No Way-mo: Opposition to NYC's robot car pilot grows

A street safety advocacy group on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of New Yorkers calling for regulators to revoke approval for a pilot program that allows a car service to test self-driving taxis on city streets.

Waymo, a taxi app company owned by Google’s parent-company Alphabet, last week got the green light from the city transportation department to operate eight autonomous vehicles in the city through September. The company already operates robot taxis in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin, where riders can order driverless cabs with their smartphones.

But organizers at the advocacy group Open Plans said New York isn’t comparable to those cities, and raised concerns the pilot program sets the stage for self-driving vehicles to one day gum up the city’s crowded and chaotic streets. Their comments followed protests by leaders of the city’s major taxi union, who fear Waymo is coming to take away their jobs.

“This was a pilot that was initiated with very little public input,” said Michael Sutherland, a policy researcher with Open Plans. “From a safety perspective, this is a technology that hasn’t been tested out in incredibly dense cities like New York City.”

Sutherland also pointed out Waymo has not rolled out at scale in cold-weather cities where roads get icy in the winter.

New York state’s vehicle and traffic laws require all vehicles to be operated by humans. And growing Waymo’s service in the city beyond the pilot would require legislation in Albany.

City data shows Waymo has spent at least $630,000 lobbying local government officials and lawmakers since 2020.

"The future of transportation is public transit that runs reliably and regularly, and active transportation that's available to everybody. It’s not cars," Sutherland added.

In May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall notice of more than 1,200 Waymo vehicles due to incidents that include “collision[s] with stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains,” according to the federal report.

The report said there were seven incidents involving collisions with chains or gates between a roughly year-and-a-half-long period starting in 2022, though no injuries were caused.

A spokesperson for Waymo did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, autonomous vehicles have a solid safety record, especially compared to those operated by human drivers.

Data provided by Waymo suggests its autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than ones driven by humans. The company reports that over the more than 70 million miles its fleet has traveled, its cars have been involved in 88% fewer crashes with serious injuries than average human drivers over the same distance.

A collision involving a Waymo vehicle in January in San Francisco was reported as the first fatal accident involving a fully autonomous vehicle in the country. Investigators said the self-driving car wasn’t at fault, and blamed the crash on a human driver traveling at high speeds who collided with multiple vehicles waiting at a traffic light, killing one person and their dog.