Rini Sampath: Welcome back to Capital Commonsense. I’m Rini Sampath. Today we’re talking about driverless cars and whether D.C. should let people use them. Even if you’ve never taken one of these rides, this could affect how you get around or how you earn a living.
I’m joined by Greg Rogers, founder of the Innovation Majority Institute and the Innovation Majority. He’s worked on policy at both Waymo and Nuro. Greg, thanks for joining us. Tell us about yourself in your own words. I want to hear what you’ve done and why this is such a passion of yours.
Greg Rogers: Rini, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve been working in autonomous vehicle policy for over a decade. It started back in 2014, when one of my best friends called me. I was working in D.C. in my first career, in policy, and he asked what I thought about autonomous vehicles. I said, well, I don’t.
But over the course of an hour, we had a long conversation about how autonomous vehicles can improve safety, make our road networks more efficient, improve accessibility for people with disabilities who don’t have great options today, and improve access in underserved communities.
That led me to become a rideshare driver, which is what any good millennial does: you quit your job to pursue a career in… And I started writing about autonomous vehicles. Since then, I’ve worked at transportation think tanks, including the Eno Center for Transportation and Securing America’s Future Energy, and I spent time in the autonomous vehicle industry at Nuro and then Waymo.
I’ve focused on how we integrate autonomous vehicles into cities so that they improve safety, deliver on their promises for accessibility and equity, and help us build the cities we want. And that’s not a city with only AVs. It’s a city with more and more options: walking, biking, taking transit. The idea is to use AVs to improve our lives and give people options that improve their communities and their neighbors’ lives as well.
Rini Sampath: You drove for Uber and Lyft here, and you’ve worked for companies that develop driverless vehicles. You know what it means to depend on driving for an income. I want to start there, because a lot of the pushback in the city has come from unions and from some workers concerned about this technology. How did your experience as a driver shape your thinking?
Greg Rogers: As a former driver, I know what it means to depend on the next ping for your income. I know what it means when Uber takes a cut of your take-home pay. I learned the challenges of driving in the city: paying for your own vehicle, cleaning it, maintaining it.
But I didn’t just learn what it means to be a driver. I also learned what it means to be a passenger. I carried passengers from all walks of life, and I heard their stories. People with disabilities who used a cane were rejected by rideshare drivers and left at the curb. People who relied on service dogs had it especially hard: drivers didn’t want the dogs in the vehicle and would refuse the ride, even though that’s illegal.
Riders coming from, say, Capitol Hill would often call me directly and ask, “Hey, are you coming?” because other drivers kept canceling on them. That broke my heart, because transportation is a lifeline. Often they were trying to get to work when their other options had failed: their car broke down, or Metro was on fire, as it was back then.
Turning to jobs: our first reflex is often to say that more robots means fewer jobs for people. That fear is real, and I understand where it comes from, because technology does transform our jobs. It also creates jobs we can’t see ahead of time. But the picture of a switch flipping overnight and every driver being replaced by an AV is wrong. Go to Phoenix or San Francisco today, the most mature AV markets in the world, and you can still hail an Uber, call a Lyft or even flag down a taxi.
What we’ve seen is that competition has actually helped drivers so far. A recent Gridwise study found that Uber’s and Lyft’s cut per trip declined once autonomous vehicles started operating in a city. In other words, Uber and Lyft started taking less from drivers on every ride. I thought that was fascinating, because it shows real competition between the rideshare companies and the AV companies. Those drivers are seeing faster per-trip pay growth than drivers in non-AV cities.
Rini Sampath: Wow. Okay.
Greg Rogers: So that’s the short-term benefit for drivers. But AVs also create new jobs, jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago. An autonomous vehicle service is inherently local. You need a local workforce to maintain these vehicles. I like to say these aren’t lattes-and-laptops jobs. Many don’t require a four-year degree: autonomous vehicle technicians, warehouse operators, fleet managers.
Turning to D.C.: Waymo has already announced three D.C. facilities, which could lead to hundreds of jobs for maintenance techs, autonomous specialists and fleet support. That alone could roughly match the number of residents who drive full-time, about 200, according to Janeese Lewis George’s estimate in recent reporting.
