Waymo promises safety for NYC, but city officials remember the brutal truth about Uber and Lyft that pushed drivers into this nightmare

Waymo is making a big push to get its autonomous vehicles onto the notoriously chaotic streets of New York City, but city officials and local advocates are meeting the high-tech pitch with deep skepticism, as reported by Politico. They simply haven’t forgotten the brutal economic damage that Uber and Lyft inflicted on the existing transportation infrastructure.

When you look at Waymo’s presentation, it certainly sounds promising. The company’s pitch to state and city officials revolves around deploying high-tech autonomous vehicles in conjunction with the city’s recent traffic safety upgrades. This combination, they argue, could create an environment for New Yorkers where traffic fatalities are dramatically reduced by eliminating human error behind the wheel.

Waymo’s head of global public policy, Justin Kintz, is explicitly linking their tech to existing city initiatives. He said, “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.” However, Waymo’s safety claims should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The issue is that for many New Yorkers, the promises of Silicon Valley have already fallen flat

The memory of the ride-share giants wrecking the taxi industry still haunts the city, and advocates are extremely wary of letting another tech firm come in and make the same claims. Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for the public transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, summed up the mood perfectly. He said, “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.”

Regional transit advocates are worried that flooding the streets with even more vehicles, even if they are driverless, could completely undermine the goals of the new congestion pricing tolls designed to cut traffic in Manhattan. As Tiffany-Ann Taylor, the influential Regional Plan Association’s vice president of transportation, noted, “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.”

The job replacement issue is also front and center. When Sara Lind, co-executive director of Open Plans, met with Waymo, the company suggested they wouldn’t necessarily add more cars to the road, which implies their vehicles would simply replace human drivers. Waymo also suggested they could “help fill holes in transit deserts,” but Lind is highly skeptical about that promise, too.

She reminded everyone that the other ride-share companies said the exact same thing. She stated, “They’ve said, we can help fill holes in transit deserts, but Uber and Lyft said that, [and] we haven’t seen that happen.”

It’s clear Waymo has a long road ahead if it wants to operate in the Big Apple. They aren’t just selling a safe new car; they’re fighting a legacy of broken promises, and New York City isn’t ready to let the tech industry dictate its timeline again.