Are Waymo cars safer? Maybe. But will they make our streets and neighborhoods more livable? Way no. If unleashed in New York City, autonomous taxis will dramatically increase the amount of congestion on our streets, according to a report released on Monday by the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College in collaboration with Open Plans. The reason? Waymo cabs spend far more time driving around without passengers than comparable human-driven Uber and Lyft cabs. In California, where Waymo’s autonomous taxis have been operating and churning out trip data for years, a Waymo will travel 0.71 miles empty for every one mile. But in New York City, so-called high-volume taxis — Uber, Lyft and the like — drive empty for 0.49 miles for every one mile with a passenger. That 14.8-percent gap would translate to tens of thousands of additional vehicle miles every single day. The amount of additional miles depends on the extent to which robotaxis replace existing taxi trips — and the report offers a range. If robotaxis are deployed and only add to existing taxi trips, obviously, the additional number of VMTs will be much higher than if robotaxis slowly replace existing taxi trips. Under both scenarios, VMTs increase. If 2,000 new autonomous taxis show up in New York City and there is no commensurate decrease in taxi trips, suddenly there will be 293,800 more vehicle miles traveled in New York City every day. No, that’s not epic, glacial congestion, but it is the equivalent of more than 3,750 trips around Manhattan every day. In the more-likely scenario that robotaxis slowly replace human-driven Uber and Lyft trips, there will still be an increase in vehicle miles traveled because of that 14.8-percent higher “deadheading” rate for robotaxis. “As it stands, replacing a HV-FHV with a robotaxi would