Rini Sampath: That’s really helpful context, and thank you for some of that surprising information. What you shared about drivers being unwilling to pick up residents, including across the river, shows that there’s a misconception that these aren’t equity and justice issues. They are. Technology, used responsibly, can solve some of our most pressing equity and justice problems, especially for residents with disabilities. So thank you for pointing that out.
Waymo’s history, the safety record and D.C.’s delays
Rini Sampath: Let’s go a little deeper into the history. Waymo started as Google’s self-driving car project, and now in other cities you can open an app and get a ride without a driver. How did Waymo go from an early experiment carrying passengers in Phoenix and San Francisco to where it is now, and what persuaded regulators to let it move ahead?
Greg Rogers: The Google Self-Driving Car Project started in 2009. By 2015, it had conducted its first fully driverless ride on public roads. There was an incredible video from that time of the Google self-driving car driving a blind man named Steve Mahan around Austin. That was one of the things that pushed me into this field: seeing the smile on his face as he realized an independence he’d never had. He’d never been alone in a car in his life.
The next year, 2016, the project spun out of Google as Waymo, and it spent the next few years ramping up an early rider program in the Phoenix suburbs. In October 2020, Waymo opened its first fully driverless service to the public in Phoenix. Then in 2023, I believe it was October 2023, California regulators approved Waymo for 24/7 driverless service.
Today, Waymo operates paid, fully driverless passenger service in 15 major metro areas in the U.S. And I’m talking about Waymo here, but there are a lot of autonomous vehicle companies in the U.S. The last time I checked, 27 operators were active, testing and even giving passenger rides in many different cities.
As for what persuaded regulators: this has been going on since 2009, so 17 years. It went slowly on purpose. Waymo started with small areas, with safety drivers in the vehicles testing routes before going driverless, and gradually expanded its territory. By the way, Charles Allen’s bill in the D.C. Council follows the same structure, with an initial cap of 200 vehicles and slow growth with DDOT approval.
Regulators saw that the vehicles were operating safely and that Waymo was a responsible operator, as they’ve seen with other operators slowly ramping up in California. That gave them the certainty they needed to expand service across more of the Bay Area, and now Los Angeles, San Diego and cities across the U.S.
One thing I’ve noticed in all my time doing this is that every city worries it’s inherently different. D.C. is unique in a lot of ways, which we can get into later. But a huge advantage for D.C. is that it’s both a city and a state. D.C.’s regulators are closer to what’s happening on their streets than many state regulators are to city streets. I’m enthusiastic that Allen’s bill recognizes that opportunity and gives DDOT, and potentially the Department of For-Hire Vehicles, more enforcement power than regulators have had in places where AVs already operate at scale.
Rini Sampath: Absolutely. Thank you. I want to look at what happened once people started using the product. We hear promises about safer trips, as you described. We also hear about cars getting stuck or causing problems, and that’s where more of the pushback has come from.
Someone tweeted at me that Waymo needs to publish its data in D.C. I had to wrap my head around some of the intricacies: something about Waymo sending data to DDOT, but DDOT not releasing it. I don’t know exactly what happened, so I want to go to an expert like you. What does the evidence show, and how public has Waymo been with its data? Where has it delivered on its promises, and where can it improve? I want to be transparent and open in this conversation.
Greg Rogers: Absolutely. Look, autonomous vehicles aren’t perfect, and no one is. But Waymo discloses more of its data publicly than any other AV company. There’s a standing general order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, the federal regulator of motor vehicles. It requires companies to inform NHTSA whenever there’s a collision and to provide reports that can be posted publicly. A lot gets redacted in those reports.
Waymo went the extra step of publishing incident details on its website, with fewer redactions, so anyone can independently inspect what happened. It also publishes how many crashes happen across the miles it has driven. As of now, Waymo’s data shows that across 271.3 million rider-only miles, it had 95% fewer crashes with serious injuries or worse, 82% fewer injury crashes and, one of the most exciting numbers, 93% fewer pedestrian injury crashes than human drivers covering the same miles in the same cities.
That’s Waymo’s data, but there have also been independent studies. The most recent, published in July, comes from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It’s an insurer-funded group, and insurers take these things very seriously. IIHS is behind the crash test ratings most of you look for when you buy a car.
