It’s Waymo season in New York.
Photo: Audley C. Bullock/Shutterstock
It was going to happen sooner or later, but the Waymos are really here. On Friday, the city’s Department of Transportation gave the autonomous for-hire vehicle company the green light to set loose eight of its sensor-equipped Jaguar SUVs in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, and they’ve already been spotted in Midtown, cruising down Chambers Street, and, in one case, stuck in traffic in Soho. (Which means the person required to passively ride along in the vehicle, per state law, was also stuck in that traffic.)
The Alphabet-owned Waymo already operates self-driving fleets in cities including San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin and has long had designs on the five boroughs: Drivers in its now-retired Chrysler Pacifica minivans manually mapped the city back in 2021, and driver-controlled Waymos were again collecting data across the city beginning in July. But it wasn’t until last week that the city gave the company the all-clear to let the self-driving vehicles actually steer themselves. Under the current pilot, which runs through September with the possibility of an extension, the cars are allowed to drive in Manhattan south of 112th Street and in Downtown Brooklyn north of Atlantic Avenue and west of Carlton Street. But there’s a sort of driver’s-ed rule in place for autonomous vehicles under state law, so in each of these cars, a “trained specialist” is required to ride along, ready to take control of the vehicle should anything go sideways. There are also no passenger pick-ups allowed during the pilot — that requires a license from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.
No one is setting the Waymos on fire here (yet?), but the so-called self-driving revolution has been met with heavy skepticism in some corners of the city. “If there’s one place on Earth that was NOT meant for self-driving cars, it’s NYC,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio recently wrote on X. “This is a really bad idea.” Also of the opinion that this is a bad idea: taxi and for-hire drivers, a contingent of whom protested outside of Kathy Hochul’s Third Avenue office on Monday, according to Hell Gate, waving signs reading “WayNO” and “Waymo Go Home.”
The job threat seems very real. (As Fernando Mateo, a spokesman for the Federation of Taxi Drivers, told the Daily News: “This is cancer to us.”) As for street safety? Waymo’s record might be a little cleaner than, say, some other drivers in the city.