7 ms·

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

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-officials-vote-on-major-changes-to-portland-area-bus-routes-shortening-of-max-green-line.html https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/04/trimet-official... https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/trimets-present-crisis-and-uncertain-future-48283837/ 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-portland/ 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.

ptero 6mo ago
> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month Sorry to nitpick, but why is the next month's ballot (and in general the issues that have not been voted on yet) affecting current service?
- starkparker 6mo ago
  > A scheduled increase to Oregon’s transportation taxes, including those that help fund TriMet, is on hold after an effort to repeal the hike secured enough signatures to send the issue to the ballot next month. from the Oregonian article I linked The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then. > “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote. from the Mercury article I linked
  - alphawhisky 6mo ago
    Two Santas but it's federa/state vs on a cyclic basis. Disgusting.
  - fsckboy 6mo ago
    >The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then. I think a more plausible reason is, "withdraw the services now to get people who want that spending and that service irritated, and therefore more likely to get out and vote for it". Keeping service in place till the vote might supress the vote through complacency. I'm not passing a value judgement on this top-down pressure on the electorate, governments should in theory be neutral and uphold current law, but governments are populated by politicians, and politicians who advocated this still want to advocate it and give it its best electoral chance. In a like "up is down" sense, people who favor cutting this government expenditure should favor the early cuts, they save money... of course, they don't, just sayin.
jrflowers 6mo ago
> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems. No it didn’t. Bus rides cost $2.80 in Portland.
- starkparker 6mo ago
  And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether. I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.
  - JuniperMesos 6mo ago
    The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - akjetma 6mo ago
      Really horrifying lack of empathy in your thinking. Also, what a stupid, shortsighted plan.
      - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
        It's possible to want homeless drug addicts to be able to get the help they need while also not wanting them spazzing out on the bus next to me.
xnx 6mo ago
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.
- sheept 6mo ago
  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.
  - Karrot_Kream 6mo ago
    They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    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.
    - Jblx2 6mo ago
      >Trains are great I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
      - soiltype 6mo ago
        None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.
JuniperMesos 6mo ago
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.
- bbor 6mo ago
  Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does To be fair, it gets far more subsidies from the government in general by simple virtue of being a car, they're just A) longterm and thus assumed and B) less visible in general. So I'd say the connection between transit and controversial taxes is arbitrary, really--I'll grant you "convenient", but definitely not genuinely-so! 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.
  - xnx 6mo ago
    How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?
    - brookst 6mo ago
      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.
rrrpdx1 6mo ago
How far into the 'burbs do waymos usually extend? Will Beaverton/hillbsoro be part of the build?
- xnx 6mo ago
  Hard to know. The Waymo bay area service area is 60 miles long. https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#PHX https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#PHX
  - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
    Oh wow that's a lot farther than I remember. I took a Waymo while in the Bay area a couple years ago, and I seem to remember the Waymo service area only going as far South as the I-280 and US-101 interchange? Am I misremembering, or did they just drastically expand it?
alphawhisky 6mo ago
I'm sure that they'll just dodge regulations like every other Service as a Software company. Literally taking the money out of the City's hands and providing a slower, less safe, less equitable service. While taking profit too. Sheesh.
- guywithabike 6mo ago
  By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here? I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
  - cvwright 6mo ago
    And you don’t have to worry that some random passenger will piss, puke, or shit in the Waymo during your commute. The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.
  - scottlamb 6mo ago
    > And they're not profitable. That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable? But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.
fsckboy 6mo ago
>TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers. Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all. "payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.
- tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
  Employers and employees split payroll taxes 50/50 by law. You definitely pay payroll taxes as an employee in the US. If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from. A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.
  - fsckboy 6mo ago
    ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves. the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do. the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.
lotsofpulp 6mo ago
> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators. https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_Gas_Tax,_Payroll_Tax,_and_Vehicle_Registration_Fees_Referendum_(May_2026) https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...
- doug_durham 6mo ago
  They aren't rejecting a tax increase. They are voting to give themselves a pay raise at the expense of infrastructure.
  - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    The wording below of the ballot question is clearly “rejecting a tax increase”. > A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding. > They are voting to give themselves a pay raise A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.
  - anvuong 6mo ago
    Do you live in Oregon? The recent vote was about rejecting the proposed payroll tax increase, which was massively unpopular. The vote was so overwhelming that Kotek attempted to yank that clause, so it can be tried another day. People here keep asking why do tax payer needs to pay for incompetent politicians' mistakes. Then when Oregonians did something, the same people blamed them. Are you people high?
blks 6mo ago
Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
- loeg 6mo ago
  At the margin, it substitutes for some trips.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  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.
  - danaw 6mo ago
    how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
    - coryrc 6mo ago
      Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.
      - jrflowers 6mo ago
        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
        cameldrv 6mo ago
        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.
insane_dreamer 6mo ago
> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems. That's absurd. Waymo exacerbates the problem. It doesn't provide public transport. You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. You think Waymo is going to cost anything close to that?
- jonas21 6mo ago
  > You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. Only because the government is subsidizing 90% of TriMet's operating costs. It might be interesting to see what sort of system Waymo could build with a similar subsidy... but that's never going to happen.
  - array_key_first 6mo ago
    Waymo is subsidized. They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road, land, or surrounding parking. That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it. There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted. Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.
    - xnx 6mo ago
      > They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road Everyone uses roads, and everyone pays for roads. If you buy a potato from a grocery store, part of the money paid for fuel for the delivery truck. The tax on that fuel paid for part of the road.
      - array_key_first 5mo ago
        Right, which is a subsidy.
badc0ffee 6mo ago
I haven't been to Portland for years, but I remember it as being a transit-forward city, with several streetcar lines (one connected to an aerial tram), and decent light rail service covering much of the metro area. It sounds like they're going to leave that behind, at least for the foreseeable future. A $300 million cut will probably lead to a death spiral in ridership.
- saargrin 5mo ago
  i remember trying to use public transport to move around portland from my hotel in the convention center area to the downtown and after sundown it was practically impossible
guywithahat 5mo ago
I would not blame this on republicans; they don't hold a majority in the state senate, house, both senators and most house reps are democrats, and there isn't anywhere they hold meaningful power. Further they're opposed to doubling payroll taxes, the taxes are not raised yet. Oregon, and Portland in particular, suffered a lot economically after covid due to overprotective laws banning operations. A lot of companies went out of business, people moved, and tax revenue plummeted. Growth since has been slow due to hostile laws. TriMet cuts are due to poor city and state management, which frankly doubling payroll tax would exacerbate.

