Photo-Illustration: Source Photographs for Photo-Illustration: George Rose/Getty Images (Street), hapabapa/Getty Images (Waymo)
This material can’t be displayed today.
To view this embed, please accept targeting cookies. It’s loaded from a 3rd party and requires that consent to appear.
The robots are on the move, whether you can see them or not. Far from New York City City, Waymo– the autonomous-driving-technology endeavor from Alphabet, the company the majority of us think of as Google– is acquiring miles and experience. It’s readily available to the public in 11 cities, possibly most prominently in Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area, where its self-governing vehicles are well out of the pilot-program phase and increasingly simply part of the roadscape. Waymo is now running majority a million rideshare journeys weekly: in Orlando, in Nashville, in the sprawls of Atlanta and Los Angeles. In New york city, however, its cars and trucks are all parked.
After more than a year of Waymo test-driving around the city– eight autonomous cars, all with humans behind the wheel as backup– its two permits to test in New York lapsed near completion of March. One was a statewide permit with a carve-out permitting New York City to manage itself. The second was the city’s own. In reapplying for those licenses, Waymo deals with little resistance at the state level– AV screening was represented in Albany’s recently passed spending plan costs, and Governor Hochul’s workplace said in a declaration that “extending this minimal screening program to assess these automobiles will help ensure the long-lasting security of this emerging innovation.” Downstate, however, the clever money is on an additional hold-up. As Sarah Kaufman, the director of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transport Policy and Management, who studies AV policy, put it, “There is an opportunity for us to be last.”
There is worth in being, at least, late. As progressive and forward-thinking a city as we can be, we are also wisely hesitant about significant shifts that may impact lots of people who are, economically and otherwise, hardly hanging on. It takes us decades to legalize things that seem comparatively benign, like in-sink waste disposal unit (banned up until 1997), pinball machines (prohibited until 1976), and pet ferrets (still off-limits). We frequently embrace a “Program me” attitude toward putatively inexorable technological modification, specifically in this sociopolitical environment, where large tech companies have excellent power to interrupt. Meera Joshi, who ran the Taxi and Limousine Commission under Bill de Blasio and then worked 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 simple matter of customer defense: The stance, at that time, was “It’s never too early to start controling.”
The city may still be wary, however it is not providing a flat “never.” The Department of Transportation’s spokespeople would not confirm this, but Waymo’s local head of state and local public law for the Eastern U.S., Matt Walsh, informed me, “We’ve established a really excellent working, productive relationship with Commissioner [Mike] Flynn and his team.” He emphasizes that Waymo is making an effort to be an affordable civic partner. “There have actually been a great deal of other companies,” Walsh said, “that have actually concerned New York City with a different technique of ‘Let’s break things and figure it out later.’ That is not what you’re seeing with Waymo.” He might have been referring to Uber, which on its arrival in 2011 contended the TLC while finding out how to operate within black-car-for-hire laws. At one point, Uber was so aggressively tough New York’s regulatory environment that it presented the “de Blasio view” in its app, using the possibility of a 25-minute await a cars and truck.
Rather, Waymo is wanting to play good– and for great factor. New york city, with its density of non-car-owning locals, is a real reward for rideshare operators. “The pressure for Waymo to specifically remain in Manhattan, where there are great deals of wallets on every street, is going to be very strong,” Joshi told me. In other words, the Mamdani administration has take advantage of, and it appears to be using it.
What would it require to get the city onboard? Detailed safety data would most likely go a long way. Waymo does publish a few of its top-line information online– you can see the control panel here– and its basic claim is that, compared to human-driven cars, its vehicles are involved in 92 percent less crashes that lead to serious injury or worse and cause 92 percent less pedestrian injuries. (I will keep in mind, though, that those data points are entirely the company’s own– and, stated Joshi, “nobody audits them, as far as I can inform.”) Its algorithmic drivers do not consume, don’t get sleepy, don’t text. Last year, 205 people were killed by chauffeurs on our streets; nationwide, two passed away in Waymo crashes, each blamed on a human-driven cars and truck rather than the AV. In theory, at least, the robots are, or will be, much better drivers than we are.
That said, individuals– in New york city or anywhere– have a very various reaction to a human running over another human than to a robotic doing it. The previous is a traumatic, if familiar, part of cars and truck culture. The latter is more atavistically appalling, no matter whether it occurs less typically. (When I asked Kaufman why people react so differently to those two circumstances, she provided that “they’re searching for regret.”) Neither Waymo nor a person will ever claim, or attain, 100 percent safety. As Kaufman stated, “What is our threshold for ‘safe sufficient’? Does it make the proper decision 70 percent of the time, or 90 percent of the time?” If the devices do get that number down and eventually show to us that they outshine people, that will likely accelerate their approval.
If you were to ask most Brand-new Yorkers about the prospect of being surrounded by AVs, though, they might question how responsive those cars can be to our especially dense, chaotic landscape. In locations 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, a minimum of in America. We love our right to jaywalk while banging on a cars and truck’s hood and screaming “I’m walkin’ here!”
When I asked Walsh about the city’s environment, he called its difficulties “generalizable. We saw that the Waymo driver effectively browsed things like double-parked cars and trucks and unpredictable pedestrian habits successfully.” San Francisco has hills and fog and street weirdos; are New York’s cool curbs and vendors and bike messengers vastly harder to browse? Right now, possibly. But from a strictly tech viewpoint, the AVs’ arrival is probably less of an if than a how and when.
Rather, the sticking point seems to be labor. New York has approximately 180,000 TLC-licensed motorists. About 28,000 of them come from the New york city Taxi Workers Alliance, a union founded in 1998. It’s a hard job that is likewise a path into the middle class for countless 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 main recommended to me that it appeared from Mamdani’s first employs that the push towards rapid AV adoption “would be put on ice. He and Julie Su”– the very first deputy mayor for economic justice– “and the brand-new TLC commissioner, Midori Valdivia, all put it in regards to an attack on labor.”
Waymo representatives point out that the company develops jobs in locations like information and service centers and a few of those tasks are held by previous chauffeurs. However it’s tough to see any circumstance where a six-figure variety of those roles can possibly change all the driving jobs in New york city. Bhairavi Desai, a founder of the NYTWA, reminded me that at least some of those assistance tasks are in the Philippines. Is her group in talks with Waymo? “No. They haven’t approached us; we have actually never ever approached them.”
Nevertheless, Desai grasps that, in some type, the AV is coming. “What I would hope for, and what we would promote, is that the administration would put in genuine requirements of independent information. A lot of the tech playbook has actually had to do with making themselves look inescapable: ‘Hey, we’re in all these other locations. Your city is backward, you’re falling back.’ And that can not be our clinical standard.” Something we do not know, she mentioned, is how the city’s for-hire drivers, who she says traditionally have better safety records than civilians do, stack up against AVs. Already, city taxis, consisting of those from Uber and Lyft, are needed to share trip information with the TLC. Every mile is logged. If Waymo wishes to enter into town for great, it will likely need to do the same. As Joshi put it to me, “I believe it’ll be a minute of ‘Who blinks?,’ and the city’s eyes are large open.”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you choose to check out in print, you can likewise find this article in the June 1, 2026, concern of New york city Publication.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our protection. If you prefer to check out in print, you can likewise find this post in the June 1, 2026, concern of New york city Magazine.
Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter
A day-to-day mix of stories about cities, city life, and our constantly progressing communities and horizons.
By submitting your email, you consent to our Terms and Personal Privacy Notification and to get email correspondence from us.