Last month, in the basement of a Baptist church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a few dozen people debated how to stop robots from taking over New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis wave, this tsunami that\u2019s coming \u2013 it\u2019s bad,\u201d Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Chiarello told the small audience that represented some of the most politically engaged constituencies of New York City: Black churchgoers, union members, lefty worker justice organizers. They were gathered around a buffet breakfast and Dunkin\u2019 coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat does it mean when technology is capable of literally just rendering human beings obsolete in a whole lot of areas of life?\u201d asked pastor and former state Senate candidate<\/a> Conrad Tillard.<\/p>\n \u201cObsolete!\u201d one person called out in refrain.<\/p>\n The gathering \u2013\u00a0informal, but not lacking in enthusiasm \u2013\u00a0was the first public meeting of a new coalition fighting autonomous vehicles in New York, as the driverless car company Waymo inches closer to acceptance in the halls of the state Capitol.<\/p>\n And if the rhetoric at a few points veered off-course \u2013\u00a0the robot vacuum Roomba was invoked as a villain by one speaker, and Tillard compared the ethical concerns of automation to cross-breeding humans and dogs \u2013\u00a0it was also grounded in very real, increasingly urgent worries for a workforce that is suddenly not at the wheel.<\/p>\n \u201cThere have been no discussions around what happens to the drivers,\u201d said David Alexis, a former ride-hailing driver and former socialist candidate for state Senate. \u201cThere\u2019s no talk about transition to another industry. There\u2019s no talk about training or support. It\u2019s really just, \u2018Driverless cars are here. We don\u2019t need you. Disappear.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For several years now, the technology industry has been making its own arguments for why New York should embrace autonomous vehicles. Waymo, a subsidiary of the company that owns Google, leads that push and has been testing eight autonomous vehicles in New York City since it was granted a small pilot permit in August. That testing license, which required a human present in the driver\u2019s seat at all times, expired last month. It will need to be renewed at the city and the state level.<\/p>\n In a surprising move, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed in her executive budget a pilot program allowing a limited deployment of robotaxis outside of New York City, assuming companies could demonstrate local support. It was the closest Waymo had come to expanding its reach in New York. But weeks later, Hochul conspicuously dropped the proposal, citing a lack of support from stakeholders, including in the state Legislature. (The New York Times reported<\/a> that the decision came as Hochul sought labor support for her higher-priority auto insurance reforms.)<\/p>\n Despite its failure this year, the brief emergence of autonomous vehicles as a live debate in Albany previewed what could become a dominant issue next session. The opposition is already organizing with new coalitions, polls in<\/a> the field<\/a>, and arguments forming for why positive safety data<\/a> from the 10 U.S. cities where passengers are hailing fully autonomous Waymos are not persuasive enough to allow the company access to the country\u2019s largest ride-hailing market.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are coming. They could be great.\u201d<\/p>\n Many people talk about autonomous vehicles as a matter of \u201cwhen,\u201d not \u201cif.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think any reasonable person would say that autonomous vehicles, looking forward in five, 10, 15, 20 years, are inevitable,\u201d said Steve Fulop, president and CEO of the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City, and the former mayor of Jersey City, where autonomous delivery robots roam the streets. Google is part of the Partnership.<\/p>\n \u201cI have no doubt that sometime in the next five years there are going to be AVs on the street in New York City,\u201d said Julie Samuels, president and CEO of the industry group Tech:NYC.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are coming. They could be great,\u201d said former city traffic official Sam Schwartz, \u201cGridlock Sam,\u201d at a recent panel on autonomous vehicles hosted by New York Law School. (Whether they\u2019re great, Schwartz said, will depend on whether they can be integrated to fill transit gaps and not just serve the wealthy.)