In This Article
- Introduction
- 1. The Vote That Is Not There Yet
- 2. What the Rewritten Bill Would Allow
- 3. The Concessions Allen Added to Win Votes
- 4. Why the Opponents Want to Wait
- 5. The Mayor-Elect in the Middle of the Fight
- 6. Waymo’s Long Road Into the Capital
- 7. The Clock: January 2 and the End of the Session
- 8. What Happens Now
The bill that would let driverless taxis carry paying passengers in Washington is one vote short, and the clock is running. On Tuesday, November 10, 2026, Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the D.C. Council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, unveiled a rewritten version of his Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026, a bill that would let Waymo and other companies run cars with no one behind the wheel for hire on the capital’s streets. The rewrite was a last-minute attempt to win over sceptics, and it added some of the strongest worker protections ever attached to a robotaxi bill in the United States: an 800-vehicle cap across the whole District, collective bargaining rights for rideshare drivers and for the workers who maintain the driverless cars, and a tax on every mile driven to support the drivers whose work the cars might replace. It was not enough, at least not yet. Three of the five members of Allen’s own committee have said they would vote no if the bill came up this week, including the woman who will almost certainly be the city’s next mayor, and only one member besides Allen himself has said yes. That leaves the bill one vote short in the only committee that can send it to the full Council, with less than two months left before the legislative session ends on January 2, 2027, when the bill would die and have to start all over again. This report sets out what the rewritten bill would do, who is for it and who is against it, why the fight is really about jobs, and what has to happen in the next few weeks if driverless taxis are ever to reach Washington. The Washington driverless taxi bill Waymo November 2026 fight is the focus of this report.
1. The Vote That Is Not There Yet
There has been no vote on the driverless taxi bill, and that is the point. The bill sits in the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, a five-member committee chaired by its author, Charles Allen, the Ward 6 councilmember, and it cannot reach the full thirteen-member Council without the committee’s approval. Allen had hoped to hold a committee vote, known as a markup, early this week and to reach a full Council vote by the end of the year. Instead, on the day he unveiled his rewritten version, three of his four committee colleagues told reporters they would vote against it if it came up this week, and urged him to delay any vote until the next legislative session. The arithmetic is blunt: Allen needs three votes out of five, and he has two. The bill is not defeated, because no vote has been taken and the three opponents have said they would vote no “this week”, which leaves room for a change of mind, but it is not advancing either, because a chairman who cannot count three votes in his own committee does not usually force one. The result is a standoff in which the bill’s supporters and its opponents are both waiting to see whether the concessions Allen has just offered are enough to move a single vote, and whether the markup Allen’s team has pencilled in for the coming days actually happens. Everything else in this story, the jobs argument, the safety argument, the mayor-elect’s opposition and the January deadline, flows from that single missing vote.
1.1 The Three No Votes
The three councilmembers who have said they would vote no this week are Zachary Parker of Ward 5, Elissa Silverman, an at-large member, and Janeese Lewis George of Ward 4, who won the mayoral election and will almost certainly take office as mayor in the new year. Their reasons overlap but are not identical, and the differences matter, because Allen needs to persuade only one of them. Parker and Silverman have raised labour displacement and safety concerns, and have said the Council should wait until the next session, when new councilmembers and the new mayor’s appointees take office. Silverman has made the timing argument explicit: she has said the vote should wait until Lewis George’s directors for transportation, for-hire vehicles and employment services are in place, so that the people who would have to enforce and live with the new rules have a say in writing them. Lewis George came out against the bill last month, before the rewrite, over the displacement of rideshare and taxi drivers raised by local labour unions, and her opposition has not moved. The three have not said they oppose driverless taxis forever, and their public statements have been framed as a call for delay rather than a permanent rejection, but a delay past January 2, 2026’s session end would kill this version of the bill outright, which makes the distinction between “not now” and “no” thinner than it looks.
