D.C. has the federal government, but New York is New York. “You must make it here to make it anywhere,” Meera Joshi, who previously ran the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, told me. Waymo spent nearly a year testing cars in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but its permits expired in early 2026. Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor, once went on a hunger strike with the city’s taxi-drivers over debt relief, and has been vague about whether he supports renewing the company’s permits. Waymos can still be glimpsed zipping through the city. They remain, waiting—albeit with human drivers behind the wheel.
Waymo sells its service as a remedy for prejudice (because robot drivers won’t discriminate against Black people) and for transit deserts (a claim Uber and Lyft also used to make). People with mobility aids and service animals report that rideshare drivers often decline to pick them up, a practice that’s the subject of a Department of Justice suit against Uber. A Waymo, however, will not balk at a passenger’s guide dog. Lana Nieves, the executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, is a member of the Waymo Accessibility Network. She has a degenerative bone disease, and, on days when she feels up to lifting her walker into the trunk, she likes to ride in the front seat of a Waymo and sing along to Carly Simon.
Still, the accessibility argument strains a bit. Wheelchair users continue to require human drivers when travelling alone. (Users can request a wheelchair-accessible, human-driven car through Waymo’s app, though this raises the question of why they’d seek out Waymo’s app in the first place.) Nieves’s organization has lent Waymo its credibility, and Waymo has, in turn, donated money for the group’s programming. “I’ve had colleagues say, ‘Oh, they bought you,’ ” Nieves told me. “I would be in Fiji on vacation if I were that person. I wouldn’t do it for less than that. Not that I would ever do it at all.”
A startling percentage of the American landscape is built for people driving cars. Cars that drive on their own will require new infrastructure. In June, I visited a Waymo maintenance depot on Toland Street, in San Francisco. Its interior, appropriately, looked like an auto-body shop crossed with a startup office; there were phone-booth pods, laptops on a table, and rows of disemboweled cars. Outside, Waymos puttered around a parking lot. Two hundred cars were on site, variously charging, awaiting their turns to charge, and enjoying the ministrations of human maintenance workers. The cars need to charge for about fifty minutes every six to eight hours—a cycle under way twenty-four hours a day, because a Waymo does not sleep at night.
A manager named Brandon Cain and I wandered the depot, interlopers among the Waymos, which yielded to us tirelessly. “I have to check myself,” Cain told me. “I will walk around the depot just like this”—he looked down, like someone not surrounded by two hundred cars—“because I know that I’m safe.” It can be a hard habit to break when walking through an ordinary parking lot. A car that had just finished charging approached, and I jumped experimentally in front of it; the Waymo stopped. I stepped aside, and the car started to proceed. I jumped again. I felt heady, powerful, and kind of like a jerk. I apologized to Cain, because I couldn’t apologize to the car.
