It’s been just over a year since Waymo rolled out its partnership with Uber, and its presence has rapidly expanded across Austin. There are now about 300 of the sleek white vehicles with black spinning tops driving around city streets, a level of ubiquity the company asserts is improving safety for pedestrians and drivers.

Not everyone is sold. Some city leaders say the vehicles can, at times, hinder public safety. In the wake of several high-profile incidents over the past 12 months — including the recent death of a beloved duck, an incident in which a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance responding to the shooting at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden and reports of autonomous vehicles unsafely passing school buses — skepticism is growing about whether the technology is ready for widespread use. City leaders also say the companies can be opaque about how their systems operate. The latest example: Waymo declined the city’s request to attend a Wednesday special meeting to discuss public safety.

“Thanks for printing out the ‘Reserved for Waymo’ signs,” Council Member Zo Qadri said, referencing empty chairs in front of the dais. “Waymo sadly did not show up.”

Despite growing skepticism at City Hall, local lawmakers have limited authority after Texas banned cities from regulating autonomous vehicles in 2017, leaving oversight largely in the hands of the state. However, additional oversight will come at the end of May, when a new state law goes into effect requiring companies to obtain Texas Department of Motor Vehicles authorization before operating commercially.

“No tech works perfectly, but we’ve managed to keep airline accidents down very low, and that’s because we’ve had a lot of time and experience to perfect, or nearly perfect the system,” said Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s Mason Autonomy & Robotics Center, a research hub on autonomous systems. “We’re still years, if not decades, away from something similar to happen to self-driving cars.”

“Austin is being treated as a lab experiment that they didn’t sign up for,” Cummings said. “It’s just a matter of time until someone’s killed.”

How autonomous vehicles took hold in Austin

While the 2025 partnership with Uber accelerated Waymo’s expansion, the company has been rolling out vehicles in Austin since 2023. Waymo is now the dominant operator in the city, but at least five other companies also have vehicles on Austin streets, though not all companies are currently offering rides.

Autonomous vehicles’ introduction has not been without its setbacks. Cruise cars were once everywhere, but after many well-documented incidents, the company suspended its nationwide operations in October 2023 amid eroding public trust.

Despite lacking regulatory authority, the city launched an autonomous vehicle dashboard in 2023 to track incidents involving the vehicles and better understand emerging issues.

Reported incidents have steadily increased since 2023, likely driven in part by the growing number of vehicles on the road, with about 270 total since the dashboard’s launch. Reports include safety concerns, vehicles blocking traffic, failing to comply with police direction and ignoring school bus stop signs.

Waymo points to safety record

“We’ve driven over 200 million miles [across all cities],” David Margines, director of product management at Waymo, told Austin Current. “We have demonstrated a 92% reduction in serious injury collisions as compared to human drivers on the same roads and in the same geographies.”

In one of the most recent high-profile incidents, a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance responding to the March 1 shooting at Buford’s that left three people dead and more than a dozen injured. Public safety officials said the delay did not hurt emergency medical response, but the incident nonetheless raised significant safety concerns and prompted Austin City Council members to send a formal letter to the company seeking ways to prevent similar situations.

Margines called the event “anomalous,” and said the company reviews such incidents to prevent recurrence and maintain community trust.

“We recognize that we need to build and maintain the trust in the communities that we operate in,” Margines said. He added that after incidents like the ambulance case, the company evaluates whether “there are things that we can do better, whether we can operate faster and basically get out of the way of emergency vehicles.”

Margines said Waymo is among the safest and most transparent autonomous vehicle companies, saying the company is more forthcoming about collisions than its competitors.

“We are tremendously proud of our track record here in Texas,” Margines said. “When we look at the big picture, people’s lives are being improved because Waymo is out there on the road.”

Austin leaders push for safeguards

Austin City Council Member Paige Ellis, who chairs Austin’s Mobility Committee, said she wants to see more transparency from all autonomous vehicle companies. Public officials have recently criticized Waymo for not providing enough detail about who its remote assistance operators are, their level of training and where they are located.

“Personally, I would love to have more information about those questions,” Ellis told Austin Current. “We as government officials, we thrive on transparency… We need our information to be available to the public. We want people to have information and answers, and private companies don’t necessarily have that charge.”

At the Wednesday special meeting, public safety leaders outlined several issues first responders have encountered in recent months, including autonomous vehicles not responding to emergency workers’ hand signals, remaining on roadways during severe weather events, requiring manual relocation during active emergency scenes and situations in which intoxicated passengers fall asleep during rides and do not wake up.

“The question is not if this is going to turn into a deadly situation but when,” Ellis said at the meeting.

While Austin currently lacks the authority to regulate the vehicles, public safety officials questioned whether future policies might restrict operations during severe weather or allow the city to recoup costs when first responders are required to manually move vehicles blocking active scenes.

The city’s government relations department expressed support for future legislation aimed at strengthening safety requirements.

Austin should do “everything that we can to be a city that does welcome new technology,” Ellis said, “but, first and foremost, has to put our top priority as the life, health and safety of the folks in Austin, Texas.”

