Robotaxis Are Ready; New York City Isn’t

During my last two years of high school in San Francisco, driverless cars—or “robotaxis,” or autonomous vehicles, call them what you will—weren’t the future. They were a joke. Waymo cars circled blocks aimlessly, teenagers jumped in front of them just to see what would happen, and every now and then one would end up awkwardly nudging onto a sidewalk. It didn’t feel revolutionary. It felt like a glitch, an experiment that had escaped the lab too early. No one I knew took them seriously, let alone imagined they would ever function in the real world.

Then I left for college in New York City.

When I came back to San Francisco for Thanksgiving break, something had shifted. The same cars that once felt like a joke had quietly become normal. I realized this just after midnight, when my 14-year-old sister walked in after me from a party. I asked how she got home, whether a friend dropped her off, or if she took the bus. When she said neither, I warned her about taking Ubers alone that late.

“Huh?” she said. “Cars don’t, like, have drivers anymore.” And then she went to bed.

The next day, I decided to try one myself. Using her app, I ordered a ride, half expecting something to go wrong. When the car showed up, it didn’t feel broken anymore. It felt deliberate, almost like it had something to prove. I sat in the front seat as the steering wheel turned on its own, casually, confidently. I kept glancing beside me, instinctively expecting a person to be there. There wasn’t.

The ride was smooth, but unsettling. The car stopped perfectly, too perfectly, waiting longer than any human driver ever would at a stop sign. Pedestrians walked right in front of it without hesitation, as if it didn’t deserve the same respect as a person behind the wheel. Inside, I could play whatever music I wanted, untouched by small talk or judgment. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking, is this actually the future? And if it is, where does that leave everyone else?

And more importantly, would something like this ever work in New York City?

Right now, the answer is not yet.

Big Apple, Big Problems

Earlier this month, New York City quietly hit pause on that future. The permits that allowed Waymo to test its vehicles in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn expired at the end of March, bringing an end, at least temporarily, to the presence of robot cars on city streets. Over the past year, eight of these vehicles had been driving through downtown Brooklyn and below 112th Street in Manhattan, always with a human safety specialist behind the wheel. According to the city’s Department of Transportation, none were involved in reported collisions during testing. Technically, the experiment worked.

But New York is not San Francisco, and proving something can work is not the same as proving it belongs.

For now, state law still requires a human driver in any vehicle, and efforts to change that have stalled. A bill introduced in 2021 that would allow fully autonomous vehicles under certain conditions has yet to move forward, and Governor Kathy Hochul recently pulled back from expanding their use even outside the city. Without those approvals, companies like Waymo are left waiting, lobbying lawmakers, negotiating regulations, and trying to convince a city that has seen every kind of transportation experiment come and go that this one is different.

And yet, outside of New York, it already is. Waymo operates fully driverless ride services in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, and is planning expansion into more cities across the United States and internationally. The company argues its cars are safer than human drivers, citing millions of miles of autonomous driving and significantly fewer serious crashes. In San Francisco, what once felt chaotic has become routine, something as normal as calling an Uber.

That contrast is exactly what makes New York such an open question.

Because if robotaxis do come here, they will not just be another convenience. They will force the city to decide what it values more, efficiency or unpredictability, automation or human labor. Nearly 180,000 drivers are currently licensed through the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, and for many of them, this is not just a technological shift, it is a direct threat to their livelihood. Labor advocates argue that without strong regulations in place, companies will shape the system before the city has a chance to.

At the same time, transportation experts point out that New York presents challenges that no algorithm has fully solved. The streets are dense, fast, and often chaotic in ways that do not follow clean patterns. Pedestrians cross when they are not supposed to. Cyclists weave between lanes at unpredictable speeds. Traffic is less about rules than about constant negotiation. A car that stops perfectly every time, like the one I rode in San Francisco, might not just feel out of place here. It might not function at all.

Which brings me back to that ride, the quiet, controlled, almost too perfect experience of sitting in a car that never hesitated, never improvised, never bent the rules. In San Francisco, that precision felt like the future. In New York, it feels like a question.

Because what I realized, sitting there watching the steering wheel turn on its own, is that the technology is not the most uncertain part of this story anymore. It will keep improving. It already has. The real uncertainty is the city itself.

New York has never been a place that runs on perfection. It runs on people, on instinct, on risk, on the unspoken understanding between a driver and a pedestrian stepping into the street at the wrong moment. It is a system that works not because it is flawless, but because it is human.

So the question is not just whether robotaxis can come to New York. It is whether New York will change enough to let them.