Unions want to ban driverless taxis—will Democratic leaders say yes?

Robotaxis could become ubiquitous in red states and illegal in blue states.

Waymo hasn’t announced any specific plans to launch a driverless taxi service in Boston. But the Google self-driving company did some preliminary testing and mapping there this summer (with safety drivers behind the wheel) and the Boston City Council wasn’t happy about it. The council grilled Waymo about its plans at a four-hour hearing on July 24.

“My main concern with this technology in Boston and honestly across the country is the loss of jobs and livelihoods of so many people,” said City Councilor Enrique Pepén.

City Councilor Julia Mejia declared her “strong opposition” to driverless vehicles operating in Boston.

“What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans,” Mejia said. “If we’re competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers.”

Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia.

When a Waymo representative mentioned the Waymo Driver—the company’s name for its self-driving software, Mejia objected. “Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot,” she said. Mejia considered it “very triggering” for Waymo to use the term “driver” to describe a technology rather than a person.

Across the country, states and cities have been grappling with how—and whether—to allow autonomous vehicles on their roads. Red states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Florida have rolled out the red carpet for Waymo. But the technology has gotten a frosty reception in blue jurisdictions like Boston.

And this means that the leaders of blue states stand at a crossroads.

In their recent book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson explained how protectionist policies—including overly strict regulations, perpetual litigation, and an unwillingness to say no to special interest groups—have led to housing shortages, high-cost government projects, and other dysfunctional outcomes that harm the quality of life in left-leaning communities.

At last month’s hearing, city council members in Boston talked about driverless taxis in terms that would be familiar to anyone who has read Ezra and Derek’s book.

Boston City Councilor Benjamin Weber.

City Councilor Benjamin Weber found it “concerning to hear that the company was making a detailed map of our city streets without having a community process beforehand.” He added that “it’s important that we listen when we hear from the Teamsters and others who feel as though they’re blindsided by this.”

“I think it’s important that we pause—sometimes we rush—and make sure everyone’s voice is heard before anything happens that we can’t turn back from and that protections are in place for our workers,” said City Councilor Erin Murphy.

The next day, Murphy announced legislation requiring that a “human safety operator is physically present” in all autonomous vehicles—effectively a ban on driverless vehicles. Given the near-unanimous hostility Waymo faced at the hearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murphy’s proposal became law in Boston.

And while Boston seems likely to be the first Democratic-leaning jurisdiction to pass legislation like this, it may not be the last. A number of other Democratic-leaning states are considering proposals to restrict or ban the deployment of driverless vehicles.

If these ideas become law, we could wind up in a future where driverless cars are widely deployed in red states and illegal or heavily restricted in many blue states. Not only would this be inconvenient for blue state passengers and bad for blue state economies, it would be a powerful symbol of how dysfunctional—even reactionary—blue state governance has become.

If this isn’t the future Democrats want, they’re going to have to say no to the Teamsters.

Waymo faces growing opposition from left-wing activists

In blue states, the debate over autonomous vehicles has evolved a lot over the last decade. During the 2010s, autonomous vehicle companies were largely able to fly below the radar. In 2016, Matthew Wansley was general counsel of the self-driving startup NuTonomy, which wanted to test its autonomous vehicle technology in Boston.

“Everything worked well in the mid-2010s,” Wansley told me (he’s now a professor at Cardozo School of Law and writes about autonomous vehicle regulation). “I had a high opinion of both the city and state governments. They were trying to think about the future and understand the technology better.”

NuTonomy’s self-driving fleet was too small to attract much attention from activists.¹ So policymaking in blue states was dominated by liberal technocrats. These policymakers wanted to make sure the technology was safe but they weren’t trying to block the technology from coming to market.

California’s regulatory framework was developed around this time, and it epitomizes this technocratic approach. The state requires a period of testing with safety drivers before cars can operate driverlessly or carry paying customers. California’s rules are stricter than those in red states like Texas or Florida. But they haven’t prevented Waymo from offering robotaxi services in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.

In recent years, however, Waymo has started to face harder-edged opposition from unions and anticar activists. The objections of these groups can’t be addressed by compromise or technocratic rulemaking because they aren’t trying to ensure robotaxis are deployed safely. They’re trying to prevent them from being deployed at all.

For example, in May 2023, as Waymo was getting ready to launch a commercial taxi service in San Francisco, the company asked the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (the equivalent of a city council) to allow a 44-space parking garage on land Waymo already owned.

However, a local CBS affiliate reported that “a retired union member of Teamsters filed an appeal for the proposed permit, alleging that Waymo may later use the plot for automated delivery services.” The Teamster, Mark Gleason, was concerned that a robot delivery service would eventually put human delivery drivers out of work.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously rejected the proposed parking garage, even though Waymo said it would only be used for employee parking and the company had no plans to launch a delivery service in San Francisco.