1.2 The One Yes and the Missing Fifth
On the other side of the count, Christina Henderson, also an at-large member, has said she would vote yes, which gives Allen two votes including his own and leaves him exactly one short. Henderson’s support matters because it shows the bill is not without friends on the committee, and because it frames the question as a genuine disagreement about policy rather than a unanimous rejection. Allen himself is the fifth vote, as the bill’s author and the committee’s chair, and he has described his proposal as one of the most progressive and substantial pieces of legislation of its kind in the country, a characterisation that reflects the worker protections he has built into it rather than the technology it would authorise. The missing fifth vote, then, is one of the three no votes, and the whole contest has narrowed to a single question: can Allen’s rewritten version, with its higher fleet cap and its union and tax provisions, persuade Parker, Silverman or Lewis George to change a no into a yes before the session runs out. None of the three has publicly said the rewrite changed their mind, and all three have repeated their call for delay, which suggests that the concessions, generous as they are on paper, have not yet done the job they were written to do.
2. What the Rewritten Bill Would Allow
The Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026, Bill B26-0684, was introduced on May 1, 2026, and it would create, for the first time, a legal route for companies to carry paying passengers in fully driverless cars in the District of Columbia. That is the heart of it, and everything else in the bill is scaffolding around that single permission. The rewritten version that Allen released on November 10 is a committee print dated November 9, 2026, which means it is the text the committee would actually vote on, and it is the version that reporters and stakeholders have been reading since Tuesday. The bill does not hand the keys to the city to any company that asks: it sets up a permitting system, a testing period, a fleet cap, fees, insurance requirements and a tax, and it gives the District Department of Transportation the job of running it all. What it would change, in plain terms, is that a company that has proved its cars can drive safely in Washington, under the city’s own testing rules, could then charge passengers for rides in cars with empty driver’s seats, which is something no company is currently allowed to do in the capital.
2.1 Paying Passengers, No Driver
Today, paying passengers in a fully driverless car are not allowed in Washington. Waymo, the company most closely associated with the bill, has been testing its cars in the District with human safety drivers behind the wheel, because city permits do not allow driverless operation, and the same restriction applies to every other operator. The bill would end that restriction for companies that complete the testing programme, and it would do so on a timetable that is deliberately slow: an operator would first need at least 180 days in the city’s testing programme and 250,000 test miles in the District, according to the bill’s text as reported, and only then could it apply for a commercial permit. The earlier version of the bill projected commercial operations beginning by 2028, and the rewritten version keeps a lengthy driverless testing phase before commercial service can start, which is one of the concessions Allen added to reassure sceptics. The bill also sets a $1 million application fee and a $5 million permit fee, and requires $5 million in liability insurance, figures that are designed to keep the programme limited to serious operators and to give the city money to oversee it. None of this is in force yet, and none of it will be unless the bill passes, but the shape of it is clear: a gated, fee-paying, tested route from today’s human-supervised testing to tomorrow’s paid driverless rides.
2.2 The 800-Vehicle Cap
The most visible change in the rewritten bill is the fleet cap. The version Allen introduced in May capped the initial rollout at 200 vehicles, a small pilot fleet that would have made Washington one of the most cautious robotaxi markets in the country. The rewritten version raises that ceiling to 800 vehicles across the whole District, for all companies combined, which is four times the original number and a substantial increase in the scale of what is being proposed. The higher cap is a double-edged concession: it gives the companies more room to build a real service, which is what they want, and it gives the city a bigger programme to oversee, which is what the sceptics worry about. Allen’s calculation appears to be that a larger cap, paired with the worker protections in the same rewrite, makes the bill more attractive to the companies and more defensible to the public at the same time, because a fleet of 800 cars is large enough to matter as a transport service and small enough, in a city of hundreds of thousands of people, to be managed. Whether the cap is 200 or 800, it is a ceiling rather than a target: no company would be obliged to put 800 cars on the road, and the number of cars that actually appear would depend on how many permits the city grants and how quickly the operators pass the testing phase. The cap has nevertheless become one of the most quoted numbers in the debate, because it is the simplest way to describe how big the change would be.
3. The Concessions Allen Added to Win Votes
Allen’s rewrite is best understood as a negotiation conducted in public, with the text of the bill as the offer. He has added provisions that no earlier version contained, and each of them is aimed at a specific objection that has been raised against the bill since it was introduced in May. The concessions do not change the bill’s core permission, which is still to let companies carry paying passengers in driverless cars, but they change the conditions around it so substantially that Allen has presented the rewritten bill as a different kind of proposal: not a technology bill, but a labour and consumer-protection bill that happens to be about technology. Whether that characterisation persuades the three no votes is the open question, and the reporting since Tuesday suggests it has not persuaded them yet, but the concessions have changed the terms of the debate, because the opponents now have to argue against a bill that contains many of the protections they asked for. That is the point of a concession, and it is why the rewrite matters even if it does not immediately win a vote.
