Hochul Is Poised To Welcome Waymo. Mamdani May Be A Different Story.

NEW YORK — Waymo has grown from a small, tightly controlled experiment in autonomous driving into the country’s most extensive robotaxi operation, ferrying riders in urban centers from Los Angeles to Miami.

But one city stands to determine whether it can ever go mainstream.

Cracking New York City would be a watershed moment for autonomous vehicles, signaling they can win approval not just in cities with more receptive political climates, but in the country’s most crowded and closely regulated transportation ecosystem. Waymo is trying to win that fight through a big-dollar lobbying campaign targeting Albany and City Hall, betting that persuasion — not disruption — is the path to mainstream adoption. The effort gained new urgency this month, after Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed allowing limited autonomous-vehicle deployments elsewhere in New York. Legislation in Albany would also permit broader expansion of robotaxis upstate, while leaving their fate in the country’s largest city largely in the hands of local policymakers.

That makes Mayor Zohran Mamdani potentially the single most important gatekeeper in Waymo’s national expansion. The new mayor is not only a democratic socialist wary of corporate interests, he’s so closely allied with cab drivers that he went on a hunger strike with them in 2021. And so far, Mamdani isn’t saying what he plans to do.

“I take the arrival of autonomous vehicles very seriously and will always make sure that our policy and our decision-making is focused on the drivers who are here alongside me, in front of me, behind me, to keep our city moving,” Mamdani said this month, standing outside LaGuardia Airport as a line of yellow cabs stretched behind him.

The stakes are heightened by New York City’s bruising history with Uber and Lyft, which entered the city by defying regulators and rapidly upended the taxi industry — leaving yellow cab drivers saddled with crushing debt and policymakers deeply skeptical of tech companies promising disruption as progress.

Waymo is trying a less combative approach.

The company is attempting to conquer New York the slow way — by lobbying lawmakers, courting regulators and gradually making inroads. State records show the company has spent at least $1.8 million lobbying Hochul, state senators, assemblymembers and their staffers as well as city officials since 2019. City filings show at least $740,000 was spent in the past five years to lobby city representatives, including City Council members who signed on to a bill requiring the city Taxi and Limousine Commission to make rules on robotaxis.

“If other cities and other peer mayors are permitting this on some level or testing on it, [Mamdani] can’t be the outlier,” said state Sen. Jeremy Cooney, chair of the body’s Transportation Committee and sponsor of legislation that would allow AVs to operate without drivers if they meet certain safety standards. “New York cannot put its head in the sand. We’ve got to be at the table. We are the leading country with innovation. We’ve got to make sure that we continue that in the vehicle space.”

Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., has been improving its technology and growing its clout with each city that welcomes its ride-hailing fleet. The merits, the company and its proponents argue, include far greater safety with advanced technology that senses what human drivers cannot. Waymo data shows that its robotaxis experience 90 percent fewer crashes involving a serious injury or worse outcome than vehicles operated by humans. But its failures are the fodder of viral videos: freezing amid tech glitches, driving into a fire scene, dramatic near-crashes and hitting and killing a bodega cat.

The Big Apple and its big dollars are Waymo’s great white whale. The company’s only foothold is a pilot program permitting it to test a handful of robotaxis — with a trained specialist behind the wheel. Since the fall, Waymo has been testing eight cars in parts of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration approved the testing, but without a change to state law it must end by April 1.

“Our operations in New York City are extraordinarily helpful for ensuring our technology is ready for the Big Apple in the future,” Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement. “The governor’s proposal brings Waymo a step closer to serving New Yorkers outside of New York City, and we look forward to exploring more communities throughout the state.”

Taxi Workers Alliance President Bhairav Desai said the tech giant’s progress in the city isn’t inevitable and blasted Hochul and state lawmakers paving the way for driverless, for-hire vehicles.

“It’s a terrible reading of the political moment in New York City and across the state,” Desai said in an interview. “It’s hard for me to imagine the governor signing it, given that the governor is going into an election year, trying to position herself as a working-class, lower-middle-class candidate."

New York is home to traditional taxicab drivers burned — with some pushed to suicide — by financial woes tied to the advent of app-based ride-hailing services. About 170,000 Taxi and Limousine Commission-licensed drivers operate taxicabs, Ubers and Lyfts around the city.

Hochul spokesperson Sean Butler said the governor “will always stand with workers and has no interest in advancing policies that put hard-working New Yorkers’ jobs at risk” and called her proposal “a limited, safety-focused way to test new technology.”

Waymo has said its introduction to the economy will create new jobs, including on its operations team.

Cooney said he’s “very bullish” on passing his legislation this year. The bill he’s carrying with Assemblymember Brian Cunningham wouldn’t ban autonomous vehicles in New York City but it would allow the city’s Department of Transportation to establish its own parameters.

Cunningham, whose father was a taxicab driver, said skepticism and hesitation always accompany the introduction of something new and unknown. He plans to host some of his colleagues on a trip to Phoenix to experience Waymo’s technology firsthand.

“It’s more than just technology for technology’s sake. It is safety,” the assemblymember said in an interview.

Regional transit advocates are still trying to figure out where to land on AVs.

They want policies that create safer streets — which aligns with what tech companies say they can achieve by removing human error behind the wheel. The same advocates also tend to support mass transit over cars and worry that flooding streets with more vehicles could undermine the goals of New York City’s congestion pricing tolls, which have cut traffic in Manhattan.

“For some season, AVs kind of get talked about as like this special thing, this otherworldly entity, but at their base they are still vehicles,” said Tiffany-Ann Taylor, the influential Regional Plan Association’s vice president of transportation.

Sara Lind, co-executive director of the pedestrian advocacy group Open Plans, retold how during meetings with Waymo, the company said it wouldn’t add more cars to the road — which suggests its cars would replace drivers’ jobs.

“They’ve said, we can help fill holes in transit deserts,” she said, “but Uber and Lyft said that, [and] we haven’t seen that happen.”

The legacy of those two companies, which badly wounded the taxi industry, also haunts Waymo’s entry efforts.

“We don’t necessarily need another tech firm coming into New York and telling us, suspiciously, that their way of making money is an improvement to our quality of life,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for the public transit advocacy group Riders Alliance.

Waymo’s pitch to state and city officials revolves around its high-tech autonomous vehicles working in conjunction with new traffic safety features to create an environment for New Yorkers where fatalities can be dramatically reduced.

“New York has the opportunity to pair its investments in slower speeds, better traffic enforcement, and first-in-the-nation congestion management strategies with Waymo’s demonstrably safe technology,” said Justin Kintz, Waymo’s head of global public policy.

In the Big Apple, a City Council bill that would put the Taxi and Limousine Commission in charge of handling licensing, vehicle standards, insurance and other logistics around regulating Waymo and any competitors is in limbo with its former chief sponsor Justin Brannan term-limited out of office. Council Member Gale Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president deeply steeped in city politics, is poised to inherit the bill as lead sponsor. But she’s a skeptic, worried in part about accessibility for disabled New Yorkers and in no rush to usher Waymo in.

“We have to go very slowly. We have to make sure we don’t harm the drivers. We have to make sure that the Taxi and Limousine Commission is at the table,” Brewer said in an interview. “They should be on our time — New York City time — not the company’s time.”