The California Public Utilities Commission has approved Waymo’s request to expand its commercial robotaxi service area, opening the door for the Alphabet company to bring its driverless ride-hailing vehicles into more communities south of San Francisco.
The company said in a post on X the approval won’t change its plans in the near term. Today, Waymo operates a commercial robotaxi service in all of San Francisco as well as parts of the Peninsula. It also provides driverless rides to paying customers throughout several Silicon Valley cities, including parts of Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale. In all, the company’s service area is about 85 square miles covering San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
The company is also aiming to unlock access to the San Francisco International Airport, although those plans are on a much longer timeline. Waymo was given permission in March to map roadways at SFO via a temporary permit. Waymo vehicles will not operate autonomously in the airport; employees will manually drive the vehicles to map the area. But the permit signals the beginning of a phased approach to Waymo eventually operating commercially there.
Waymo provides 250,000 paid trips each week across its operations, which extends to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and more recently Austin.