3.1 Union Rights for Drivers and Maintenance Workers
The most striking concession in the rewrite is the right to unionise. The new version would allow both rideshare drivers and workers at autonomous-vehicle maintenance facilities to organise and bargain collectively, which is a significant enticement to labour unions that have opposed the technology out of fear it would displace rideshare and taxi drivers. The provision is unusual because robotaxi bills do not normally contain labour-organising rights at all, and its inclusion is a direct response to the unions that have led the opposition, among them SEIU 32BJ, the App Drivers Union, the Teamsters and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689. Those unions have been the most organised and most visible opponents of the bill, holding rallies outside the John A. Wilson Building, the seat of the D.C. Council, where dozens of drivers, union members and faith leaders gathered on a Tuesday in October chanting “Robotaxis don’t vote. We vote,” and calling on the Council to reject the bill. By writing union rights into the bill, Allen is offering the unions something they do not have today and cannot get without legislation, in exchange for accepting a technology they oppose. It is a bold trade, and it is the clearest sign that Allen understands the fight is about jobs rather than about the cars themselves.
3.2 A Tax on Miles to Help Displaced Workers
The second major concession is financial. The rewritten bill includes a vehicle miles-travelled tax, a charge on every mile a driverless car travels, whose revenue would support displaced rideshare workers and help manage congestion. The earlier version of the bill charged operators 15 cents per mile, with the proceeds split between the Metro transit system and displaced rideshare drivers, and the rewritten version keeps the same idea: the cars that take work away from drivers would pay, mile by mile, into a fund for the drivers they displace. It is a mechanism that tries to answer the hardest question in the whole debate, which is what happens to the people whose livelihoods depend on driving when the driving is done by software. The tax would not replace a lost income, and no one in the debate has claimed it would, but it would create a dedicated stream of money tied directly to the scale of the driverless fleet, so that the more the cars drive, the more support is available. Alongside the tax, the rewrite requires operators to begin offering wheelchair-accessible rides, which addresses a separate concern about whether driverless services would serve disabled passengers, and it imposes stringent data-sharing rules, which would require the companies to tell the city where their cars go and how they behave. Taken together, the concessions add up to a bill that tries to make the companies pay for the disruption they cause, in money, in access and in information.
4. Why the Opponents Want to Wait
The opponents’ case is not, for the most part, that driverless cars can never work. It is that Washington should not be first, or at least should not be first on this timetable, and that the Council should wait until the next legislative session, when new councilmembers and the new mayor’s appointees are in place, before deciding. That argument has two strands, one about jobs and one about safety, and both have been made forcefully since the bill was introduced. The jobs strand is the louder of the two, because it is the one the unions have carried into the Council chamber and onto the street, but the safety strand is the one that resonates most with the councilmembers who have to vote, because they are the ones who would be answerable if a driverless car caused a serious crash on a Washington street. Both strands end in the same place, which is a request for more time, and both are worth setting out on their own terms, because the bill’s fate depends on whether Allen can answer them or whether the Council decides that waiting is the safer choice.
4.1 Jobs First: The Unions’ Case
The jobs argument is simple and it is powerful. Washington has thousands of rideshare and taxi drivers, many of them immigrants and many of them working long hours for modest pay, and a fleet of driverless cars would compete directly with them for the same passengers on the same streets. The unions that represent those drivers, SEIU 32BJ, the App Drivers Union, the Teamsters and the transit workers of ATU Local 689, have said from the start that the bill would put countless workers at risk, and they have made that case in testimony, in rallies and in direct lobbying of councilmembers. Their argument is not only about the number of jobs, which is genuinely uncertain, because no one knows how quickly a fleet of 800 cars would take work from human drivers, but about who bears the cost of a technological change and who benefits from it. The companies that would run the driverless cars are among the largest and best-funded in the world, and the drivers who would compete with them are among the least protected workers in the city, which is why the unions have framed the bill as a question of fairness rather than a question of technology. Allen’s concessions, the union rights and the miles-travelled tax, are an attempt to answer that framing, but the unions have so far held their line, and the three councilmembers who oppose the bill have adopted the unions’ timing argument, which is that the decision should wait until the next session.
