The push for driverless DC
A taste of Waymo’s lobbying efforts in the US capital
Earlier this week, I hopped on the metro and crossed town for my first visit to Station DC, a venue that brings startups together with government, investors, and even the military. A warehouse-like space that manages to be roomy but not cavernous, it’s the kind of place that has copies of Arena magazine strew across the coffee tables.
I was there to hear the case for autonomous vehicles in Washington DC, at an event hosted by Greg Rogers, a former Waymo policy campaigns lead and now the founder of a new pro-tech group called the Innovation Majority. Given the excitement around the upcoming rollout of this technology in London, I thought it would be interesting to see how things are going in another capital.
Slowly, it turns out.
The debate over whether to allow AVs has been going on for more than a decade. “Washington DC was one of the first locations in America to think about setting policies for autonomous vehicles, around the same time as California and Nevada, back in 2012,” Rogers explained in his introduction. “And yet today, DC does not yet have a framework to allow us to operate.”
I am by no means an expert on DC City Politics. For that, I will defer to this very thorough read by Andy Masley.
But to sum things up, much of the wait is down to a District Department of Transportation (DDOT) report, commissioned in 2020 and due by 2021, which is still not published. Rogers compared this delay to if Thomas Edison had invented the lightbulb, only for it to spend five years unused while consultants compiled a lengthy report about electricity.
Throw in political disagreement over the issue, including between the two most likely candidates to be the city’s next mayor, and it’s a tricky situation.
This particular panel was by no means a debate. Everyone agreed that AVs – Waymo’s offering in particular – would bring benefits to the city and should be allowed to operate.
Former DC mayor Anthony A. Williams, who is now CEO of economic development nonprofit Federal City Council, was among the speakers. Alongside him was Reverend Thomas L. Bowen, general secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Waymo’s own Tiffany Moore completed the set. She just joined the Alphabet-owned business earlier this year as head of federal policy and government affairs, having previously worked at the Consumer Technology Association.
The political stakes in DC are distinct from those in the UK. Like a company town hit by a factory closure, it was affected deeply by DOGE job cuts. Mayor Williams spoke of the need to rebuild the city’s economy, looking towards the AV providers as potential sources of new jobs. Much of the conversation also focused on transport inequality, in terms of how people without access to their own car might be losing out on job opportunities. There are even “ride-sharing deserts”, districts where it’s harder to get an Uber or equivalent, which Moore said would be addressed by AVs.
Discrimination also comes into play: both Mayor Williams and Reverend Bowen recalled instances of being unable to get taxis because of racial bias. Driverless cars, they implied, can display no such intolerance. “That cannot be overlooked,” Reverend Bowen said. “It’s about dignity, where people are viewed as the same.”
Where the issues most closely overlap with what we might expect to see in the UK is the question of jobs. For this, Moore offered two reassurances.
First, the maintenance of fleets of AVs will create plenty of new employment. “There’s an entire human infrastructure around that driverless vehicle, and those are local jobs.” This could translate into tens of millions of dollars of investment in the area across multiple depots, she said.
At the same time, she argued that this new transport option won’t change the landscape dramatically. Waymo’s entire US fleet numbers about 3,000 cars, which she said was similar to the number of ride-hailing vehicles out and about at typical peak time in DC alone. “We’re only talking about a sliver. It’s a compliment to the existing transportation ecosystem, not to replace it.”
Moore was very diplomatic about the delays. “We’re waiting for our partners,” was all she said on the matter. But it must be frustrating. Indeed, the event itself was part of a growing effort to build support for AVs as the wait for their deployment in DC drags on. In February, Wired reported that Waymo was encouraging members of the public to pressure city officials on the issue. Axios also noted that the company is spending big on retainers to beef up its lobbying in the city. Meanwhile Thomas Hochman, a staffer a pro-technology think tank FAI, recently vibecoded a somewhat morbid death dashboard to keep track of traffic deaths that could supposedly have been avoided by the introduction of driverless vehicles.
London looks like it has more momentum. When Moore noted that DC has the opportunity to be the first capital city in the world to deploy AVs, I reflexively – smugly – thought: London’s going to get there first.
But UK advocates of the technology would be ill-advised to rest on their laurels. Just last week, transport commissioner Andy Lord said Transport for London (TfL) could block robotaxi services if they don’t meet the authority’s private hire standards – adding that none of them currently do.
The conversation in DC is very different for obvious reasons to do with the cultural and political landscape. But listening in on this conversation suggested a possible future for London: one in which barrier after bureaucratic barrier slows progress.
This becomes especially challenging if the public has no stake in the tech. A new survey from the Institute for Driverless Transport this week found that a third of the British public say they see no benefits to autonomous vehicles. As I wrote last month, opinions on this kind of tech often improve primarily by exposure to it. So until AVs hit the road properly in both London and DC, their promoters face one of policy’s most difficult challenges: fear of the unknown.
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