ptero 6mo ago

> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month Sorry to nitpick, but why is the next month's ballot (and in general the issues that have not been voted on yet) affecting current service?

starkparker 6mo ago
> A scheduled increase to Oregon’s transportation taxes, including those that help fund TriMet, is on hold after an effort to repeal the hike secured enough signatures to send the issue to the ballot next month. from the Oregonian article I linked The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then. > “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote. from the Mercury article I linked
- alphawhisky 6mo ago
  Two Santas but it's federa/state vs on a cyclic basis. Disgusting.
- fsckboy 6mo ago
  >The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then. I think a more plausible reason is, "withdraw the services now to get people who want that spending and that service irritated, and therefore more likely to get out and vote for it". Keeping service in place till the vote might supress the vote through complacency. I'm not passing a value judgement on this top-down pressure on the electorate, governments should in theory be neutral and uphold current law, but governments are populated by politicians, and politicians who advocated this still want to advocate it and give it its best electoral chance. In a like "up is down" sense, people who favor cutting this government expenditure should favor the early cuts, they save money... of course, they don't, just sayin.

jrflowers 6mo ago

> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems. No it didn’t. Bus rides cost $2.80 in Portland.

starkparker 6mo ago
And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether. I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - akjetma 6mo ago
    Really horrifying lack of empathy in your thinking. Also, what a stupid, shortsighted plan.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
      It's possible to want homeless drug addicts to be able to get the help they need while also not wanting them spazzing out on the bus next to me.

xnx 6mo ago

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.

sheept 6mo ago
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.
- Karrot_Kream 6mo ago
  They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  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.
  - Jblx2 6mo ago
    >Trains are great I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
    - soiltype 6mo ago
      None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.