4.2 Safety and the Testing Question
The safety argument is quieter but it is the one that the bill’s authors have spent the most words trying to answer. Driverless cars have been involved in crashes and in embarrassing failures in other cities, and the opponents have pointed to those incidents as a reason for caution, arguing that Washington’s streets, with their heavy pedestrian traffic, their complex intersections and their frequent motorcades and protests, are a harder test than the wide roads of the desert cities where the technology was first deployed. The bill’s answer is the testing regime: 180 days in the city’s testing programme, 250,000 test miles in the District, and a lengthy driverless testing phase before any commercial service can start, all under the oversight of the District Department of Transportation. That is a serious regime on paper, and it is considerably more demanding than the rules in some other cities, but it is also untested, because no company has yet completed it in Washington, and the opponents have asked, reasonably enough, why the Council should approve a commercial programme before the testing programme has produced any results. Uber, which operates a large rideshare business in the city and has its own interests in the outcome, has also called for more time, which has added a commercial voice to the call for delay. The safety question, in the end, is not whether driverless cars are safe in general, but whether they are safe on Washington’s streets in particular, and that is a question that can only be answered by testing in Washington, which is exactly what the bill proposes and exactly what the opponents say should happen before, not after, the Council votes.
5. The Mayor-Elect in the Middle of the Fight
No figure in this story matters more than Janeese Lewis George, and no figure is harder to place. She is a Ward 4 councilmember, a member of the very committee that must approve the bill, and she is also the mayor-elect, the woman who won the election and will almost certainly be sworn in as mayor in the new year. That gives her two roles in the same fight, and they pull in different directions. As a councilmember she is one of the three no votes, and her opposition is enough, on its own, to keep the bill one vote short. As mayor-elect she is the person who would have to sign or veto the bill if it ever reached her desk, and the person whose administration would have to enforce it, appoint the directors who would oversee it, and answer to the public if it went wrong. Her position, therefore, is not just one vote among five; it is a preview of the bill’s future, and that is why Allen’s rewrite, for all its concessions, has not yet moved her.
5.1 Lewis George’s “Irresponsible” Warning
Lewis George came out against the bill last month, in a social media post that was unusually blunt for a mayoral candidate talking about a bill sponsored by a close ally. She called the legalisation drive “irresponsible” and warned that it would “put countless workers at risk”, language that left little room for negotiation and that framed the issue as a matter of principle rather than of detail. Her objection, as reported, was rooted in the displacement of rideshare and taxi drivers raised by local labour unions, and she has said she wants lawmakers to wait until at least next year, when she will almost certainly be mayor, before deciding. That is a coherent position, and it is one that the other two no votes have echoed, but it creates a problem for the bill’s supporters, because waiting until next year means waiting until after the current session ends on January 2, 2027, which means the bill dies and has to be reintroduced. Lewis George has not said she would veto a driverless taxi bill as mayor, and she has not said she would support one either, and her public statements have been about timing rather than about the technology itself, which leaves open the possibility that a bill written in the next session, under her administration, could look very different from the one Allen is pushing now.
5.2 An Ally Divided From His Own Side
The personal politics of the fight are as interesting as the policy, because Allen and Lewis George are close allies, and Allen has said he was given a heads-up before her social media post blasting the bill, which suggests that the disagreement was handled privately before it became public. Allen has nevertheless pressed ahead, saying he still plans to bring the bill to a vote this fall despite her opposition, and describing his proposal as one of the most progressive and substantial pieces of legislation of its kind in the country. That is a striking position for a chairman to take against a mayor-elect from his own political camp, and it reflects a genuine difference of judgement about whether the Council should act now or wait. Silverman, the third no vote, has tied her own position to Lewis George’s future administration, saying the vote should wait until Lewis George’s transportation, for-hire vehicle and employment services directors are in place, which makes the delay argument as much about who decides as about what is decided. The result is a split inside the city’s governing coalition, with the committee chairman pushing a bill that the next mayor opposes, and the next mayor’s allies on the committee siding with her. It is the kind of split that is usually resolved by waiting, and waiting is exactly what the opponents are asking for.
