There’s only one airport in the U.S. where you can step off a plane and be whisked away by a robotaxi.

In order to get there, I had to take an Uber to San Francisco International Airport, board a Southwest flight, and travel 650 miles into Arizona’s oppressive summer heat. That’s because, despite being the birthplace of self-driving technology, San Francisco doesn’t have an airport robotaxi service. Phoenix does. And San José soon will.

After three years of carrying passengers on the mean, hilly streets of San Francisco, the driverless taxi operator Waymo remains stuck in a years-long logjam with the city over access to the Bay Area’s busiest airport. Communications between the two parties have included rejection notes, a harshly worded cease-and-desist letter, and contentious contract negotiations, public records show. 

By contrast, Waymo has offered 24/7 curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for more than a year. Since it began offering rides at one of PHX’s Sky Train stations in 2022, the Alphabet-owned company has completed more than 450,000 airport trips. 

“When you arrive at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, you can use the most advanced technology to get to your destination,” said Mayor Kate Gallego, who takes Waymo for her own travel to and from the airport. “It’s a point of pride that we were the first.” 

While Phoenix has established itself as “America’s King of the Robotaxi,” San Franciscans are still anxiously waiting for Waymo to make inroads at SFO. In December alone, more than 13,000 people searched for SFO on the Waymo app, and around 700 people installed the app while physically at the airport. A July 2024 survey by Waymo found that 89% of riders in the Bay Area are interested in using the service to get to and from SFO. 

Adding insult to injury, San José Mineta International Airport announced Thursday that Waymo has received a permit to operate there, clinching the title of the first California airport to offer a commercial robotaxi service. Waymo is set to launch in San José by the end of the year, ahead of the Super Bowl and World Cup. 

Meanwhile, discussions between Waymo and SFO have hit repeated speed bumps. Although the mapping process was completed this year, the two parties have yet to reach an agreement on permitting. 

“I’m surprised it’s not already available, to be honest,” said William Riggs, director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative at the University of San Francisco. “It’s about time that we start the experiment and see where it goes.”  

A spokesperson for SFO, which is owned and operated by the city of San Francisco, said meetings are ongoing, but there is no timeline for getting a Waymo service up and running. 

Mayor Daniel Lurie has cast his administration as pro-business and innovation-friendly, recently reopening Market Street to Waymo and other ride-hail services after five years of car-free experimentation. Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer, cochairs the mayor’s Partnership for San Francisco, which is tasked with improving business conditions. 

Former Twitter CFO Ned Segal, now the city’s chief of housing and economic development, is acting as liaison between Waymo and SFO. The mayor’s office and Segal declined to comment. A Waymo spokesperson said the company is in active talks with SFO and looks forward to further collaboration.

The rideshare curb at Phoenix Sky Harbor is a peek into a possible future. Waymos cruise down the thoroughfare, their rotating domes peeking up from the sea of Ubers and Lyfts, their indicators blinking as they glide to the curb. 

“They’re really good at avoiding the congestion,” said Mike O’Shaughnessy, PHX’s deputy aviation director for operations and my tour guide. “With their LiDAR and radar, they can see further ahead and anticipate more than humans do.” 

Talks with Waymo began in 2020 with a “crawl, walk, run approach,” O’Shaughnessy said. Two years later, the airport opened 24/7 Waymo service to one of PHX's two Sky Train stations. Now, more than a year after curbside service launched, the airport sees 1,000 to 1,200 Waymo trips per day. That’s far fewer than the roughly 13,000 daily Uber and Lyft trips to the airport, but PHX staff expect the number to grow as Waymo expands its service area to highways and additional neighborhoods.

Back in the Bay Area, Waymo and SFO have had a far bumpier relationship. In 2023, Waymo was on its way to securing a speedy mapping permit. But airport officials abruptly reversed course, informing the company that they were delaying approval until it had mapped the surrounding parts of San Mateo County and secured autonomous operations approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.

The backtrack took place amid growing resistance to Waymo and its now-defunct competitor Cruise, which sparked anger from San Francisco residents and public officials for interfering with emergency responders and causing mile-long traffic jams. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu publicly opposed expanding autonomous fleets, while activists disabled robotaxis by placing traffic cones atop them. The furor peaked when a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian and a Cruise robotaxi dragged her 20 feet, leading the DMV to suspend Cruise’s permit to operate in San Francisco. 

“The environment wasn’t really conducive to airport expansion then,” said Robert Singleton, senior policy director for the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry trade group. “It was a time of public skepticism.” 

Weeks later, airport staff spotted Waymos driving by two of SFO’s terminals, and officials brought the hammer down. 

“Waymo is directed to immediately cease and desist all operations on airport property,” wrote Eva Chong, SFO’s managing director of airport services, operations, and security, in a letter addressed to Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov. “Whether staffed or operated fully autonomously, Waymo’s operation of autonomous vehicles at the Airport creates an unsafe condition for the traveling public and impacts the efficient operation of Airport roadways.”