By OISAKHOSE AGHOMO

Photography By OISAKHOSE AGHOMO

Reporting Texas

Near a nondescript building in North Austin, if you listen hard, you can hear Mimi and Rodolfo falling in love. 

As the Austin Opera prepares for its upcoming opening of “La Boheme,” it’s on the upswing into a new era – despite the recent turbulence surrounding the classical arts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. And while the actor Timothee Chalamet recently said “no one cares about” opera and ballet, Austin Opera is building its future. 

“The company had been leasing rehearsal and administrative space for many years when I got here. …We’ve been kind of running our costume shop out of the corner of a warehouse.” said Annie Burridge, general director of the Austin Opera. 

For the last year, the company has been promoting its big move to the Sarah and Ernest Butler Performance Center in the fall; it will have both a rehearsal space and a costume shop. The company is betting that both the move and its ambitious slate of classic and experimental operas will fortify its business as threats to funding spiral across the industry. 

Brittany Olivia Logan plays Mimi in the Austin Opera’s new production. Oisakhose Aghomo/Reporting Texas

 “La Boheme” was originally composed by Giacomo Puccini as a tale of friendship and love, set in 19th century France, centered around lovers Rodolfo and Mimi. It’s sung in Italian, the de facto language of opera.

Austin Opera’s “La Boheme” is a production of around 160 people including stage crew and a youth choir. Several times a week for three-hour blocks, the cast and crew meet up in a waiting-room sized space filled with carts of props, costumes and musical instruments. 

As director of the show, Eboni Adams works to make everyone feel at home with the space and each other.

 “What I found in rehearsal spaces is that no matter if you’ve done ‘La Boheme’ one time or 20 times, I always look at the space that we enter into as this is the first last time we will do ‘La Boheme’ in this way because we have people in the room that we have never done this with,” Adams said. 

Though “La Boheme” tends to attract a large audience, opera companies typically run a deficit, Burridge said. 

“Even with ticket prices that can go up to as high as $250 when we’re doing something that’s really popular or in demand, that’s still only going to cover maybe 30% of the expense of putting on an opera,” she said. “It’s always been reliant on patrons willing to cover 70% of that gap.” 

Burridge said that the company had been looking for additional sources of revenue to stay alive because “city, state, national support is just meaningless here in the U.S.”

Timothy Myers, the musical director, ends a scene with Jasmine Habersham as Musetta and the rest of cast and choir. Oisakhose Aghomo/Reporting Texas 

In the last few months, a highly publicized breakup between the Washington National Opera and the newly renamed Trump Kennedy Center, under new management by the Trump administration, has unfolded. NPR reported that the new policies, which required the Washington National Opera to pay for the costs of production up front, caused the rupture.

In addition, the Trump administration has systemically cut grants from the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for Humanities in the last year. The Madison Opera in Wisconsin lost a $25,000 grant in 2025, according to The Cap Times.

Burridge said that even though government funding could account for about 5% of an American city opera’s budget, the loss of the funding is “a signal that you don’t need to care about these things, and that’s tough to combat right now.”

Adams said that framing the arts as trivial doesn’t make sense. 

“When has sports ever been underfunded? Hm,” she said. “And so the question is, what is it about art that some people and organizations are deciding generally that those things should not be funded? What is the power of art and why are people not finding it of importance?” 

This is why, as an Austin native, Adams said it was disheartening that Texas’ unofficial cultural ambassador, Matthew McConaughey, was a silent bystander while Chalamet made his comments on the profitability of opera  at a CNN and Variety Townhall, filmed at the University of Texas. 

“My call to action – invite Matthew McConaughey and his friends and family to come see the show and experience the show. And his friend, Timothy Chalamet to the show as well. I want to hear their thoughts,” Adams said. 

The show will run from April 30 to May 3 at the Long Center, which the company currently rents for shows while the Sarah and Ernest Butler Performance Center is under renovation. 

When the center opens in October, Austin Opera hopes to use it to create more revenue by filling South Austin’s need for rehearsal and performance space.

“We’ll have rental revenue streams. We’ll have bar revenue. Hopefully, we can sell a lot of Chardonnay,” Burridge said. “Having our own will enable us also to broaden what we are offering so we can do opera and … chamber music, musical theater, jazz, all kinds of cabaret or recital formats as well.”

The opening will launch the 2026-27 season with “Ofrenda,” which is performed in Spanish and English – another feature of the company’s vision for its future. The opera is the brainchild of Jorge Sosa and John de los Santos as part of the Austin Opera’s Residency for Latinx Creatives. 

Alejandra Martinez, one of the residents, said that expanding the language offerings will open up the market and help more consumers connect to the art form.

“If we’re not making the move to say, ‘we’re going to have this speak to you, we’re going to invite you into this world,’ then ultimately we’re to blame,” Martinez said.

Martinez said that opera’s future, monetarily and culturally, rests in its ability to connect its audience to their humanity. 

“The thing that vibrates to make noise ranges in size from like the diameter of like, of like a dime or a quarter. It is a miracle that we speak and we sing,” Martinez said. “How wonderful it is to be human and to be able to do that.”