Waymo is coming. Will Portland be ready?

Self-driving vehicles are ready to roll, but there is resistance among the powers that be

Imagine: The year is 2027. Your driverless vehicle heads south on Northwest 11th toward The Armory. It takes the left lane to target the theater drop-off, avoiding the streetcar tracks, which it classifies as a high-cost surface. Ahead, a rideshare vehicle is stopped in the curb lane. The vehicle’s planner evaluates a nudge maneuver but rejects it; the cost of merging over slick steel rails exceeds the cost of waiting. It holds its line. A pedestrian steps off the curb from the Brewery Blocks; the prediction model has already latched onto their trajectory and initiates a gentle deceleration. You arrive. As you reach for the door handle, the internal display flashes: “Check Surroundings” — radar has detected a cyclist filtering up the blind side.

Before Waymo operates in a new city, it maps every street in detail — lane markings, bike lanes, curb cuts, signals and transit priority zones. On the road, the vehicle layers that map against real-time data from cameras, lidar and radar, classifying every object and predicting its likely trajectory, many times per second. The onboard system drives. Remote agents exist only to advise stuck vehicles on routing.

I’ve taken Waymo a dozen times in San Francisco (at every opportunity, honestly) and I can tell you, the technology works. Waymo is expanding into new cities every few months, and Portland is on the list. The only question is whether the cars arrive on our terms or someone else’s.

No one behind the wheel

This year’s short legislative session offered a preview of what that fight will look like. House Bill 4085 would have opened Oregon’s roads to autonomous vehicles, while stripping cities of regulatory authority. The bill stalled. But its chief co-sponsor, Rep. Susan McLain, chairs the House Transportation Committee, and is expected to pick this back up for the 2027 Legislature. Meanwhile, Waymo is expanding fast, and Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Millicent Williams has told city leaders that Portland’s existing autonomous vehicle rules are outdated and need rewriting.

Portland has roughly a year to build the regulatory framework it will need before the next bill lands. That work requires elected officials willing to engage with the technology. Not all of them are.

I watched the Feb. 9 Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing where PBOT presented on HB 4085. PBOT asked the right questions about enforcement gaps, accessibility and curb management. But Councilor Angelita Morillo, who vice-chairs the committee, declared her opposition before the presentation was finished: “I cannot see at this time being convinced in any way that I would want any autonomous vehicles to be allowed in the city.” Three days later, I attended a Buckman Neighborhood Association meeting as a guest speaker alongside Councilor Morillo. When a constituent asked about Waymo and Vision Zero, she rejected the premise that AVs could be safer.

Morillo raised valid concerns about worker displacement and state preemption. But at neither venue did she engage with PBOT’s policy analysis. Instead, she focused on misunderstandings: remote operators making crash decisions (they don’t — agents advise on routing, not driving), and trolley-problem dilemmas (manufacturers don’t program “who to hit” decisions; AVs maintain following distance and brake hard).

Factually incorrect claims make it easy for bill sponsors to dismiss Portland’s opposition as uninformed. Opposition without a counterproposal is an invitation for Salem to write the rules instead. Portland needs leaders who ask the hard questions, not ones who has already decided the answer.

Blind spots

PBOT raised genuinely hard problems in its briefing. For example: How do you cite a vehicle with no driver? Jeffrey Tumlin, who led San Francisco’s transportation agency during Waymo’s expansion, told the legislature that police cannot ticket AVs because citations must be issued to a human operator. Parking enforcement works (Waymo received 589 parking citations in San Francisco in 2024), but for running red lights or illegal turns, there’s no mechanism.

Portland could close this gap by tying automated citations to vehicle IDs, requiring real-time data sharing from fleet operators and designating agents who are legally responsible for each fleet’s conduct on city streets. HB 4085 would have made all of that harder. The bill prohibited cities from imposing requirements “specific only to” autonomous vehicles, capped insurance at $1 million per incident (California requires $5 million). It contained no accessibility requirements, no mechanism to prevent bike lane blocking and no tools for managing empty vehicles circling downtown.

HB 4085 is dead, but its provisions represent the default outcome if Portland doesn’t propose something better. Portland wrote the rules for rideshare a decade ago — per-ride fees, accessibility standards, insurance requirements — and they still govern Uber and Lyft today. It can do the same for autonomous vehicles, but only if it shows up in 2027 with a framework of its own.

Merge ahead

Portland set a goal of zero traffic deaths by 2025. According to preliminary PBOT data, we recorded 39 — down from 58 the year before and real progress back toward pre-pandemic levels, but still a long way from zero. AV safety claims deserve scrutiny; Waymo’s data applies primarily to geofenced urban areas under 35 mph. But scrutiny means doing the work, not refusing to look.

A version of this bill is coming back in 2027. PBOT is already rewriting its AV rules. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee should be leading that effort, and its chair, Councilor Olivia Clark, should be the one in the driver’s seat, rather than letting a vice-chair who has publicly declared her opposition set the course.