6. Waymo’s Long Road Into the Capital
Waymo is the company whose name is attached to this bill more than any other, although the bill itself is written for any operator and names no company. The firm, owned by Alphabet, has said since March 2025 that it planned to launch in Washington in 2026, and it has been testing its cars in the District ever since, with human safety drivers behind the wheel, because city permits do not allow driverless operation. That testing programme is the reason the bill exists at all: Waymo has cars on Washington’s streets today, and it wants to be allowed to take the safety drivers out and charge passengers, which is the service it already runs in other American cities. The company’s position, as reported in the coverage, is that it is ready, that its technology has been proved elsewhere, and that Washington should let it operate under the city’s rules. The opponents’ position is that being ready elsewhere is not the same as being ready in Washington, and that the city should set its own timetable. Between those two positions sits the bill, which is, in effect, Waymo’s route into the capital, and the reason the company has been following the Council’s proceedings as closely as any lobbyist.
6.1 Testing With a Human Behind the Wheel
Waymo’s Washington testing programme is easy to miss, because the cars look like ordinary vehicles with extra equipment on the roof, and because there is always a person in the driver’s seat, which means they are not, in any visible sense, driverless. But the programme matters, because it is the evidence base on which the whole bill rests. The cars have been driving Washington’s streets for more than a year, collecting data about the city’s roads, its traffic patterns and its pedestrians, and that data is what the company would use to argue that its cars are ready for driverless operation. The bill would formalise that process, requiring at least 180 days in the city’s testing programme and 250,000 test miles in the District before a commercial permit could be granted, which means the testing that Waymo has already done would count towards the requirement, but would not be enough on its own. The human safety driver is the key detail: under current permits, the driver is there to take over if the software fails, and the bill’s promise is that, after enough testing, the driver can be removed. That promise is what the opponents question, not because they doubt that the cars can drive, but because they doubt that enough testing has been done in Washington specifically, and because they want the testing to happen before the Council commits itself, rather than after.
6.2 What Other Cities Have Decided
Washington is not the first city to face this question, and the decisions of other cities are part of the argument on both sides. Waymo already runs paid driverless rides in several American cities, which its supporters cite as proof that the technology works at scale, and the company has expanded steadily from its first markets into new ones, which suggests that the business model is viable. But other cities have also pushed back, and the most striking recent example comes from Minneapolis, where the city council voted seven to six on October 1, 2026, to require a human safety monitor with a driver’s licence in the driver’s seat of every robotaxi, a rule that would, in effect, prevent fully driverless operation. Seven votes were short of the nine needed to override a veto, which left the rule’s future uncertain, but the vote itself showed that even cities that have welcomed the technology are willing to impose conditions that limit it. There is also a federal dimension: Congress is considering the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026, a bill introduced by Senators Moreno and Slotkin that would restrict Chinese-built vehicles, which passed the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously on July 22, and which could complicate the plans of any operator whose fleet depends on vehicles built in China. Washington’s decision, then, is not being made in isolation, and the Council is watching what other cities and Congress do, just as other cities are watching what Washington does.
7. The Clock: January 2 and the End of the Session
The deadline is the least debatable fact in this story, and it is the one that gives the whole fight its urgency. The D.C. Council’s current legislative session ends on January 2, 2027, and if the driverless taxi bill has not passed by then, it dies. That is not a metaphor: under the Council’s rules, a bill that has not completed its journey through committee and two full Council votes by the end of the session must be reintroduced from scratch in the next session, which means new hearings, a new committee process and a new vote, under a new mayor and with new councilmembers in place. Allen knows this, and it is why he has been pushing for a markup this week and a full Council vote by the end of the year. The opponents know it too, and it is why their call for delay is so effective: they do not need to defeat the bill, they only need to run out the clock, and the calendar is on their side. With less than two months left, and with three of five committee members opposed to a vote this week, the bill’s path to passage is narrow, and it gets narrower with every week that passes without a markup.
7.1 What Happens If the Bill Dies
If the bill dies on January 2, nothing changes on Washington’s streets, at least not immediately. Waymo would continue testing with human safety drivers, paying passengers in driverless cars would remain illegal, and the question would return in the next session, probably in a different form and under a different political alignment. The next session would begin with Lewis George as mayor, with new councilmembers in place, and with her appointees running the transportation, for-hire vehicle and employment services departments, which is exactly the arrangement the opponents say they want. A new bill could be introduced then, and it could contain the same concessions or different ones, but it would have to start from the beginning, and there is no guarantee that it would move any faster than the current one has. For Waymo and the other operators, a death in January would mean at least another year of waiting, and possibly more, because the new mayor has given no sign that she would prioritise the issue. For the drivers and the unions, a death in January would be a victory, but a temporary one, because the technology is not going away and the question will return, in Washington and in every other city, until it is answered one way or the other.
