Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta are fed up with Waymo robotaxis.
The Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union is claiming that drivers have reported lower pay, longer waits between rides, and fewer fares since Waymo began offering its service in the city last June, Axios reports.
As such, the union is calling on city and state leaders to curb Waymo’s expansion — and to consider some measures to easen its disruptive effects on their livelihoods.
Liza Ramsey of the ARDU proposed a particularly bold measure to Atlanta City Council members on Wednesday. Rideshare drivers, Ramsey claimed, wanted to create a robotaxi impact fee of between $0.50 to $1.00 that would be added to each ride.
The money from this would go into a “driver transition fund” to help drivers find a new calling with job training and other assistive programs.
“If corporations profit from replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute to helping those workers transition to the next opportunity,” Ramsey said, per Axios.
The union also wants to ban robotaxis from picking up people from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Airports, historically, have always been a reliable place to pick up passengers.
Ramsey said that the union hasn’t collected any hard data proving the decline in income, but cited widespread complaints from drivers who share screenshots of their earnings in a group chat.
Since launching in June 2025, Waymo’s Atlanta service has logged more than 5.4 million miles of fully autonomous rides. (It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, with residents complaining about the vehicles’ strange habit of congregating in suburban neighborhoods and repeatedly plunging into flooded stretches of road.) It also hasn’t had an antagonistic relationship with Uber: to help it get a foothold in the area, Waymo partnered with the rideshare app, allowing passengers to hail a robotaxi directly through its app as they would a human driver.
It’s not the only city where Uber and Lyft drivers are disgruntled about automation. In January, rideshare drivers protested against Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, demanding tighter regulation of the industry. Similar protests have taken place in New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
ARDU is also not the only union going on the offensive against autonomous vehicles. Earlier this month, the California branch of the Teamsters union sued state lawmakers for pushing out new regulations friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry, which they allege didn’t consider the devastating impact of self-driving trucks on their jobs.
More on self-driving vehicles: Former Lyft Drivers Now Doing Menial Tasks for Their Waymo Overlords
