Waymo in Portland
waymo.com271 points by xnx 14 hours ago
271 points by xnx 14 hours ago
For context, this is coming in as TriMet is laying off staff, reducing service frequency, eliminating bus lines, and cutting parts of light rail routes due to a $300M budget shortfall. The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners, so the budget is going to get worse before it gets better.
https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/04/trimet-official...
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/trimets-present-crisis-...
At the same time, Portland's city council is debating whether to cap the cut of driver pay that rideshare companies take: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/13/uber-lyft-driver-pay-...
So at the same time that public transit is retreating and rideshare company labor overhead is threatening to increase, Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does, and also doesn't have human drivers who need to be paid subject to the laws of the city of Portland. But it doesn't actually matter all that much what is going on municipally in Portland at the moment - Waymo (or ideally, a wide variety of competing robotaxi services) should exist everywhere in the country and be as widely available as cars and roads themselves. And eventually this will happen; the concept that Waymo entering a new local market is a newsworthy event is a temporary state of affairs.
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does
Portland car infrastructure in particular does get a little love from me just because of how damn impressive some of it is (namely the mountain passage to the west and the complex bridge interchanges on the east side) but it's still car infrastructure.
Road maintenance isn't a subsidy, it's a collective good that buses also benefit from along with many other types of human transport. This is separate from the cost to the government of running a bus system, which is exactly what large numbers of people really don't want to pay an additonal tax for and are therefore voting against.
If you only wanted to run buses, you would not build nearly as many roads as we do.
How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?
> by simple virtue of being a car
State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".
Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?
In FY25, according to their budget [1], TriMet - the Portland public transit authority - spent $19M on bus services.
In that same budget, PDOT spent $56M on streets, signs and streetlights, before you even consider the $242M spent on "asset management" - which appears to generally be capital improvements; i.e., rebuilding roads [2, page 509].
I don't care what fraction of that wear and tear is due to buses, it's not remotely close. And in any case, by the same fourth-power law, private 18-wheelers do astronomically more damage than buses.
And yes, PDOT makes revenue back from some of those things, so it's not all straight from the city general fund, but it doesn't matter in any practical way. They don't have revenues broken down as far as I'd like on that budget - there's one big $89M line item for "charges for services", which appears to include parking meters as well as tram fare - but the vast majority of their budget still comes from taxes plus "intergovernmental" sources (aka state and federal money, aka taxes).
[1] https://www.gpmetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-Oper... [2] https://www.portland.gov/budget/documents/fy-2025-26-city-po...
Your first link is for the bus budget in Portland, Maine. The system cost for busses in Portland, Oregon in 2025 was $453 million.[1]
Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric).
So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.
Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.
For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.
This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.
The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.
For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]
If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.
And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.
I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.
1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.
The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.
> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles
Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.
> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking
Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.
Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
Portland was originally designed around mass transit and is a completely planned city - this argument does not hold water there specifically.
> is if you're bad at designing cities for it
Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).
Those preferences are based at least partially on the available transportation. If the automobile didn't exist, would people still prefer to live so far from jobs and entertainment?
We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.
> Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not.
The car is mostly not.
> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,
Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.
Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.
But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.
I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.
> in your comment you're excluding road cost
Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
FWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.
Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!
try it again while calculating infrastructure and road costs for 262mm uber/lyft rides
Because roads are a shared resource used by everyone (even non car owners) Uber/Lyft's portion is small and covered by taxes they already pay.
The point is that the cost of the road infrastructure isn't accounted for, not to mention the externality of having a half a million cars on the road to move 750k people. Rideshare is slipstreaming in the subsidized flow of cars.
What about infrastructure costs for lyft and uber?
Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?
The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.
That is an argument for buses on well-designed routes and schedules, not an argument against buses.
It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”
well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake
It depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop.
Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
Yep, you definitely want a range of bus sizes. Some areas are served perfectly well with a couple of these
"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.
The OP you're responding suggested using Waymo's to help fill the buses, not get rid of buses.
I suggested both. Milk runs through suburban neighborhoods likely make sense to get rid of entirely.
If it can deliver transit to the public at a reasonable price…
Even five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.
How many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.
how many tax dollars go to roads and bridges just for cars?
Too many, but at least some are directly on vehicles. Transit (in the USA, on the West coast) is funded >90% by taxes on income, property, vehicle registration, fuel, etc not by the people using it.
I cannot speak for every state ever, but I remember that roads in WA were mostly funded by gas/diesel taxes + vehicle registration fees.
Which is also why WA state has been charging an additional significant car registration fee on EVs (on top of the usual annual registration costs), since EVs don't contribute to this normally through gas/diesel taxes.
Everyone uses the roads. You have to reach for very obscure examples to find commerce that doesn't utilize roads. Every bit of concrete and steel to build transit was at some point transported over roads.
https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
Tax revenue was $555mm
https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding)
So about $4.53 per ride.
The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr.
Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet.
Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.
https://info.oregon.aaa.com/how-much-does-it-really-cost-to-...
Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost.
When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.
And the meaning of the truism you so adoitly picked up on is that at reasonable projections trimet and similar public transit will be uncompetitive in price (and service) relative to self driving EVs. Ergo it is correct to deprioritize their funding.
This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.
> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
Why not both?
The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".
If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.
And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.
Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.
Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.
Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.
If Portland is really forward-thinking, they would be smart to use this opportunity to jump to the next stage of public transport by focusing on flexible bus routes and Waymo/rideshare subsidies for the poor and disabled.
Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.
I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.
>Trains are great
I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
Yesh go to literally any other industrialized part of the world and see how ** backwards the US is on trains
I’ve become quite radicalized on trains after visiting Japan and Switzerland myself.
Not like the US didn't try. California spent 15yrs trying to build a high speed train and failed. Canada has been talking about building trains forever too and it usually goes nowhere because the budgets explode like every major infrastructure project these days.
UK spent $100M just to deal with bats in a single train tunnel, which is representative of the issue https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
I wonder what's different between these English speaking countries you mention failing to build out rail transit, and places like Japan and China that have built fabulous rail networks.
Japan is a fairly unique case, and probably does not share much with China aside from being in the same region. Japan is geographically well suited to serving a large portion of the population with one long line with a few branches. That's a convenient advantage.
China just doesn't have to worry about environmentalists or anyone else locally trying to stand in the way, they just bulldoze them and build.
China also has much lower labor costs, and even Japan is a good bit cheaper (than the US, at the least)