On Tuesday Self-driving vehicle developer Waymo announced it would offer full-time curbside pickup and drop-off services at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona. The announcement came without much fanfare—a post on X—but it signals that self-driving vehicles could be moving in the right direction (literally) after years of delays.
The new airport curbside service is a good sign for Waymo’s business, says Mike Ramsey, automotive analyst at Gartner. “The airport is the most important destination and starting point for any kind of mobility service, be it a taxi, a shuttle bus or an autonomous robocab,” he says. Nearly a decade ago, then-upstarts Uber and Lyft fought hard for access to airports. Less price-conscious business travelers, families with luggage and anyone who doesn’t want to spend money on airport parking all want easily accessible rides, making the airport an ideal location for a taxi service.
Even before all-day curb service began, the airport was Waymo’s most popular destination in Phoenix, says Brad Gillette, Waymo’s market leader in the city. Waymo has operated self-driving vehicles in Arizona since 2017 and began offering rides to Phoenix’s airport in late 2022. During the first year of operation, passengers could only be picked up and dropped off at stations along the airport’s “Sky Train” — areas with less heavy traffic. Late last year, Waymo began offering nighttime curb service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., also times when the airport was less busy. Now the service is available anytime to anyone who downloads the company’s Waymo One app.
The company says it has made nearly 100,000 trips to and from the airport since launching its station service nearly two years ago and now serves thousands of travelers a week.
Airport departure and arrival areas are also really difficult terrain. Cars driving in and out, searching for passengers and navigating tight spaces – all of that is difficult enough for a human. Gillette says Waymo conducted a year of testing to make sure the company’s technology “can predict with a certain level of assertiveness and react appropriately to get to the right place at the right time.”
Waymos will pick up and drop off passengers at designated terminal areas for rideshare and electric vehicles, Eric Everts, spokesman for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said in an email. Through Waymo’s app, passengers will be notified of specific wait times to board the vehicles, and the cars will leave them behind if they don’t meet the deadline, Everts wrote – meaning traffic cops won’t have to badger the driverless vehicles to move on.
Bumpy ride
Last summer, curbside pickup and drop-off became a point of contention when Waymo and rival Cruise both applied to offer full-time paid passenger robotaxi service in San Francisco — to officially compete with Uber and Lyft in the city where those services were born. In letters to the regulatory agency in charge of the permit, the City of San Francisco expressed concerns that the robotaxis would not get close enough to the curb to pick up and drop off passengers.
For California regulators who oversee autonomous vehicle operations in the state, this wasn’t a major sticking point: A commission approved the permits in August 2023. (Cruise has since been stripped of its license to operate rides in the state after state officials alleged the company concealed details of an incident in which an autonomous vehicle dragged a pedestrian about 20 feet.) But for some city officials and residents, the roadside robotaxis’ behavior was reason enough to say: No thanks.
