Photo-Illustration: Source Photographs for Photo-Illustration: George Rose/Getty Images (Street), hapabapa/Getty Images (Waymo)

The robots are on the move, whether you can see them or not. Far from New York City, Waymo — the autonomous-driving-technology venture from Alphabet, the company most of us think of as Google — is racking up miles and experience. It’s available to the public in 11 cities, perhaps most prominently in Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area, where its autonomous vehicles are well out of the pilot-program stage and increasingly just part of the roadscape. Waymo is now running more than half a million rideshare trips per week: in Orlando, in Nashville, in the sprawls of Atlanta and Los Angeles. In New York, though, its cars are all parked.

After more than a year of Waymo test-driving around the city — eight autonomous vehicles, all with humans behind the wheel as backup — its two permits to test in New York lapsed near the end of March. One was a statewide permit with a carve-out allowing New York City to regulate itself. The second was the city’s own. In reapplying for those permits, Waymo faces little resistance at the state level — AV testing was accounted for in Albany’s newly passed budget bill, and Governor Hochul’s office said in a statement that “extending this limited testing program to evaluate these vehicles will help ensure the long-term safety of this emerging technology.” Downstate, though, the smart money is on a further delay. As Sarah Kaufman, the director of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, who studies AV policy, put it, “There is an opportunity for us to be last.”

There is value in being, at the very least, late. As progressive and forward-thinking a city as we can be, we are also wisely skeptical about major shifts that might affect many people who are, economically and otherwise, barely hanging on. It takes us decades to legalize things that seem comparatively benign, like in-sink garbage disposals (banned until 1997), pinball machines (banned until 1976), and pet ferrets (still off-limits). We often adopt a “Show me” attitude toward putatively inexorable technological change, especially in this sociopolitical environment, where large tech companies have great power to disrupt. Meera Joshi, who ran the Taxi and Limousine Commission under Bill de Blasio and then served as a deputy mayor under Eric Adams, tells me that the TLC’s attitude when she ran it was to treat the arrival of AVs as a straightforward matter of consumer protection: The stance, back then, was “It’s never too early to start regulating.”

The city may still be wary, but it is not issuing a flat “never.” The Department of Transportation’s spokespeople wouldn’t confirm this, but Waymo’s regional head of state and local public policy for the Eastern U.S., Matt Walsh, told me, “We’ve established a really great working, productive relationship with Commissioner [Mike] Flynn and his team.” He emphasizes that Waymo is making an effort to be a reasonable civic partner. “There have been a lot of other companies,” Walsh said, “that have come to New York City with a different approach of ‘Let’s break things and figure it out later.’ That is not what you’re seeing with Waymo.” He may have been referring to Uber, which on its arrival in 2011 controversially sidestepped TLC approval and figured out how to operate within black-car-for-hire laws. At one point, Uber was so aggressively challenging New York’s regulatory environment that it introduced the “de Blasio view” in its app, which automatically made users wait 25 minutes for a car.

Instead, Waymo is looking to play nice — and for good reason. New York, with its density of non-car-owning residents, is a real prize for rideshare operators. “The pressure for Waymo to specifically be in Manhattan, where there are lots of wallets on every street, is going to be very strong,” Joshi told me. In short, the Mamdani administration has leverage, and it appears to be using it.

What would it take to get the city onboard? Detailed safety data would probably go a long way. Waymo does post some of its top-line information online—you can see the dashboard here—and its standard claim is that, compared with human-driven cars, its vehicles are involved in 92 percent fewer crashes that result in serious injury or worse and cause 92 percent fewer pedestrian injuries. (I will note, though, that those data points are entirely the company’s own — and, said Joshi, “nobody audits them, as far as I can tell.”) Its algorithmic drivers don’t drink, don’t get sleepy, don’t text. Last year, 205 people were killed by drivers on our streets; nationwide, two died in Waymo crashes, each blamed on a human-driven car rather than the AV. In theory, at least, the robots are, or will be, better drivers than we are.

That said, people—in New York or anywhere—have a very different reaction to a human running over another human than to a robot doing it. The former is a distressing, if familiar, part of car culture. The latter is more atavistically appalling, regardless of whether it happens less often. (When I asked Kaufman why people react so differently to those two scenarios, she offered that “they’re looking for remorse.”) Neither Waymo nor a person will ever claim, or achieve, 100 percent safety. As Kaufman said, “What is our threshold for ‘safe enough’? Does it make the correct decision 70 percent of the time, or 90 percent of the time?” If the machines do get that number down and eventually prove to us that they outperform people, that will likely speed up their acceptance.

If you were to ask most New Yorkers about the prospect of being surrounded by AVs, though, they might question how responsive those cars can be to our particularly dense, chaotic landscape. In places like lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, the number of car-on-bike and car-on-pedestrian and car-on-halal-cart interactions is nearly unique, at least in America. We hold dear our right to jaywalk while banging on a car’s hood and shouting “I’m walkin’ here!”

When I asked Walsh about the city’s environment, he called its challenges “generalizable. We saw that the Waymo driver successfully navigated things like double-parked cars and unpredictable pedestrian behavior successfully.” San Francisco has hills and fog and street weirdos; are New York’s funky curbs and vendors and bike messengers vastly harder to navigate? Right now, maybe. But from a strictly tech standpoint, the AVs’ arrival is probably less of an if than a how and when.

Instead, the sticking point seems to be labor. New York has roughly 180,000 TLC-licensed drivers. About 28,000 of them belong to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a union founded in 1998. It’s a tough job that is also a route into the middle class for thousands of new Americans. Organized labor still has clout in the city, and it’s perhaps feeling empowered under Mayor Mamdani, who had an early public moment in 2021 when hunger-striking in support of NYTWA workers. Five years later, his strike partner Richard Chow drove him to his inauguration. One former City Hall official suggested to me that it was evident from Mamdani’s first hires that the push toward rapid AV adoption “would be put on ice. He and Julie Su” — the first deputy mayor for economic justice — “and the new TLC commissioner, Midori Valdivia, all put it in terms of an assault on labor.”

Waymo representatives point out that the company creates jobs in places like data and service centers and some of those jobs are held by former drivers. But it’s hard to see any situation where a six-figure number of those roles can possibly replace all the driving jobs in New York. Bhairavi Desai, a founder of the NYTWA, reminded me that at least some of those support jobs are in the Philippines. Is her group in talks with Waymo? “No. They haven’t approached us; we’ve never approached them.”

Nonetheless, Desai grasps that, in some form, the AV is coming. “What I would hope for, and what we would push for, is that the administration would put in real requirements of independent data. So much of the tech playbook has been about making themselves look inevitable: ‘Hey, we’re in all these other places. Your city is backward, you’re falling behind.’ And that cannot be our scientific standard.” One thing we don’t know, she pointed out, is how the city’s for-hire drivers, who she says historically have better safety records than civilians do, stack up against AVs. Already, city taxis, including those from Uber and Lyft, are required to share trip data with the TLC. Every mile is logged. If Waymo wants to come into town for good, it will likely have to do the same. As Joshi put it to me, “I think it’ll be a moment of ‘Who blinks?,’ and the city’s eyes are wide open.”

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