SFO Is Trying to Bury Waymo

SFO is exiling Waymo to the Rental Car Center — a ten-minute AirTrain detour from the terminals — while Uber and Lyft keep exclusive access to the main rideshare Domestic Garage. Although the airport has tried to frame it as a “pilot program,” this is incumbent protection, pure and simple.

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Garry Tan

@garrytan

Legalize self driving cars

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The Road to Autonomy®

@RoadToAutonomy

Why can't @Waymo drop-off curbside and pickup at the @flySFO rideshare garbage? Politics.

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The “New” Policy

Here’s what the restriction actually does. SFO approved Waymo for pickups and drop-offs in January 2026 — but only at the Rental Car Center, Level 1. Not the main rideshare Domestic Garage where every Uber and Lyft picks up. Waymo can drive you to the airport. It just can’t meet you where the other cars do.

That distinction is the whole game. To catch a Waymo at SFO, you don’t walk to the curb. You ride the AirTrain — a ten-minute detour through an elevated rail loop — to a facility designed for picking up rental cars. It’s not a minor routing difference. It’s a deliberate friction point, engineered to make the autonomous option just inconvenient enough that most travelers won’t bother.

And that’s exactly the point. Uber and Lyft run approximately 800,000 trips per month to SFO from that Domestic Garage. Eight hundred thousand trips a month that stay with the incumbents as long as Waymo is stuck on the wrong side of an AirTrain ride. The Rental Car Center restriction doesn’t test anything. It protects a market.

The tell is the framing: SFO calls it a “pilot program.” No defined metrics. No timeline for evaluation. No criteria for graduation to the Domestic Garage. That’s not a pilot. It’s a bureaucratic stall — the kind of indefinite provisional status that lets officials say yes on paper while ensuring nothing changes on the ground.

The Scale is Weighted in Favor of Incumbents

An industry analyst at RoadToAutonomy said it plainly in a recent video: “Waymo technically can do it. There’s nothing stopping them but pure politics and policy that is trying to protect an incumbent. That’s all this is.”

Then he drew the parallel the taxicab industry: “If you go back to the early days of rideshare with Uber and Lyft… the taxicab unions had a meltdown to try and stop it. This is just a classic case of history repeating itself. First it was human driven. Now it’s autonomously driven. It’s purely politics.”

Today, Peter Finn and Victor Mineros, Co-Chairs of Teamsters California, are demanding the California Public Utilities Commission suspend Waymo’s operating license indefinitely.

The same playbook ran in San Diego this January. The Metropolitan Transit System passed a 12-1 anti-Waymo resolution under union pressure. The lone dissenting vote came from Coronado Councilmember Mark Fleming, who called it “looking backward rather than forward.” Twelve out of thirteen officials voted against safer, cheaper transportation for their constituents. That’s the outcome when union endorsements are the variable being optimized.

The “protecting workers” frame sounds principled. Ask which workers. The 800,000 people catching rides to SFO every month are disproportionately workers without cars, people whose mobility depends on rideshare availability and pricing. Locking Waymo out of the main garage doesn’t protect them. It forces them to pay more for a worse service so incumbent companies keep their margins.

The Study That Never Comes

DC is the proof of concept for where the SFO approach ends when nobody pushes back. DC’s 2020 law required its Department of Transportation to deliver autonomous vehicle safety recommendations by 2022. Four years later, no report exists. The Washington Post concluded that DC’s DDOT had “pumped the brakes for years in an attempt to sabotage the rollout of autonomous vehicles in the nation’s capital.” A safety study mandated by law, due in 2022, simply never delivered. That’s not rigorous process. It’s a veto in a lab coat.

Meanwhile, Phoenix operates Waymo full-time. Austin, Atlanta, Miami — none required a multi-year study process before permitting driverless testing. The Argument had the framing exactly right: red states get Waymos, blue states get studies.

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Garry Tan

@garrytan

AVs are safer and make a city more vibrant

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GrowSF

@GrowSF

San Francisco ❤️ Waymo! Our recent polling shows 67% of voters support autonomous vehicles, an astounding 45 point shift in net favorability from our poll two years ago. The #1 reason people like Waymo? Safer driving. growsf.org/pulse/growsf-pulse-july-2025-autonomous

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The public already sees through it. 67% of SF voters now support autonomous vehicles, a 45-point swing in net favorability since 2023. Over 300,000 people signed up to ride Waymo in San Francisco — more than a quarter of the city’s population. The officials who tried to block AVs in San Francisco lost their elections. The people are ahead of the politicians.

Archived tweet

San Francisco ❤️ Waymo! Our recent polling shows 67% of voters support autonomous vehicles, an astounding 45 point shift in net favorability from our poll two years ago. The #1 reason people like Waymo? Safer driving. https://t.co/SoLfVK3DpZ

GrowSF @GrowSF October 08, 2025

Open the Garage

No new legislation required. The Airport Commission controls SFO operations and structured the current pilot. The Rental Car Center restriction is an administrative decision. The Commission can reverse it.

The ask is specific: the SFO Airport Commission should give Waymo access to the rideshare Domestic Garage on the same terms as Uber and Lyft. The safety data is there. The public demand is there. The authority exists today.

Email the Airport Commission. Tell them to end the Rental Car Center exile and open the rideshare zone to Waymo — no studies or legislation needed.