The DC Robotaxi Bill Is Really Four Fights at Once

Under the Jobs-Versus-Independence Fight Sits Industrial Policy

For more than seven hours on July 13, 81 witnesses across 17 panels filed through a hearing room in the Wilson Building to tell the DC Council what driverless taxis would do to their city. Teamsters, SEIU 32BJ and transit-union members in the seats called the bill a job killer written for Silicon Valley billionaires; blind and disabled riders called the same technology an independence they had never reliably had; Waymo pledged hundreds of local jobs, and Uber warned that a driverless-only law would hand its rival a monopoly. The measure on the table, the Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026, would give the District Department of Transportation something it has never run: authority to permit fully driverless commercial service, hedged with seven-figure fees, a per-mile tax, an eight-ward service-equity mandate and a fund for displaced drivers. Under the hearing's jobs-versus-independence binary sits the machinery, DC trying to shape how a safety-critical robotic system enters its streets using the levers of industrial and labor policy, at a moment when the federal government is pressing it to move faster and the technology's own record, gathered in other cities because the District has none, keeps failing in the structured edge cases the crash statistics do not capture. That the guardrails may be aimed at the revenue and liability the bill can price rather than at the failure modes regulators are acting on is our reading of the record below, not a charge we level at anyone.

• The Bill. Councilmember Charles Allen (Ward 6), who chairs the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, announced the measure on April 23 and formally introduced Bill 26-0684 on May 1 with Brooke Pinto (Ward 2) and Matthew Frumin (Ward 3). It amends DC's 2012 Autonomous Vehicle Act, which today allows testing only with a safety operator behind the wheel, to let DDOT permit fully driverless testing and then commercial passenger and goods service; the Bowser administration has issued no driverless permits, so this is net-new authority, not a tweak.
• The Hearing. The Committee on Transportation and the Environment held its public hearing on Monday, July 13, at the Wilson Building; it ran more than seven hours and drew 81 witnesses across 17 panels. The Teamsters, SEIU 32BJ, ATU Local 689 and the machinists rallied against the bill and recruited Uber and Lyft drivers to testify, while the American Council of the Blind and Waymo testified in favor; the bill remains in committee, with no markup or Council vote scheduled.
• The Guardrails. The design is the story: a $1 million application fee plus a $5 million permit against about $5,500 for a human ride-hail license, a 15-cent-per-mile tax, a 200-vehicle cap per company, a 250,000-in-DC-mile testing wall and no commercial service before January 1, 2028. It bolts on an eight-ward comparable-service mandate, a $5 million liability-insurance floor separate from the permit fee, and an Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Fund split evenly between public transit and a workforce fund for displaced rideshare drivers.
• The Fight. Both sides are real welfare claims on different populations. Teamsters Local 639 president Bill Davis called the bill's so-called guardrails a failure to protect middle-class professional drivers from Big Tech, and SEIU 32BJ's Jaime Contreras called it a job killer; disability advocates testified that robotaxis grant mobility independence; Uber, straddling the field, opposed the driverless-only design and lobbied for a mandate that AVs also carry human drivers, warning the bill would hand Waymo a de facto monopoly; and the DC Chamber of Commerce backed the bill while urging the Council to remove the 200-vehicle cap and lower fees.
• The Record. DC has no driverless service yet, so the Council is legislating on other cities' incident data, and that record is unsettling in a specific way. Twelve days before the hearing, NHTSA called driverless interference with first responders a functional insufficiency and said it would schedule meetings with developers by month's end to hear fixes; a Waymo struck a 9-year-old in a Santa Monica school zone; the NTSB found a Waymo passed a stopped Austin school bus after its remote assistant answered no to the car's school-bus query; and empty Waymos circled an Atlanta cul-de-sac at dawn, eight of them getting stuck.