With driverless cars a reality, what can cities do to prepare for them? Speakers at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas last week said the shift from pilot programs to implementation has accelerated in the last year, and will keep doing so. Since it began in 2009 as “the secret Google Self-Driving Car Project,” Waymo has turned a pilot project into a viable product by scaling rider-only service across multiple cities, logging more than 200 million miles of fully autonomous, driverless operation on public roads as of Feb. 2026. Waymo has already expanded into airports such as Phoenix Sky Harbor and San Jose International and is logging miles in numerous major cities nationally, including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. Expansion to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Baltimore and other markets is now in the works, while volume currently surpasses 400,000 fully autonomous, paid rides weekly. And while safety continues to be a concern, programs such as the University of Michigan’s Connected Environment and Smart Intersections Project, which focus on creating reference architecture that cities can copy for performance measures, crash reduction and traffic signal priority, are enabling autonomous vehicles and human drivers to respond better. As a result, data from the first 127 million miles of operation recorded by Waymo shows a 10-fold reduction in crashes involving serious injuries and a 12-fold reduction in crashes involving pedestrians compared to human benchmarks. The technology that propels autonomous vehicles is no longer in question. Automated vehicles like Waymo clearly can drive a city block safely. It’s the reason why U.S. competitors such as Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox are beginning to scale their factories while international players are working to drive costs down in the wake of analyst concerns about profitability. Per unit costs of autonomous vehicles, after