A striking contradiction sits at the heart of New York City’s autonomous vehicle future: residents overwhelmingly want robotaxis on their streets, but almost none of them are willing to actually ride in one. That tension — between aspiration and anxiety — may define the next chapter of urban transportation policy in the United States, and it carries implications far beyond the five boroughs.
A recent survey conducted by Phyware, an AI and robotics analytics firm, found that 73% of New York City residents support the introduction of robotaxi services. Yet in the same survey, only 28% said they would personally feel safe riding in a fully autonomous vehicle today. The gap — what Phyware calls the “trust gap” — represents one of the most significant barriers to commercial deployment of self-driving technology in dense urban environments.
The Numbers Behind New York’s Autonomous Ambivalence
The Phyware survey, which polled over 1,500 New York City adults in early 2025, paints a nuanced picture. Support for robotaxis was highest among younger respondents aged 18 to 34, with 81% expressing general approval. But even in that demographic, willingness to ride dropped to 38%. Among respondents over 55, support for the concept remained a healthy 62%, but personal willingness to ride fell to just 14%.
The reasons for hesitation were varied but clustered around a few core themes. Forty-seven percent of respondents cited safety concerns — specifically, fear of software malfunctions or an inability to handle unexpected situations like construction zones, aggressive drivers, or pedestrians jaywalking. Another 31% pointed to a lack of accountability, expressing uncertainty about who would be legally responsible in the event of a crash. And 22% said they simply didn’t trust the technology enough yet, regardless of what safety data might show.
Why New York Is Different From San Francisco
New York’s trust deficit stands in contrast to cities like San Francisco and Phoenix, where Waymo has been operating commercial robotaxi services for over a year. In San Francisco, Waymo vehicles have become a familiar sight, completing over 150,000 paid rides per week as of early 2025 according to company disclosures. The gradual normalization of the technology in those markets has helped reduce — though not eliminate — public skepticism.
But New York presents a categorically different challenge. Manhattan’s street grid is among the most complex driving environments on Earth: narrow lanes choked with double-parked delivery trucks, bike messengers weaving through traffic, pedestrians crossing against signals at virtually every intersection, and road conditions that shift block by block. As Phyware noted in its analysis, “The chaos of New York City streets is not a bug — it’s a feature of the city’s design, and it’s precisely what makes autonomous driving here so much harder than in sunbelt sprawl.”
Regulatory Gridlock Adds Another Layer of Uncertainty
New York State has maintained some of the most restrictive autonomous vehicle testing laws in the country. Under current regulations, any AV testing on public roads requires a specific permit from the state Department of Motor Vehicles, the presence of a safety driver, and coordination with local law enforcement. Commercial deployment of fully driverless vehicles — the kind Waymo operates in San Francisco — remains effectively prohibited in New York City without additional legislative action.
Governor Kathy Hochul has signaled openness to updating the state’s AV framework, but progress has been slow. A bill introduced in the state legislature in late 2024 that would have created a licensing pathway for commercial robotaxi operations stalled in committee amid opposition from the taxi and ride-hail industry, labor unions representing drivers, and some consumer safety advocates. The political dynamics are formidable: New York City’s taxi medallion system, which nearly collapsed during the rise of Uber and Lyft, remains a politically sensitive subject, and elected officials are wary of being seen as enabling another wave of disruption to the for-hire vehicle industry.
The Labor Question Looms Large
Organized labor’s opposition to autonomous vehicles in New York is not abstract. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents roughly 28,000 yellow cab and app-based drivers, has been vocal in its criticism of any move toward driverless ride-hailing. The union argues that robotaxis would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs held disproportionately by immigrants and people of color, and that the economic benefits would flow primarily to Silicon Valley technology companies rather than to New York workers.
This argument carries real political weight in a city where the for-hire vehicle industry employs an estimated 130,000 drivers. Even supporters of autonomous technology acknowledge that the workforce transition question has no easy answer. The Phyware survey found that 58% of respondents who expressed concern about robotaxis cited potential job losses as a factor — a number that was even higher among respondents in lower-income brackets.
Safety Data Hasn’t Closed the Confidence Gap
Proponents of autonomous vehicles point to an increasingly strong safety record. Waymo published data in late 2024 showing that its vehicles were involved in significantly fewer injury-causing crashes per mile than human-driven vehicles in comparable conditions. A study by Swiss Re, the reinsurance giant, found that autonomous vehicles equipped with advanced sensor arrays had a property damage claim rate roughly 50% lower than the human-driven average.
Yet these statistics have done little to move public opinion in New York. The Phyware analysis suggests that this disconnect is partly psychological — people tend to fear risks they cannot control more than risks they can, even when the latter are statistically more dangerous. A New Yorker who routinely rides in yellow cabs driven by fatigued or distracted human drivers may still feel more anxious about a computer-controlled vehicle, because the perceived loss of human agency triggers a deeper kind of unease.
What Would It Take to Build Trust?
Industry observers and researchers have proposed several strategies for closing the trust gap. Transparency is near the top of the list. As Phyware argued, AV companies need to move beyond aggregate safety statistics and provide real-time, granular data about vehicle performance — including near-misses, disengagement events, and how the vehicles handle edge cases specific to New York City conditions.
Graduated deployment is another frequently cited approach. Rather than launching a full commercial service, companies could begin with limited pilot programs in controlled environments — perhaps dedicated lanes or specific neighborhoods — and expand gradually as public familiarity grows. This is essentially the model Waymo followed in Phoenix, where it spent years operating a geofenced service in the suburb of Chandler before expanding to the broader metro area and eventually to San Francisco.
The Role of Infrastructure and City Planning
Some transportation planners argue that the trust gap cannot be closed by technology companies alone — it requires active participation from city government. Dedicated pickup and dropoff zones, improved road markings readable by both humans and machines, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems could all help make autonomous operations safer and more predictable in dense urban settings.
New York City’s Department of Transportation has begun exploring some of these concepts, though concrete plans remain limited. The city’s congestion pricing program, which took effect in early 2025, has already begun reshaping traffic patterns in Manhattan below 60th Street, and some analysts believe the reduced vehicle volumes could actually create a more favorable environment for AV testing — fewer cars means fewer variables for the algorithms to process.
A City Watching and Waiting
For now, New York remains in a holding pattern. The technology is advancing, the regulatory framework is inching forward, and public interest is high. But the trust gap identified by Phyware represents something more fundamental than a marketing problem or a policy bottleneck. It reflects a genuine and reasonable set of concerns about safety, accountability, economic disruption, and the appropriate pace of technological change in a city where 8.3 million people share some of the most congested streets in the world.
The companies that eventually bring robotaxis to New York will need to do more than demonstrate that their vehicles can handle the city’s traffic. They will need to convince New Yorkers — skeptical, demanding, and accustomed to being in control — that the technology deserves their confidence. Based on the data, that remains a far harder problem than the engineering.