IIHS studied about 50 million miles Waymo drove with no one behind the wheel over three years, 2021 to 2024. It found 68% fewer crashes per mile, 81% fewer injury crashes and 85% fewer single-vehicle crashes. So overall, we’ve seen a big reduction in crashes with AVs on the road. One of the biggest opportunities is the gain for pedestrians and cyclists: the most vulnerable people on our roads are the ones who stand to benefit most.
I point to the IIHS numbers because insurers bet money on risk for a living, and their numbers line up with Waymo’s. IIHS was analyzing earlier data, and Waymo has driven many more miles since.
Where have Waymo and other AV companies fallen short? This year Waymo issued a recall after a number of incidents in freeway construction zones where its vehicles got confused. It did the responsible thing: it pulled its vehicles off the freeways and kept them off until it had a fix, even though a lot of riders were posting on X and Bluesky asking where their freeway rides went.
I’m a huge believer in the potential for AVs to improve safety and deliver a lot of benefits. But when AV companies fail, they should be held accountable. These were real failures, and they should be taken seriously. Still, look at what happens after an incident like this. AV companies can push an update to every car at once, with federal regulators watching to make sure it happens. When a human driver behaves unsafely, we don’t get to recall that driver and update everyone else’s software.
Rini Sampath: I’d never thought of it that way. That’s a fair point, because a lot of AV proponents in D.C. point to the safety benefits, especially at a time when Vision Zero hasn’t, well, to put it frankly, I think Vision Zero has failed.
Greg Rogers: Absolutely failed.
Rini Sampath: There’s a laundry list of other cities where riders can take these cars, and here in D.C. we’re still debating whether and how to allow them. Our mayor-elect, Janeese Lewis George, tweeted that we need to think about this carefully. You probably saw my view: I think we’ve debated it plenty, and a lot of thought has gone into it, especially into Allen’s very thoughtful bill. So tell listeners: what has held up driverless service in D.C.? Who needs to act, what’s stopping them, and where do we go from here?
Greg Rogers: I’ve heard a lot of people suggest that D.C. is rushing to put AVs on the road, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. D.C. was one of the very first jurisdictions in the U.S., alongside California, Nevada and Florida, to pass an autonomous vehicle law. Back in 2012, the D.C. Council passed one of the nation’s first AV laws, and I believe it was the first city AV law in the U.S. So D.C. has been at this a long time.
In 2018, Mayor Bowser formed an AV working group to help guide how the city would regulate AVs. In 2020, the council passed a bill requiring DDOT to deliver a full report on how AV deployment should be regulated by fall 2022. That deadline passed. Two more years went by, still no report. DDOT finally put out a request for proposals for a consultant to do the study, four years after the law passed. Then in 2025, the congressional budget freeze halted the study.
So D.C. waited a long time on this study, when it could have looked at all the other cities and states successfully operating AV services and learned from them. In May 2026, Charles Allen introduced his bill. He held a hearing in July where we heard from a lot of stakeholders; I believe it ran eight to ten hours. Now the council is expected to mark up the bill later this month.
I have a lot of good things to say about this bill, having read a gazillion AV bills in my time. But the most important thing to remember is that D.C. has had people in DDOT and other parts of government who are paid to think about AVs, and they’ve been doing it for a long time. There have been many hearings on AVs over that time. There is no rushing happening here.
Who needs to act? The council needs to create a framework for AVs to be deployed. And back to your question about transparency on AV data, Rini: a big reason we don’t have as much public data about AVs is that there’s no standard set of regulations, and creating one requires the council’s authority. The deployment bills we’ve seen, from McDuffie last year and from Charles Allen this year, would require DDOT to create a framework for public reporting of AV incidents.
By the way, that’s data we don’t even get about TNC drivers. We don’t even know how many full-time rideshare drivers we have in D.C., because there’s so little transparency on the TNC side. On the AV side, we’re going to have an incredible amount of transparency about how these vehicles operate and about any incidents.
I don’t think this is much of a technical question anymore. We know the technology works; AVs have driven hundreds of millions of miles across America. It comes down to politics. There’s organized labor opposition, and Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George called for a delay and suggested that D.C. is rushing.