7.2 The Path to a Full Council Vote
The path from here to a law is short on paper and hard in practice. First, the bill must be voted out of Allen’s committee, which requires three votes out of five, and which is the step where it is currently stuck. Then it must pass two votes before the full thirteen-member Council, a requirement that applies to most Council legislation, and which means the bill would need to survive not one but two rounds of debate and amendment. Finally, to reach the outgoing mayor’s desk before she leaves office, the bill would need to complete its committee markup by mid-November, according to the timetable reported in the coverage, because the two full Council votes and the mayoral review all take time. Allen had hoped to mark the bill up early this week and reach a full Council vote by the end of the year, and reporting on November 11 said a second and final vote was expected later this month, which suggests that his team still believes the timetable is achievable. But the timetable depends on the markup happening, and the markup depends on the missing vote, and the missing vote depends on the concessions, which have not yet persuaded any of the three no votes. The path exists, but it is blocked at its first step, and that is the story of this bill.
8. What Happens Now
The next few days will decide whether the driverless taxi bill lives or dies, and the decision will be made in a committee room rather than on the streets where the cars drive. Allen’s team has said it anticipates a markup as soon as tomorrow, which would be the first formal test of whether the rewritten bill has moved any votes, and the outcome of that markup, if it happens, will tell the city whether the bill has a future in this session or whether it will have to wait for the next one. The reporting since Tuesday has been consistent: the concessions are real, the opposition is real, and neither side has yet given ground. What is not yet known is whether the markup will happen on schedule, whether any of the three no votes will change their position, and whether the full Council, if it ever gets the chance, would pass a bill that its own committee approved only narrowly. Those are the questions that the coming days will answer, and they are the questions that this report will return to as the story develops.
8.1 The Markup to Watch
The markup is the event to watch, and it is worth understanding what it is. A markup is a committee meeting at which the members debate the bill, offer amendments and vote on whether to send it to the full Council, and it is the moment when the private counting of votes becomes public. Allen had hoped to hold it early this week, and his team has anticipated it as soon as the day after the rewrite was unveiled, which would put it in the middle of November, with the mid-November deadline for reaching the outgoing mayor’s desk looming just behind it. If the markup happens and the bill passes out of committee, the story moves to the full Council, where the debate would be broader and the stakes higher. If the markup is delayed, or if it happens and the bill fails, the story effectively ends for this session, and the bill would die on January 2. The markup has not been formally scheduled in the reporting available at the time of writing, and that is itself a sign of how uncertain the outcome is: a chairman who is confident of his votes schedules a markup, and a chairman who is not keeps negotiating. Allen is still negotiating, in public, through the text of his bill, and the markup will happen when he believes he has the votes, or when he decides that he has to test whether he does.
8.2 The Bottom Line
Washington’s driverless taxi bill is one vote short, and the missing vote belongs to a mayor-elect who has called the whole enterprise irresponsible. That is the bottom line, and it is a harder problem than any of the bill’s details, because it is a problem of timing and of politics rather than of drafting. Charles Allen has written a bill that is, by the standards of robotaxi legislation anywhere in the United States, unusually protective of workers: an 800-vehicle cap, union rights for drivers and maintenance workers, a tax on every mile to support the displaced, wheelchair-accessible rides and strict data-sharing rules. He has done this because he understands that the fight is about jobs, not about cars, and because he believes that a bill which protects workers can also welcome a new technology. His three opponents on the committee, including the woman who will be mayor in a matter of weeks, have answered that the Council should wait, and that the decision should be made by the next session, under the next mayor, with her appointees in place. Both sides have a case, and both sides are, in their own way, right: the technology is ready enough to be tested, and the city is right to be careful about who pays for it. What is not yet known is whether any of the three no votes will move, whether the markup will happen this week, whether the full Council would pass the bill if it got the chance, and whether Lewis George, as mayor, would sign a driverless taxi bill at all. The answers will come in the next few weeks, and the deadline is January 2, 2027, after which the bill, in its current form, will be gone. The coming days will provide the answers.