The vote gave the Supervisors a way to vent their frustration at the fact that state law gave them little to no direct authority over the operation of Waymo’s robotaxis in the state. A few months after the San Francisco supervisors voted down the parking garage, the California Public Utilities Commission allowed Waymo to begin offering commercial robotaxi rides in the city over the objections of city officials.

Pragmatic Democrats have defended driverless technologies

Governor Gavin Newsom deserves a large share of the credit—or blame, depending on your perspective—for Waymo’s growth in the Golden State. Politicians in California face many of the same political pressures as politicians in Massachusetts, and some of them—like the San Francisco supervisors—would restrict driverless vehicles if they could.

But California law gives the state, not cities, authority to regulate autonomous vehicles. And Gavin Newsom’s administration has been consistently supportive of the technology.

Twice—in 2023 and again in 2024—the California legislature passed Teamster-backed bills to require self-driving vehicles over 10,000 pounds—such as semi-trucks—to have a human driver behind the wheel. Newsom vetoed both bills.

Newsom has a kindred spirit in Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who recently vetoed Teamster-backed legislation that would have banned large driverless trucks in Colorado. But Newsom and Polis are each nearing the end of their final term in office. Their successors, due to be elected next year, may be more receptive to the Teamsters’ arguments.

Washington State considered legislation this year that would have required all autonomous vehicles to have a human safety operator. Several union representatives testified in favor of the bill at a February hearing. Kris DeBuck, a Teamster agent who represents workers at UPS, argued that “a human operator should remain in all AVs regardless of the automation level.”

The bill did not make it out of committee in the 2025 session but could come up again next year.

There are also two bills under consideration in Massachusetts, and both would restrict autonomous vehicles. The Teamsters-backed bill, S.2393, is less than a page long and simply requires that all self-driving vehicles have a safety driver—effectively banning driverless technology.

A more industry-friendly bill, H.3634, would set up a regulatory framework to allow robotaxis on Massachusetts roads. However, it requires a safety driver for all vehicles over 10,000 pounds.

On the other hand, legislators in Washington DC and New York State have introduced bills to open the door to driverless vehicles—though it’s not clear if these bills will become law. Legislators in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia could also act on driverless vehicle technology in the next year or two.

The stakes are high

This debate really matters because Waymo is now approaching the steepest part of its growth curve. The company has commercial operations in five cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta—and it is preparing to expand its service to at least a dozen others. So the decisions policymakers make over the next two years will have a big impact on how—and where—self-driving technology develops.

The most obvious reason this debate matters is safety. Waymo estimates that over the first 70 million miles, Waymo’s vehicles got into major crashes—those serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag—about 80 percent less often than comparable human-driven vehicles.

It’s always worth taking a company’s own statistics with a grain of salt. But I’ve consulted multiple traffic safety experts over the last two years and they’ve consistently told me Waymo’s research is credible. A large majority of crashes involving Waymo vehicles have been clearly the result of a human driver in another vehicle. For example, one of the most common crash types involves a human driver rear-ending a Waymo.

So while opponents of autonomous vehicles sometimes claim that banning robotaxis is a pro-safety move, it’s more likely to cost lives than to save them.

It’s also important to remember that self-driving technology is ultimately going to be used for a lot more than just taxis—including long-haul trucking, local deliveries, and personally-owned vehicles. So banning driverless vehicles is going to have economic impacts that reach far beyond the taxi industry.

Imagine it’s 2035 and robotaxis are ubiquitous in cities like Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Commuters in these cities set their cars to autonomous mode and watch a movie (or catch up on email) while their cars drive them to work. Instead of driving to the grocery store, people order groceries with a smartphone app and a robot delivers the items to their front door 20 minutes later—with no delivery fees.

Meanwhile, the roads in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle look about the same in 2035 as they did in 2025. Because these jurisdictions banned driverless technology in the mid-2020s, companies like Waymo and Tesla never got a foothold here.

This means that not only are taxis still manned by human drivers, commuters still have to drive their own cars to work. It’s not possible to offer fast, cheap robot delivery services, so most people still drive to the grocery store. Bans on driverless trucks in these cities mean that everything consumers buy is a little more expensive than it would be otherwise.

In this hypothetical world, there’s a growing safety gap between red and blue states. Red states are enjoying steadily declining crash rates as more vehicles become driverless. But crash rates in blue cities are as high as they’ve ever been.

This would be a bad outcome for left-leaning communities for all kinds of practical reasons. And it would also carry a symbolic punch. After all, progressives like to imagine themselves to be champions of progress—it’s right there in the name. Yet it’s hard to think of a more anti-progress stance than banning a technology with the potential to save thousands of lives, reclaim billions of hours of commuting time, and make every purchase a little cheaper and a lot more convenient.

If blue jurisdictions start restricting autonomous vehicles, it will give Republicans an opportunity to claim the mantle of technological progress for themselves. If that’s not the future Democratic leaders want, they should pay attention to the leadership Gavin Newsom has shown in California over the last six years.

1. NuTonomy was later acquired by Motional, a self-driving project whose majority owner is Hyundai.