The opposition, unions, public trust and what comes next
Rini Sampath: Along those same lines, tell us more about who’s leading the opposition to Waymo in D.C. On the surface, I saw the Teamsters, SEIU, an ATU local, and a couple of drivers who said they’d lose income. Then Ashley Schapitl, who runs Capital Commonsense, put out one number: just a couple hundred full-time drivers would be the ones losing income. I found that interesting.
Then more digging seemed to show that the groups leading this effort are actually tied to the Ubers and Lyfts of the world. Am I getting this right? What does the makeup look like, and what do they want?
Greg Rogers: I don’t want to get ahead of the reporting on this, but I’ve been following it, and there are a lot of open questions about who might be funding these campaigns. The rally on October 6 in front of the Wilson Building was organized by the People First Transportation Alliance, whose membership and backers The Washington Post itself described as murky.
Their website says they oppose legalizing driverless vehicles, and that where AVs are already authorized, they want a human driver behind the wheel. What I find interesting is that, as far as I can tell, the website doesn’t list a single person as a contact or staff member. That’s pretty unusual.
We’ve seen the Teamsters push state bills that require human operators in AVs. We’ve also seen Uber push legislation this year that would require any AVs to be run through a platform like Uber. I can only speculate about the reasons.
In any policy discussion, I want to come in with good faith. I went to that rally as a former driver who wanted to hear what drivers wanted changed in the bill. As I wrote in Capital Commonsense earlier this week, I was disappointed to discover that they didn’t really want anything changed. It was blanket opposition. I feel for the drivers who spoke about struggling, and a big part of why they’re struggling is that Uber takes so much of their fares. I take that seriously.
We haven’t touched on the bill’s workforce fund yet. The bill effectively creates America’s first robot tax: it taxes AV companies to operate on the streets, and as introduced, it gives half the money to workers and half to transit. I think that’s an incredible step. You’d think that’s what labor unions would be asking for in the first place: if you’re going to bring this technology here, at least help support our transition.
Rini Sampath: It’s fascinating. I’m looking at a post from our local SEIU chapter. The original post says the debate over the legislation could be an early test for Lewis George in balancing different interests as mayor, and quotes the union’s leader, Contreras: “Janeese Lewis George understands that people don’t make enough money in the city to be able to make ends meet.”
That was quote-tweeted by, and I have to be transparent here, what looks like a representative at Waymo, Ethan. He wrote: “Mayor Lewis George ran on good jobs for everyone. Waymo will invest in hundreds of high-quality jobs if it can operate in the District, and there are already several dozen D.C. residents doing the work right now. It is not pro-worker to risk those jobs, especially when Charles Allen’s bill creates the nation’s first VMT-based tax on AVs to help potentially affected drivers, of which there are, according to the mayor, only 200 who drive full-time-equivalent hours that actually live in D.C.”
This is the part I found most compelling. Ethan continues: “And this is before we even consider the fact that we are talking about 1099 work that provides no benefits and no access to the social safety net, where people have to spend their own limited resources on gas, maintenance, insurance and other expenses. Why is the SEIU committed to protecting something that it has previously described as exploitative?”
It’s a compelling argument, and it made me scratch my head about the dynamics and what the unions are thinking. I should be clear that I’m not anti-union. During the campaign I visited and spoke with several union members, and some of these unions have made great strides in protecting workers. That’s the history of unions. But I’m scratching my head in this case, because that last argument seems to go against their ethos and values. Any other comments or reactions to what I just read?
Greg Rogers: I grew up in a union family. My dad was a factory worker with a great-paying W-2 job, and that’s what put food on the table when my mom and dad had a kid very young. It was that stable, well-paying job that made it possible, not temporary gig work.
As I said earlier, if autonomous vehicle companies come to this city, they’ll create good-paying jobs as technicians, fleet operators and autonomous vehicle specialists. These are well-paying jobs in the economy of the future for District residents, at a time when we need them most.
What I find really interesting, Rini, is that the bill creates a fund for workers and puts it toward retraining and support in a way we’ve never seen in any previous wave of automation. One recent example I think about: in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as computers and word processors spread, typists were a big part of D.C.’s workforce. D.C. didn’t create a program that charged Microsoft to help those workers transition. It relied on taxpayer-funded programs through the Department of Employment Services, which already existed, and on unemployment insurance.