<\/p>\n Evangelists usually cite safety first. There is a lack of independent studies, but data published by Waymo<\/a> suggests their driverless vehicles will get in far fewer serious crashes than human drivers. \u201cAt Waymo\u2019s current scale, the data suggests our technology is preventing approximately one serious-injury crash every 8 days,\u201d Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement.<\/p>\n Waymo has partnered with advocacy groups including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the American Council of the Blind to promote the tech\u2019s benefits. It won\u2019t drive impaired, and it won\u2019t decline to pick someone up<\/a> if they have a service animal, for example. \u201cBeing able to show people the technology is really wonderful, and to put their hope in the fact that together, we can end impaired driving,\u201d said Paige Carbone, regional executive director for MADD\u2019s New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania office. (Carbone said Waymo has provided financial support to MADD as part of their partnership.)<\/p>\n And then there is a healthy amount of shiny object attraction. Riding in a Waymo is fun, even thrilling. Assembly Member Brian Cunningham, who sponsors legislation that would allow autonomous vehicles to operate in New York with certain safety conditions, has twice tested the company\u2019s cars in Atlanta.<\/p>\n Cunningham said those trips were on his own dime, though Waymo has invited him \u2013\u00a0and at least 11 other state lawmakers \u2013 to try out their vehicles in other cities, according to lobbying records. Cunningham said he plans to bring fellow lawmakers along on a trip to test Waymos in Phoenix soon. \u201cI want to be the chief cheerleader,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to be first,\u201d he added of the state adopting the new technology. \u201cBut we have to be best.\u201d<\/p>\n If you want a sense of how Waymo presents its own inevitability, look no further than a map on its website<\/a> showing cities where they currently operate, and the cities that are \u201cup next.\u201d \u201cNew York, NY\u201d is listed alongside 18 other cities across the country as well as London and Tokyo. Autonomous vehicles are not an issue most New York lawmakers are volunteering opinions on yet. But they\u2019re getting an earful on it. Waymo has spent<\/a> at least $2.5 million lobbying New York City and state officials since 2019 and has hired multiple top firms, including Brown & Weinraub, Bolton-St. Johns and Kasirer.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to continue to partner with (Hochul) because we think this is a really important technology for New Yorkers to have access to,\u201d Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told The New York Times<\/a> recently. \u201cIt will be odd if we are in a lot of major cities around the world and New York is excluded from them.\u201d<\/p>\n Labor versus the machine<\/p>\n The Transport Workers Union has fought automation for decades. To the union, robotaxis represent a slippery slope.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 1960s version of Abundance bros was saying, \u2018It\u2019s inevitable that there will be fully automated operation of the New York City subway,\u2019\u201d TWU International President John Samuelsen said. \u201cForward flash 60 freaking years, and there\u2019s still a two-person train crew on the subway cars in New York City. That\u2019s because of the union.\u201d<\/p>\n Like it or not \u2013\u00a0and some don\u2019t<\/a> \u2013\u00a0it\u2019s that kind of hard-headed attitude that could form the strongest opposition to autonomous vehicles in New York. Organizations like the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, representing yellow cab and ride-hailing drivers, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is fighting<\/a> autonomous vehicles in other states, are other major opponents.<\/p>\n Some opponents are on their guard 15 years after Uber first bounded into<\/a> New York City, followed by competitors like Lyft and Via. App-based for-hire vehicle rides outnumbered rides in the city\u2019s iconic yellow cabs in around five years, during a period in which their licenses weren\u2019t capped. The city\u2019s slowness to regulate the new technology \u2013\u00a0on top of an underlying taxi medallion debt<\/a> crisis \u2013\u00a0was often blamed for cab drivers\u2019 financial ruin. In the late 2010s, several drivers died by suicide.<\/p>\n \u201cWaymo is underestimating us. We are organized, and we have battle scars to remind us of lessons,\u201d said New York Taxi Workers Alliance Executive Director Bhairavi Desai, referencing the fights for taxi medallion debt relief, and a slew of labor protections for the new workforce of app-based drivers.