Robotaxi Company Waymo Is Eyeing Portland, PBOT Director Says

The robotaxi company Waymo is eyeing Portland.

That’s according to Portland Bureau of Transportation director Millicent Williams, who briefed city officials in a Jan. 20 email to Mayor Keith Wilson, City Administrator Raymond Lee and the Portland City Council.

“As you may have heard, there is interest from Waymo in bringing Autonomous Vehicles to the City of Portland,” Millicent wrote. “While AVs may bring safety benefits, 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 pick-ups and drop offs, prevent challenges for first responders and more.”

Williams made no mention of Waymo’s timeline, nor does it appear that Waymo has made any public statement that it’s exploring expansion into Portland. But if Waymo does seek to enter the Portland market, it’s sure to stir both policy and philosophical debate at the local level about autonomous vehicles.

While the city imposes strict regulations on taxis and ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft, its code around robotaxis and other self-driving cars is less robust. Williams told the city’s leaders that they would need to re-write the city’s administrative rules around autonomous vehicles in case Waymo—or any other AV company—got serious about coming.

“The rule is outdated and needs to be amended,” Williams wrote, adding that the arrival of such vehicles “will have the greatest impacts on local jurisdictions and it makes sense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.”

The city’s current rules do say that an AV company must obtain a permit to operate in the city, and it appears that city staff want those regulations to stay in place, and be reinforced with more. Recommended changes to the city’s current AV rules, drafted by PBOT staff and shared with the city’s elected officials by Williams, include requiring companies to provide a “safety plan based on the City’s Vision Zero goal” of zero traffic deaths, to pay ride fees to “support critical maintenance of the transportation system,” and to comply with any city restrictions on limiting the total number of AVs on Portland streets.

The state of Oregon does not currently have a robust regulatory framework for AVs, though Williams noted in an accompanying memo to the council that the legislature in the upcoming session is expected to take up the matter, “which may include local preemption.”

Owned by Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, Waymo currently operates in just a handful of cities including Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco—but it’s rapidly expanding robotaxi service into Houston, Austin, Dallas, Orlando, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. Within the past week, the company made headlines for two very different reasons: Bloomberg reported that it was launching a $16 billion financing round aimed at a $110 billion valuation, and one of its AVs hit a child walking to school in Santa Monica, Calif.

At least one city councilor has made his position clear on Waymo.

Councilor Mitch Green told WW in a statement that he looks forward to “learning more about how PBOT intends to regulate this, with the expectation that we do not issue any permits without a rigorous analysis of the impacts they may have on our communities. I’ll add that until we’ve done right by our ridershare drivers, who’ve been asking for a resource center, it would be a huge slap in the face to enable another way to hurt their livelihoods.”