Those same protections will still be there for any affected driver. DOES also has a program called IgniteDC that prepares residents for careers in transportation and logistics. I’ll note that Lewis George sits on the council committee that oversees that program, so she should probably be aware of it.
So the bill, as Allen has written it, adds another layer of worker support on top of a program we’d hope is already in good shape. I’d hope unions would see this as a huge opportunity for D.C. to lead the nation in supporting workers through a transition to new technology, in an era of increasing automation.
Rini Sampath: Definitely. Thank you. I’ve got two more questions to wrap things up. The first is about earning public trust, and how these driverless cars became familiar to consumers in other cities. It’s going to take some level of trust to get people to use this service. What helped people get comfortable with Waymo in other cities, and what would it take to earn that trust here?
I feel optimistic. I’m hopeful. I think Charles Allen has written a very reasonable bill, and he has relationships across a very progressive coalition in the city, which benefits those of us who want to see this happen. But what is it going to take to earn people’s trust?
Greg Rogers: The biggest thing that affects acceptance is taking a ride. Here’s what happens the first time: people get in white-knuckled, not sure what’s going to happen, because no one is in the driver’s seat. Then within a minute or two (this happens every time I take someone on a first ride) they’re looking at their phone, checking their calendar, texting, sending videos of the ride.
Comfort develops very quickly once you see the car following the speed limit, driving safely, yielding to other drivers and obeying traffic laws, which is harder and harder to see these days. National surveys, like AAA’s, show that most people are wary of self-driving cars, but in cities where people can actually ride them, they become normal. Fear is highest where people have never seen an AV.
We’ve also seen that cyclists in California and Arizona, who are often wary of drivers to begin with, tend to prefer AVs to human drivers, because AVs follow cautiously behind them and give them three feet of space when passing.
I’m a cyclist. I spent a lot of my years in D.C. biking around; I proposed to my wife by zip-tying the ring to her bike. The thing I worry about most is people blowing through stop signs and red lights, speeding and passing too close. That’s become more and more of an issue in D.C.
Look at the rise in deaths and serious injuries for people on scooters and bikes. It’s because drivers aren’t respecting them, and enforcement only goes so far. As you said, Vision Zero has been a failure. Traffic deaths have effectively doubled in the decade since we launched it. Concrete and cameras can only go so far, because one of the biggest problems is driver behavior.
So exposure, whether riding in an AV or just sharing the street with one, can increase comfort quickly. In San Francisco, even people who were skeptical at first said, at least it stops for me at the crosswalk. That was the start of building trust, to the point where people now take for granted that AVs will be more respectful toward them as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
Rini Sampath: Before we wrap up, I want to leave listeners with something specific to watch as this debate moves forward. Some of us are eagerly waiting to see how it pans out. What should we keep our eyes on and listen for, and what should D.C. do next?
Greg Rogers: The most important thing is for the council to pass legislation that authorizes DDOT to move from a testing regime to a deployment regime, allowing driverless vehicles to serve passengers in the District. That requires the council to act.
The thing to remember is that we’ve already had years upon years of delay. It takes time to set up the permitting processes and the regulatory dashboards that will be needed, and to get all of this in place. There has been no rushing, and I think you’d agree there’s very little rushing in D.C. government in general.
Charles Allen’s bill creates a clear set of requirements for AV companies to operate responsibly and scale up gradually in the city, and it creates the safeguards DDOT and DFHV need to oversee AVs operating here. When the bill is marked up later this month, I hope council members consider that Allen brought together stakeholders from across the board and gave deep consideration to concerns from the safety community, labor, transit advocates and cyclists.
He has crafted a bill that does more to make sure AVs deliver on their promises than any other AV bill I’ve seen in the past 10 years. My hope is that D.C. Council members rally around this bill and work with DDOT and DFHV to bring this option to D.C. residents.
Rini Sampath: Greg, thank you so much. I really want to see our city move forward with driverless cars. We’ve been debating this for years. Council Member Charles Allen has spent months working on the legislation, as you mentioned. Janeese Lewis George, our likely next mayor, has called for a delay. I disagree. I believe the bill has the worker protections, it needs to move forward, and residents deserve the chance to use this technology.
