Waymo Is 10x Safer. DC Candidate Says No.

Ninety-two percent fewer pedestrian injuries. Eighty-two percent fewer cyclist crashes. Up to ninety percent fewer serious crashes overall. That’s Waymo’s published safety record across 56.7 million autonomous miles. And a DC mayoral candidate looked at those numbers and said, “I don’t think our city is ready.”

Fifty-two people died on DC streets in 2024. Across the wider DC region, 110 pedestrians and bicyclists were killed that year, more than 30% of all traffic fatalities. DC pedestrians are twice as likely to die as a decade ago. Ready for what, exactly?

Dean Ball, a tech policy writer with nearly 25,000 followers, lives in DC’s Ward 4. His own council member, Janeese Lewis George, is running for mayor. She told the Dream City Podcast the city isn’t ready for Waymo. Her opponent, Kenyan McDuffie, introduced legislation last July to bring self-driving vehicles to DC.

Ball is right. This isn’t a local DC spat. It’s the same fight we already won in San Francisco, replaying 2,800 miles east.

The Evidence

Waymo has completed nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles and over 20 million trips. It serves more than 400,000 rides per week across six US metro areas. Across serious crash categories, the peer-reviewed data shows riders face roughly one-tenth the risk of a human-driven vehicle.

The Santa Monica incident critics love to cite proves the opposite of what they think. In January, a 5-year-old ran from behind a double-parked SUV near Grant Elementary School. The Waymo braked from 17 mph to 6 mph before contact. The child stood up and walked to the sidewalk. Waymo’s modeling shows a human driver would have struck that child at approximately 14 mph. That’s the difference between a scrape and a shattered bone.

The Teamsters demanded the program be shut down after that incident. The incident that proves the technology is safer than us.

Human drivers kill over 39,000 Americans per year. Drunk driving alone kills 13,000, roughly 36 people every single day. Waymo doesn’t drink, doesn’t text, doesn’t blow through crosswalks. And it serves elderly and disabled riders who can’t drive at all, people whose mobility depends entirely on someone else’s availability or sobriety. Blocking this technology isn’t caution. It’s negligence and dereliction of duty to pedestrians and the citizens of any given city.

Same Playbook, Every City

The playbook is the same in every city: say “protecting safety” when you mean “protecting unions,” delay the study, run out the clock, and people keep dying.

In San Diego, the MTS passed a 12-1 anti-Waymo resolution under union pressure. The lone dissent came from Coronado Councilmember Mark Fleming, who called the motion “looking backward rather than forward.” In Boston, a union-backed ordinance would require human drivers inside driverless cars.

Now look at DC. Lewis George is endorsed by five labor unions representing over 53,000 members, including ATU Local 689, the transit workers’ union. She opposes the technology that would make human rideshare drivers, the transit workers’ biggest competitors for riders, obsolete. Every city where Waymo faces political opposition has the same two ingredients: a union and a politician who needs their endorsement.

The contradiction that gives it all away: on the same podcast, Lewis George said she supports deploying AI to optimize traffic flow and make government more efficient, citing Boston’s use of the technology. Self-driving cars ARE traffic optimization. They ARE the AI safety technology. Supporting one and opposing the other reveals the objection isn’t technical. It’s political.

We Already Won This in San Francisco

We fought this exact fight. I made a video documenting how SF officials were lying about self-driving car statistics.

SF’s MTA head Jeffrey Tumlin claimed Cruise’s accident rate was 6.3x the national average. Of four reported incidents, three were the autonomous vehicle being rear-ended by human drivers. The fourth involved no vehicle collision at all. The California Public Utilities Commission called his analysis out for having an “unacceptably high degree of statistical error and uncertainty.” Tumlin resigned. Peskin and Preston lost their elections. Nature heals when voters pay attention.

Voters flipped hard: 67% of San Franciscans now support autonomous vehicles, a 45-point swing in net favorability. Over 300,000 people signed up to ride, more than a quarter of the city. San Francisco tried harder than any city to kill this technology. It won because residents demanded it.

DC Votes June 14

Axios notes Lewis George’s strategy echoes NYC’s democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani. Her opponent, Kenyan McDuffie, introduced AV legislation last July. That bill has stalled waiting for a DDOT safety report that was due last fall and has been pushed to summer 2026, officially due to congressional budget cuts. The delay is itself a weapon. If you never keep delaying the study, you never have to say yes.

Waymo has been testing in DC for two years with safety drivers. It wants to build a maintenance hub in DC that would employ dozens of workers and bring millions in infrastructure investment. When the company emailed DC residents asking them to contact officials, over 1,500 responded within 90 minutes. Mayor Bowser has the authority to direct DDOT to issue driverless testing permits right now. She hasn’t. No other city where Waymo operates, not Phoenix, not Austin, not Atlanta, not Miami, required a multi-year study process.

DC’s primary is June 14. One candidate introduced legislation to bring Waymo to the city. The other wants to block it while human drivers keep killing people at 10 times the rate. The data across 20 million rides is not ambiguous. The choice shouldn’t be either.