Waymo & Cruise Robotaxis: Permitted by the State, Not the City
California, not San Francisco, licenses robotaxis: the DMV permits driverless testing and deployment, the CPUC permits carrying passengers for money. The city protested, moved to stay and sought a rehearing — and lost each time, the Court of Appeal upholding the permits in January 2025. Cruise lost its permits in October 2023 and GM shut it down; Waymo runs on.
Live
📅 since 2022
🤖 Uses AI
✔ Editor-reviewed
📊 Impact
San Francisco's protest, stay motion and rehearing request against the 2023 permits all failed, and the Court of Appeal upheld the CPUC on 14 January 2025. City firefighters filed at least 31 reports of robotaxis obstructing emergency operations between April 2025 and July 2026 (SF Standard).
🎓 Lesson
Hosting a system is not governing it. San Francisco collected the incident data, filed at every stage and was overruled at every stage, because the permits were never the city's to issue.
Evidence📰 Media
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ CPUC — Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Programs (authority)Primary. Defines the four permit tiers (drivered/driverless pilot, drivered/driverless deployment) and states the CPUC permit is separate from and additional to the DMV's deployment permit. Waymo driverless pilot 18 Nov 2022; both deployment permits 10 Aug 2023.
↗ CPUC — Approves permits for Cruise and Waymo to charge fares in San Francisco (10 Aug 2023)Primary, and the source for keeping the two companies apart: before the 3-1 vote Cruise's fared driverless service was limited to parts of the city between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., while Waymo needed a safety driver for any fared ride. The vote let both charge fares at any hour.
↗ CPUC — First driverless AV passenger service deployment permit (2 June 2022)Cruise's original paid driverless permit: 30 vehicles, select streets, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., 30 mph maximum, no shared rides. This, not the 2023 vote, is when paid driverless rides began in San Francisco.
↗ California DMV — Statement on Cruise LLC suspension (24 Oct 2023)Primary suspension order. Suspends the deployment permit and the driverless testing permit; testing with a safety driver was not suspended. Cites 13 CCR 228.20(b)(6), 228.20(b)(3) (manufacturer misrepresented safety information), 227.42(b)(5) and 227.42(c). No set duration.
↗ U.S. Attorney, Northern District of California — Cruise admits submitting a false report (15 Nov 2024)Establishes the distinction the coverage usually loses: the penalties were for the reporting failure, not the collision. Deferred prosecution, 500,000 dollar criminal fine, alongside NHTSA's 1.5m consent order (30 Sept 2024) and the CPUC's 112,500 dollars (June 2024). Automated fetch blocked (401); existence and content cross-checked against TechCrunch and CBS News.
↗ California Court of Appeal — City and County of S.F. v. Public Utilities Com., A169262 (14 Jan 2025)Published First District opinion resolving the jurisdictional question. The court found no basis to conclude the Commission acted outside its authority or abused its discretion in issuing Waymo's phase I driverless deployment permit. San Francisco lost.
↗ San Francisco County Transportation Authority — Autonomous Vehicle Technology (city)The city's own account of its position: 'While San Francisco does not have a permitting role for AV Passenger Services.' Lists its CPUC filings — the August 2023 motion to stay, the September 2023 rehearing motion, joint SFMTA/SFCTA comments on AV data standards — and the safety metrics it wants collected. The city testified it had logged almost 600 incidents with driverless vehicles between June 2022 and June 2023; the carrying filings are scanned-image PDFs that would not yield text to this desk, so that figure is attributed as city testimony rather than used as an impact number.
↗ Waymo — Safety Impact (operator)Operator-reported scale: 67.078 million rider-only miles in San Francisco through March 2026. Its crash-reduction studies are peer-reviewed in Traffic Injury Prevention but authored by Waymo employees against a Waymo-constructed human baseline, so they are cited here as operator evidence, not independent evaluation, and no safety-superiority claim enters this entry.
↗ The San Francisco Standard — Waymo keeps blocking SF firefighters (10 July 2026)Counterweight and currency. At least 31 internal SFFD reports of robotaxis obstructing emergency operations since April 2025. Carries Waymo's response that its cars interact with 50,000 emergency vehicles weekly in California without issue.
↗ The San Francisco Standard — Sen. Dave Cortese on SB 1246 (22 July 2026)Confirms the authority gap persists in 2026: 'There's no municipal or county ability legally to regulate robotaxis at all.' His earlier SB 915, which would have required local authorization, died in the Assembly Transportation Committee. SB 1246 proposes state fines of 5,000 to 10,000 dollars for stalled vehicles blocking responders.
↗ CNBC — Waymo resumes San Francisco service after blackout (21 Dec 2025)Counterweight. A substation fire darkened traffic signals across the city; Waymos stalled in intersections and live lanes, service was suspended Saturday evening and resumed Sunday, followed by a fleet-wide software update.
↗ Axios — GM stops funding Cruise (10 Dec 2024)Cruise's end as a robotaxi operator: GM ended funding and folded the unit into its engineering organisation, abandoning robotaxis; roughly half of Cruise staff were cut in February 2025.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Waymo & Cruise Robotaxis: Permitted by the State, Not the City” — San Francisco, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sf-robotaxis/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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