JuniperMesos 6mo ago

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.

bbor 6mo ago
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does To be fair, it gets far more subsidies from the government in general by simple virtue of being a car, they're just A) longterm and thus assumed and B) less visible in general. So I'd say the connection between transit and controversial taxes is arbitrary, really--I'll grant you "convenient", but definitely not genuinely-so! 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.
- xnx 6mo ago
  How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?
  - brookst 6mo ago
    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.

rrrpdx1 6mo ago

How far into the 'burbs do waymos usually extend? Will Beaverton/hillbsoro be part of the build?

xnx 6mo ago
Hard to know. The Waymo bay area service area is 60 miles long. https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#PHX https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#PHX
- Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
  Oh wow that's a lot farther than I remember. I took a Waymo while in the Bay area a couple years ago, and I seem to remember the Waymo service area only going as far South as the I-280 and US-101 interchange? Am I misremembering, or did they just drastically expand it?

alphawhisky 6mo ago

I'm sure that they'll just dodge regulations like every other Service as a Software company. Literally taking the money out of the City's hands and providing a slower, less safe, less equitable service. While taking profit too. Sheesh.

guywithabike 6mo ago
By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here? I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
- cvwright 6mo ago
  And you don’t have to worry that some random passenger will piss, puke, or shit in the Waymo during your commute. The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.
- scottlamb 6mo ago
  > And they're not profitable. That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable? But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.

fsckboy 6mo ago

>TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers. Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all. "payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.

tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
Employers and employees split payroll taxes 50/50 by law. You definitely pay payroll taxes as an employee in the US. If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from. A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.
- fsckboy 6mo ago
  ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves. the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do. the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago

> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators. https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_Gas_Tax,_Payroll_Tax,_and_Vehicle_Registration_Fees_Referendum_(May_2026) https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...

doug_durham 6mo ago
They aren't rejecting a tax increase. They are voting to give themselves a pay raise at the expense of infrastructure.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  The wording below of the ballot question is clearly “rejecting a tax increase”. > A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding. > They are voting to give themselves a pay raise A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.
- anvuong 6mo ago
  Do you live in Oregon? The recent vote was about rejecting the proposed payroll tax increase, which was massively unpopular. The vote was so overwhelming that Kotek attempted to yank that clause, so it can be tried another day. People here keep asking why do tax payer needs to pay for incompetent politicians' mistakes. Then when Oregonians did something, the same people blamed them. Are you people high?

blks 6mo ago

Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.

loeg 6mo ago
At the margin, it substitutes for some trips.
Schiendelman 6mo ago
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.
- danaw 6mo ago
  how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
  - coryrc 6mo ago
    Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.
    - jrflowers 6mo ago
      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
      - cameldrv 6mo ago
        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.

insane_dreamer 6mo ago

> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems. That's absurd. Waymo exacerbates the problem. It doesn't provide public transport. You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. You think Waymo is going to cost anything close to that?

jonas21 6mo ago
> You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. Only because the government is subsidizing 90% of TriMet's operating costs. It might be interesting to see what sort of system Waymo could build with a similar subsidy... but that's never going to happen.
- array_key_first 6mo ago
  Waymo is subsidized. They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road, land, or surrounding parking. That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it. There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted. Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.
  - xnx 6mo ago
    > They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road Everyone uses roads, and everyone pays for roads. If you buy a potato from a grocery store, part of the money paid for fuel for the delivery truck. The tax on that fuel paid for part of the road.
    - array_key_first 5mo ago
      Right, which is a subsidy.

badc0ffee 6mo ago

I haven't been to Portland for years, but I remember it as being a transit-forward city, with several streetcar lines (one connected to an aerial tram), and decent light rail service covering much of the metro area. It sounds like they're going to leave that behind, at least for the foreseeable future. A $300 million cut will probably lead to a death spiral in ridership.

saargrin 5mo ago
i remember trying to use public transport to move around portland from my hotel in the convention center area to the downtown and after sundown it was practically impossible

guywithahat 5mo ago

I would not blame this on republicans; they don't hold a majority in the state senate, house, both senators and most house reps are democrats, and there isn't anywhere they hold meaningful power. Further they're opposed to doubling payroll taxes, the taxes are not raised yet. Oregon, and Portland in particular, suffered a lot economically after covid due to overprotective laws banning operations. A lot of companies went out of business, people moved, and tax revenue plummeted. Growth since has been slow due to hostile laws. TriMet cuts are due to poor city and state management, which frankly doubling payroll tax would exacerbate.