On Tuesday, Alphabet Waymo, the self-driving car developer, said it would begin operating curbside pickups and deliveries around the clock at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona. The announcement came without much fanfare: Post on XBut this suggests that, after years of delay, autonomous vehicles could be moving (literally) in the right direction.
The new airport curbside pickup service sends a good signal about Waymo’s business, says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at Gartner. “The airport is the primary destination and starting point for any type of mobility service, whether it’s a taxi, a shuttle bus or an autonomous robotaxi,” he says. Nearly a decade ago, then-upstarts Uber and Lyft fought hard to gain access to airports. Less price-sensitive business travelers, families lugging suitcases and anyone who doesn’t want to spend money to park at the airport want easy-to-access rides, making it an ideal place to set up a taxi service.
Even before the all-day curbside pickup service began, the airport was Waymo’s most popular destination in Phoenix, says Brad Gillette, Waymo’s market lead in the city. Waymo has operated self-driving vehicles in Arizona since 2017 and began offering rides to the Phoenix airport in late 2022. For the first year of service, passengers could only be picked up and dropped off at stations along the airport’s “Sky Train,” areas with less heavy traffic. Late last year, Waymo began offering overnight curbside pickup service between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. — also periods when the airport was less hectic. Now, the service is open at any time, to anyone who downloads the company’s app. Waymo One application.
The company says it has served nearly 100,000 trips to and from the airport since it began service at the station nearly two years ago, and now serves thousands of travelers a week.
Airport departure and arrival curbs are also a very tricky place to drive. Cars are entering and exiting, looking for passengers, navigating tight spaces — these kinds of things are hard enough for a human being to do. Gillette says it took Waymo a year of testing to ensure the company’s technology “can predict and react appropriately, with some level of assertiveness, to get into the right place at the right time.”
Waymos will pick up and drop off passengers in designated areas of the terminal for electric and ride-sharing vehicles, Eric Everts, a public information officer at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said in an email. Through Waymo’s app, passengers will be given specific wait times to board vehicles, and the cars will drop them off if they miss the deadline, Everts wrote, meaning traffic officers won’t have to hassle self-driving cars to move along.
A bumpy ride
Last summer, curbside pickup and drop-off became a point of contention when Waymo and competitor Cruise applied to begin offering full-time passenger-carrying robo-taxi service in San Francisco — essentially officially competing with Uber and Lyft in the city where those services were born. In letters to the regulator that oversees permitting, the city of San Francisco said it was concerned that robo-taxis wouldn’t get close enough to sidewalks to pick up and drop off passengers.
For California regulators, who oversee autonomous vehicle operations in the state, the concern wasn’t a big deal: A commission approved the permits in August 2023. (Cruise has since had its permit to operate rides in the state revoked, after state officials alleged the company withheld details of an incident in which an autonomous vehicle dragged a pedestrian for about 20 feet.) But for some city officials and residents, the robotaxis’ behavior on the sidewalk was enough to say: No, thanks.