I didn’t mean to phrase that in a way to imply it wasn’t a universal practice.
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.
COTW: “giving up our largest public spaces, i.e. roads, to the control of corporations….”
David Zipper is absolutely a thinker everyone in this space should be following. He is active on Bluesky.
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.
Yes. Actually, this is exactly how business is done here. I don’t like that aspect whatsoever, but you’re not paying attention if you think this fast track only is happening for Waymo.
I don’t know what kickback the council is angling for, but it will be interesting once they actually start negotiating what the council asks for that is unique to Portland.
Green can’t say he’s against automobiles, afterall the majority of his voters have and use autos so one can’t be anti-car and get ahead as a politician very well.
He can go after AVs because the voting masses don’t own them.
So, like any politician who wants to be voted back in he knows what side of the bread the butter is on.
Wait.. so you’re saying that the Oregon Legislature will do a good job of regulating AVs?
No, that’s not what I’m saying, but touché. That’s a fair touch 🙂
I don’t see why the Council defaults to being unique from the rest of Oregon unless the idea panders to their ego or they really want another taxed revenue stream. A statewide set of regulations will be okay (and not a good job)and be a fine start so I don’t see the councils urgency when they have plenty to concern themselves with. Like a forensic audit of the whole city government. They just found another 20 million to pay for it.
Unlike most here, I have not seen the council successfully walk and chew gum.
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.
OTH, I can appreciate the opportunity to request a hundred waymos to 4301 S. Macadam Ave.
I’m not necessarily against AVs but bill HB 4085 needs some serious work to allow regulation at the local level. However, I am against any more taxes that will be passed on to the consumer. But I agree it sounds like the bill was written by AV lobbyists and that should be concerning which should raise further scrutiny.
Witness more destruction of democracy by capitalist vultures. Please, good people, remember capitalists and corporations are not here to benefit you or society.
In the really early days of AVs, I was very excited about their deployment in urban spaces. That was when I naïvely thought they would be engineered and managed using a solid “safe systems” approach, akin to how the aviation industry (at its best) works. In that world, safe AVs would have had a positive effect on the streets, modeling safe behavior and slowing traffic on our high-crash corridors.
But that was a loooong time ago, and it’s clear to me now that the AV industry is rife with charlatans who are happy to use unwilling pedestrians in their opaque experiments. Any deployment needs capable and vigilant regulation and monitoring to ensure that these technologies achieve outcomes in terms of safety, environmental impacts, and generally make urban spaces better, not worse.
I don’t see the State of Oregon, the City of Portland, or any other entity in the state having anywhere near the necessary capabilities now or in the foreseeable future.
So no. Just no.
Disclosure: Waymo has supported my work as a sponsor of PRN in the past, but I am under no obligation to promote or support their activities.
As a person who hasn’t driven a car in probably 3 years, I’d rather share the road with or be driven by a waymo than 95+% of human drivers – and that number is only going to go up.
I do think we must regulate these vehicles and we should demand that the technology and services are monitored, priced, shared, and accessible.
Until our council has appetite to price the existing dangerous and damaging trips of private drivers, I have little patience for selective opposition to some car trips.
Nearly every person I have spoken to in LA who rides a bike comments about how pleasant it is to ride around these cars.
There is an AV threat, it’s the lazy and corner-cutting approach being pursued by Tesla and Elon Musk. Transportation advocates would be wise to encourage the option that does, by all means, seem interested in safety and fleet operation.
I get what you are saying here, Tony, but aren’t you concerned that a fleet of AVs wandering around town, looking for riders, is going to clog the streets and balloon VMT? The state is supposed to be working on *reducing* VMT, not increasing it via AV miles.
If we could say that AVs will replace SOVs, for example, on a mile-for-mile basis, then I can see a case for them. But clearly that’s not happening anywhere they have been introduced.
“Waymo has supported my work as a sponsor of PRN in the past…”
Don’t taxi, Uber, and Lift drivers already “wander” around town clogging our streets?
It’s odd that Green’s main opposition to AV’s is the labor aspect.
Protecting those totally Mom and Pop ride share App companies is one of his priorities?
Is he also opposed to better public mass transit options for the same reason?
He probably needs another junket to investigate it.
One thing that both Oregon and NC have in common is how our relatively-conservative state legislators are constantly trying to regulate the actions of its notoriously-liberal largest city (Portland & Charlotte), and how often each of those cities successfully finds work-arounds to evade state legislation.
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about robotaxis, but I deeply and profoundly resent state legislators preempting how local governments manage their streets and their communities at the behest of corporate lobbyists.
What makes you think the City Council is immune to corporate wiles?
That’s a no from me dawg. I don’t have a problem with AVs, I think they are probably safer on average, HOWEVER…when you have language like “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 is a gigantic red flag.
It sure does remind me of the constant fights cities get into with ODOT, where ODOT says that a street has to be X, Y, and Z to support traffic flow, objections, concerns, and lives of the local residents be damned.
Plus, the federal government is clearly not going regulate AVs correctly at this time. So it falls on states and yes, cities, to do it instead.
“Safety” is currently being discussed based on:
1) self-reporting from Waymo and other AV companies, which is not necessarily accurate and comprehensive.
2) focusing ONLY on collision data, and ignoring other public health and environmental issues, including air pollution, chemical runoff, noise pollution, etc, all of which increase with more automotive use. Currently, one of the few limits on the number of automotives on our roads is the number of human drivers; once that limit is removed, expect way more traffic and pollution, with direct implications for public health. (Shout out to *Life After Cars* for so much great data on how bad electric vehicles and their combustion engine cousins are for public health and the environment.)
3) a moment in which we have not *yet* experienced cyberattacks on autonomous vehicles. Yes, you know how hackers get into everything? Can you imagine what happens when entire networks of AVs get hacked? How safe will that be? If this sounds a little far-fetched, consider that there have already been incidents when network overload or network failures have caused problems with AVs. More to come!!
If you want the safest streets, reduce the number of automobiles. Those things kill people!!!