Waymo’s internal review found that the manually driven test cars had mistakenly entered the airport after missing an off-ramp, communications between the two parties show. 

“Neither mapping nor autonomous driving occurred on SFO property,” Waymo shot back in its response.

By the end of 2023, San Francisco and Phoenix were on dramatically different robotaxi trajectories. Phoenix had quietly become the leading test market for robotaxis, which were operating across a 225-square-mile zone in and around the capital. In December 2023, Waymo expanded its Phoenix airport service to include limited curbside service in addition to 24/7 service at both Sky Train stations. 

“What helped Phoenix get there first was just a near-complete willingness from all the stakeholders to come to the table at the same time,” Singleton said. He added that SFO’s location outside San Francisco and highway-only accessibility have complicated the process. 

Long-standing pro-business policies have helped Waymo move faster in the Grand Canyon State. In 2015, Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order authorizing the testing of self-driving vehicles and directing state agencies to support AV development. Three years later, Ducey signed another order allowing vehicles without a human driver behind the wheel and barring Arizona cities and counties from creating their own AV rules. In 2021, the state Legislature signed Ducey’s model into law.

Compared to Arizona, where the Motor Vehicle Division acts as the primary regulator, California has a more layered bureaucracy, with the DMV, Public Utilities Commission, and local governments participating in the approval process. Companies here must also publicly report every collision, as well as when a human safety driver takes control of an autonomous vehicle.

“We saw ourselves as the polar opposite of policy in California,” said Danny Seiden, CEO and president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry and former chief of staff to Ducey. 

After Waymo’s unsuccessful efforts at securing a permit to map SFO in 2023, the company initiated a new round of talks last year as it prepared to launch curbside service to the public at PHX. 

“Waymo riders in the Bay Area consistently ask Waymo to provide service to SFO,” Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi wrote to Airport Director Ivar Satero, touting the company’s experience operating at Phoenix Sky Harbor and in San Francisco. “We would like to partner with airport leaders and staff to work towards that future goal.”

Waymo proposed two to three weeks of airport mapping by human-driven robotaxis, followed by a longer period of autonomous testing of airport roads and parking lots with a safety driver behind the wheel. By this point, Waymo had opened ride-hailing to all in San Francisco and received regulatory approval to expand its 24/7 paid service in San Mateo County on freeways.

But those discussions quickly stalled. Communications records obtained by The Standard show disagreements over insurance coverage, data sharing, and whether the mapping process required additional environmental review. At the same time, the politically powerful Teamsters Union filed a complaint with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, alleging that Waymo failed to register some of its employees as lobbyists during mapping negotiations. The commission declined to pursue the complaint, but the Teamsters filed a new case in February with additional evidence. Waymo has maintained it followed all applicable regulations.

Seven months after its second proposal, Waymo finally began mapping SFO in March. 

As part of Waymo’s contract with the airport, it agreed to provide detailed trip-level data for each session — including entry and exit times and a location ping every 30 seconds — a level of data sharing it had initially resisted. 

Now, airport officials say they are working to create a permit system tailored for autonomous vehicles, albeit similar to the one created for Uber and Lyft. “Given that self-driving cars are a new mode of transportation,” said SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel, “we’re working on a new permit structure.”

However, if it proceeds at the rate of past permissions, the process could take years. Uber launched in San Francisco in 2010, but SFO didn’t officially permit its use until 2014. By contrast, Phoenix expedited permissions for Waymo by using the same permitting system as existing rideshare companies, which includes a flat $5.15 fee per pickup or dropoff.

The lack of progress at SFO has some calling for Lurie to step in. “At this point, the mayor should light a fire under the airport commission,” Riggs said. “The city needs to find a way to get this done.”

Meanwhile, other airports are studying Phoenix’s success story. Sky Harbor regularly hosts delegations from across the globe to show how it trained its staff and first responders to incorporate driverless cars into the environment.

“For example, we have a lot of one-way roads at the airport, so we had discussions about how a Waymo should react if a human were going the wrong way,” said Gallego. “Would it be better to pull over? No one had dealt with those questions before.”

But both the mayor and PHX staff emphasize that the rollout of a robotaxi service is not a one-size-fits-all blueprint for airports. “There’s a saying in the airport industry,” said O’Shaughnessy. “‘If you’ve seen one airport, you’ve seen one airport.’ Every single one is different.”

Now, another Bay Area airport has solved the puzzle to get Waymo onto its grounds. By the end of the year, San José is set to launch a commercial robotaxi service that will include its airport. 

“It’s the perfect time for Waymo’s autonomous vehicles to begin to roll into San José, the capital of Silicon Valley,” said Mayor Matt Mahan. “Waymo embodies our region’s spirit of innovation.” 

Or at least one part of the region.