As travelers across the country prepare to fly home for the holidays, they’ll have a brand new transportation option when they land in Phoenix: a fully autonomous Waymo ride, with no one behind the wheel.
Starting today, Waymo is opening our ride-hailing service between Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and Downtown Phoenix to members of the public. The service is available at the 44th Street and Washington PHX Sky Train® Station and is the only autonomous airport service of its kind in the world, available round the clock with no human driver.
We’re also greatly expanding the size of the service areas where members of the general public can catch fully autonomous rides in San Francisco and Phoenix – just weeks after we first opened these services. Waymo remains the first and only company to offer fully autonomous trips to members of the public 24/7 and in multiple metro areas simultaneously.
“Our progress in two of the most popular ride-hailing cities in the country is accelerating,” said Saswat Panigrahi, Chief Product Officer at Waymo. “As we add more neighborhoods and vehicles to our service in San Francisco and Phoenix, we’re excited to bring the safety and mobility benefits of round-the-clock autonomy to more people in more places.”
Waymo is able to drive fully autonomously – with nobody behind the wheel – across all of San Francisco, 24/7. Per our approach, Waymo One continues to expand by carrying select members of the public, while employees and their guests continue pilot operations.
Earlier this month, we began inviting members of the general public to experience fully autonomous rides in San Francisco for the first time. The public service area covers a large portion of the city, including every neighborhood along the 17-mile Crosstown Trail. Members of the public have taken tens of thousands of trips since we began inviting San Franciscans to ride with Waymo in August 2021, and tens of thousands more have signed up for our waitlist.
We’re also more than doubling our rider-only service area in Downtown Phoenix, connecting our first-of-its-kind airport service to all of the downtown area. This vast expansion of our service offers safe and convenient mobility options to Phoenicians and visitors alike.
“Phoenix is leading the future of mobility and modernizing how the world will experience travel,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. “The exciting technology offers our customers an additional option for traveling to the airport in a clean, sustainable and technologically advanced mode of transportation. The future has arrived in Phoenix!”
Before deployment, we rigorously assess our Driver’s readiness for rider-only operations as part of our safety framework. One important method we use is Collision Avoidance Testing, and earlier this week, we shared more information on how we use it to evaluate the Waymo Driver’s ability to avoid crashes compared to humans.
The service expansions in San Francisco, Phoenix and to Phoenix Sky Harbor will offer our riders many more opportunities to use our fully autonomous service in the ways that are meaningful to their daily lives. We want to say a huge ‘thank you’ to all of our riders for their critical role in getting us where we are – their feedback has been instrumental to building the service we know will surprise and delight many new riders.
As our Waymo One service continues to grow, we encourage you to download the Waymo One app next time you’re in Phoenix. For those of you in San Francisco, join the waitlist today.