<\/p>\n Legislation sponsored by state Sen. Luis Sep\u00falveda and Assembly Member Karines Reyes would effectively ban driverless vehicles<\/a>, requiring a human driver to always be present. Sep\u00falveda\u2019s concerns lie with the immigrant taxi and ride-hailing drivers in his Bronx district, whose incomes would be devastated by robotaxis.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can reach a happy medium where we can slowly take the technology in while we protect jobs, then I\u2019ll be the first one to support that,\u201d Sep\u00falveda said. But like many people interviewed for this story who said they are open to \u2013 or even counting on \u2013\u00a0solutions for worker displacement, he hasn\u2019t heard many promising ideas for exactly what that would look like.<\/p>\n There have been some suggestions that autonomous vehicle companies could license existing taxi medallions from their current owners \u2013\u00a0a bill sponsored by<\/a> Assembly Member Micah Lasher would require AVs to be licensed by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission as taxicabs \u2013\u00a0but app-based drivers have raised concerns about being left out of that kind of deal.<\/p>\n Waymo has stressed that its rollout in other cities has been gradual \u2013\u00a0their total fleet size across the country is 3,000 vehicles. By comparison, the TLC licenses more than 130,000 vehicles in New York City alone.<\/p>\n \u201cLike with any new technology, there will be changes, but these changes will take shape very slowly over time,\u201d Teicher, the Waymo spokesperson, said in a statement, adding that the technology would open up jobs as vehicle testers as well as other positions operating and maintaining the cars, depots and charging infrastructure. Waymo is also working with Bronx Community College to develop a training curriculum.<\/p>\n There are also major unanswered questions about what New York City wants its own streets to look like in the future. \u201cWe just got congestion pricing going. We are moving in the direction of fewer cars on our streets,\u201d said Sara Lind, co-executive director of the open streets advocacy group Open Plans, which advocates for car-free street uses like curbside dining and pedestrian space. \u201cRobotaxis, for all the fancy technology, are just cars.\u201d<\/p>\n Lind also cautioned that any regulation in New York should also include a demand for more safety data from autonomous vehicle companies and robust privacy protections for data collected inside and outside of the vehicle.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Tumlin, the former director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said he loves riding in a Waymo. But he\u2019s eager to share lessons from the West Coast after becoming intimately familiar with the challenges \u2013\u00a0including headline-grabbing fiascos like a power outage<\/a> that stalled Waymo vehicles across San Francisco in December, a vehicle driving through<\/a> a police stop or even a car that hit a child.<\/a> \u201cAVs, to the extent that your city looks like a computer simulation of a city, are fantastic,\u201d he said. But New York City \u2013\u00a0from its congestion to its weather \u2013 is exceptional, the San Franciscan acknowledged.<\/p>\n The taxi test<\/p>\n Assuming the state renews its program authorizing local testing, which it\u2019s likely to do in the budget, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a noted ally of taxi workers<\/a>, will need to decide whether to renew Waymo\u2019s testing permit in New York City.<\/p>\n \u201cIf a company like Waymo finds itself in New York City, what they will also find is a city government that is committed to delivering for the workers who keep the city running, and those workers also include our taxi drivers, who for far too long, have been sold a dream of being able to work their way to the middle class only to have the rug pulled out from under them,\u201d Mamdani told City & State at an unrelated press conference last week.<\/p>\n The decision conjures two competing visions for the future of New York City. The techno-optimists see a city free from traffic collisions, where almost anyone can get a ride at any time, pedestrians aren\u2019t killed or injured by reckless drivers, and no person is spending hours circling the block to find parking. Doomers see a city where a whole sector of the economy is devastated by automation, where streets are congested with vehicles that could be hobbled by a power outage, a bad software update, or worse, weaponized in a cyberattack.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you direct the entire industry towards the best parts of the technology,\u201d Tumlin asked, \u201cand avoid the inevitable enshittification<\/a> that will occur when these companies need to start actually being profitable?\u201d<\/p>\n