San Francisco has long been among America's most visionary cities. From the computer mouse and interactive computing to the first widely popular commercial web browser in Netscape, the city has always had one eye on the future. It's no surprise then that San Francisco was an early adopter of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on its streets. That's not to say there hasn't been resistance and that special interests haven't been working overtime to stop "robotaxis", but those forces are losing.
A common complaint about AVs centers on their impact on the labor market. Opponents insist this technology will be a "job killer," putting rideshare drivers out of work and destroying their livelihoods. This fear has fueled proposals in Minneapolis, New Jersey, Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to impose stringent rules on the technology, thus threatening its future. Sometimes that looks like mandating a higher insurance premium for driverless cars. Other times, it means requiring a human driver to sit in the car at all times, or mandating that a certain percentage of trips be completed by human drivers.
These proposals deserve more scrutiny, and evidence is fast emerging that robotaxis leave neither drivers nor consumers worse off.
New data from Gridwise Analytics offers evidence for greater optimism. In San Francisco, data show a marketplace in which every party appears to benefit from AVs. Between Q2 2024 and the second quarter of 2026, Gridwise found that the median prices consumers paid for trips remained flat, while the rest of the country saw a net increase in prices. Drivers were doing fewer trips per hour, yet their quarterly earnings continued to grow. While numerous factors are driving these changes, the data challenge the narrative that AVs and human drivers cannot possibly coexist.