While recent research suggests autonomous robotaxis may be safer than the average human driver, a new study suggests these driverless vehicles could spike congestion in New York City while bringing only “limited safety benefits.”
That’s because in a city like New York, robotaxis would actually be replacing yellow cab, Uber, and Lyft drivers. These professional for-hire drivers are already about 14 times safer than the city’s average driver, according to a July 20 report from the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College, published with advocacy group Open Plans.
While the autonomous vehicle company Waymo has recently boasted a lower crash rate than human drivers, citing a new analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, researchers suggest New York City needs its own data before autonomous vehicles arrive at scale.
“There’s a mantra going around that autonomous vehicles are more than 90% safer than human driven cars,” said Sam Schwartz, transportation engineer, former NYC traffic commissioner, and founder of the program that bears his name, in a press release. “There is no solid evidence as of yet, to make such a claim compared to the for-hire vehicles already serving this city. We find that NYC taxi and Uber/Lyft drivers may in fact be safer per mile.”
The study found Waymo’s national rate of crashes causing serious injury or death was about 1.5 times higher per mile than New York City’s for-hire fleet, and more than three times higher in the Bay Area specifically.
The authors caution that Waymo’s limited mileage and gaps in available data make it hard to say definitively that robotaxis are more or less safe than professional drivers. But they argued the numbers “warrant significant caution and further scrutiny” rather than validating the safety case robotaxi companies are making.
On congestion, the study calculates a “vehicle miles traveled multiplier,” or total miles driven per mile actually carrying a passenger. Waymo’s is 1.71 in California, compared with 1.49 for New York’s existing high-volume for-hire fleet. That’s a roughly 15% efficiency gap driven by “deadheading,” or empty miles spent waiting for or driving to the next fare.
And this gap could widen further in New York.
In California, Waymos can park during about 58% of that idle time. But the study says that’s unrealistic in a city with New York’s curb-space scarcity. Modeled at just 25% park time instead of 58%, the report estimates roughly 62,000 additional vehicle miles traveled per day.
Waymo pushed back in response to the study. A company spokesperson said that while Waymo can’t say with certainty what its safety record would look like in New York specifically, the data so far makes the company “hopeful” its technology can “help make New York City’s roads safer.”
Is Waymo safer than the average human driver?
Waymo, which is also battling reports of its cars dying in the middle of roads and racking up thousands in fines for illegal parking, has touted a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showing a lower crash rate than human drivers.
The nonprofit insurance research group found Waymo vehicles had a 68% lower crash rate per vehicle mile traveled than human drivers overall, across the four cities where Waymo has operated long enough to study: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety researchers added a caveat to their findings, noting that companies are required to report self-driving car crashes to federal and California regulators. But they don’t have to report the number of miles their cars log or how much of that driving happens in autonomous mode — making it hard to know how common self-driving car crashes actually are. Waymo is the only company that publishes its mileage data, which is why it was the only one studied.
After stripping out duplicate reports and crashes that likely wouldn’t have been reported if a human were driving, researchers found only 22% of the 736 autonomous-vehicle crashes they reviewed were likely “police-reportable” — a small dataset for sweeping safety claims.
“Those are encouraging signs for the future of driverless vehicles,” Eric Teoh, the study’s lead author, said in a press release. He added that data collection needs to improve “so that we can ensure that level of safety continues as these technologies become more prevalent.”
Two crashes this week — one of which left a woman critically injured in Los Angeles, and another which sent a Waymo vehicle up in flames in Atlanta — may seem to discredit Waymo’s safety claims. But the circumstances are more tangled than “Waymo crash” headlines suggest.
In Los Angeles’ Pico-Union neighborhood on July 26, a Waymo was struck by a sedan that had first hit a pedestrian pushing a cart outside a crosswalk, then swerved into oncoming traffic and into the Waymo, according to police and a Waymo spokesperson. A woman was critically injured, but local outlets have not attributed fault to the Waymo’s driving system.
In Atlanta that same night, a Jeep rear-ended a Waymo that was stopped waiting to turn left on Cheshire Bridge Road. The Jeep itself caught fire, which then spread to the Waymo, per Waymo and Atlanta Fire Rescue. No one was riding in the Waymo. Two people in the Jeep were evaluated for injuries, including burns, but declined transport to a hospital. The fire did prompt questions from witnesses and Atlanta Fire Rescue about how riders could exit a burning Waymo, and about whether Waymo needs updated safety training for battery-related emergencies.
Rolling back the robotaxi fervor?
Even as Waymo and other robotaxi competitors plan to expand services to additional markets, from Houston to Munich, Tesla has struck a notably more cautious tone on its robotaxi ambitions during its July 22 earnings call.
A year earlier, CEO Elon Musk had predicted the robotaxi network would expand at a “hyper-exponential rate” and reach half the U.S. population by the end of 2025. On the call, Musk and other executives fielded pointed questions about a rollout that has fallen well short of that timeline.
Since launching a small pilot with safety monitors in Austin in June 2025, Tesla has expanded to only a handful of Texas and Florida cities, often in outlying, less-trafficked areas. The company listed expansions in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Tampa and Orlando.
Musk framed the slower pace as deliberate, saying, “If we injure even one person, it will be worldwide news and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities.”
Tesla reported 2.5 million paying-customer robotaxi miles to date, including 380,000 without an in-vehicle safety monitor — a fraction of the more than 220 million autonomous miles Waymo had logged through the end of March.
Barclays bank analysts wrote that Tesla “hasn’t met previously laid out targets” and that “more is needed to show that Tesla’s capabilities are inflecting” on robotaxis. The update contributed to a steep Tesla stock selloff the following day.
Reagin von Lehe is a Summer 2026 reporting intern for Next City. As a master’s student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, she has a focus in health and science reporting. She was a Dow Jones News Fund intern while earning her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina. She then reported on energy business and policy for a year before deciding to go back to school. Her work has been published in the NYCity News Service, Carolina News and Reporter, New Project Media, and a former Morning Brew executive venture, Energy Central. She was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina and currently resides in Brooklyn.
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