New York’s public transit advocacy community has launched a new attack against robotaxis. A recently published report from Open Plans and the Sam Schwartz Transportation Program leads with an alarming claim: Waymo vehicles, they assert, “have a significantly higher rate of crashes with a serious injury or fatality than the existing New York City for-hire fleet.” The full report largely concedes the point that robotaxis are safer than the typical human driver (an earlier point of debate) and instead focuses on the comparison with for-hire services like Uber, Lyft, and yellow taxis. Concern about the impact on jobs in this sector is the main reason that autonomous vehicles remain illegal in New York. (Waymo’s limited testing permit lapsed in March.) Finally, a reason to check your email. Sign up for our free newsletter today. But a closer look at what the report actually found shows that the safety record of robotaxis is so strong that they clear even the bar of safety compared with professional drivers in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the report skewed the numbers to push the authors’ preferred narrative. The study’s strongest statistical analysis looks at the risk of injury-causing crashes among different vehicle types. These data are taken from Waymo’s reporting to federal regulators and crash data from the NYPD indicating injuries or fatalities. Over 40,000 such cases occur in New York City in a typical year, allowing for a statistically sound comparison against Waymo’s record, whether deployed in San Francisco or nationwide. The report’s key finding is that Waymos are involved in far fewer injury-causing crashes than either New York City drivers or for-hire vehicles: 0.71 crashes per million miles nationally compared with 2.15 for New York City’s taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts. This is especially striking because New York City’s lower speed limits and other