A new study out Monday found that autonomous robotaxis in New York City would likely be 1.5 times more likely to cause traffic crashes resulting in deaths and serious injuries, per one million miles driven, than the human for-hire vehicle drivers they could replace, while also leading to more gridlock on city streets. The report seeks to understand how robotaxis — also known as for-hire autonomous vehicles (AVs) — would impact human for-hire-vehicle drivers who could be replaced by them as well as traffic patterns across the five boroughs. Traffic wiz Sam Schwartz’s Hunter College research program and the advocacy group Open Plans, the study’s authors, set out to challenge the pitch from AV companies, like Waymo and Tesla, that the driverless vehicles will make city streets safer and less congested. “We felt like there’s a lot of conversation about Waymo and their safety record and how they would make transportation better in New York City, and we wanted to just examine that from a data perspective,” said Open Plans Executive Director Sara Lind in an interview. The city had been piloting Waymo’s robotaxis, with trained drivers behind the wheel, in Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. However, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration declined to renew the program, which had been launched by his predecessor Eric Adams last year, when it expired in March 2026. Kelly McGuinness, director of the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program, said that, in particular, they wanted to look at whether robotaxis would make city streets safer before introducing them here. “We really wanted to dig into the safety question before Waymos are deployed in New York City,” she said. What the robotaxi study concluded for NYC The study compares data released by Waymo, on its operations around the country dating back to its 2020 launch, to that