Waymo ride-hailing market share reached 15% of gross bookings in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and 16% in Phoenix, in June, according to estimates from Yipit, a market research firm, figures large enough that researchers now say the effects on human drivers should, in principle, be detectable, even if they remain stubbornly difficult to isolate.
Yipit calculated the shares among Waymo, Uber, and Lyft by examining trips that begin and end inside Waymo’s operating zones. The estimates draw on email receipts from a sample of about 1.5 million active US consumer accounts. The figures represent dollars spent on rides, not the number of trips completed: Waymo’s share of actual rides could be higher or lower depending on how its prices compare with those of Uber and Lyft.
Waymo Ride-Hailing Market Share in Context
The January readings were slightly higher across all three cities (16% in San Francisco, 17% in Los Angeles, and 19% in Phoenix) but Yipit cautions that share can appear to decline as a service expands into new areas where uptake is initially lower. Waymo said in May that it expected to expand its Bay Area footprint by 60 square miles. Despite that caveat, the Waymo ride-hailing market share held in the mid-teens across all three cities through June.
Gad Allon, a Wharton professor who studies the gig economy, told Business Insider that a 15% share constitutes a “serious shock” to the labour market, even though its effect on any individual driver is diluted because drivers also work beyond Waymo’s geofenced operating zones. His own analysis, published on his Wharton/Substack research page, finds that median monthly driver earnings in Los Angeles dropped 18.4% between July 2024 and July 2025, a concrete earnings figure that gives quantitative weight to what had previously been a largely anecdotal concern.
“My initial view is that the impact would not first appear as large numbers of drivers suddenly losing their jobs,” Allon told Business Insider. “Because driver supply is flexible, the earliest effects would likely show up in utilization, longer waits between rides, fewer trips per hour, and possibly more unpaid repositioning.” Utilisation refers to the proportion of a driver’s time online that is spent on paid trips.
Trips per Hour Falling Faster in Autonomous-Vehicle Cities
The trips-per-hour metric is now showing a clear divergence. According to a Gridwise Analytics report covering 500,000 Gridwise users over the year to July 2025, trips per hour declined 5.3% in cities with autonomous vehicles in Q4 2025, versus 2.6% nationwide, nearly twice as fast. Gridwise, described as a ride-hailing data platform, had separately reported declining hourly driver wages in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco (all Waymo operating cities) while the national median rose 1%. Researchers have noted that correlation alone cannot establish robotaxis as the cause.
The slower national decline also points to a pricing dynamic that shapes the competitive pressure. According to a PR Newswire release citing S&P Global projections, scalable autonomous rideshare profitability likely requires pricing near $1 per mile, while traditional human rideshare pricing remains closer to $3.25 per mile. That gap gives robotaxi operators structural room to undercut human-driver platforms on fare, which would pull bookings volume (and, over time, utilisation rates) away from human drivers.
Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy shared Yipit’s figures on X this month when discussing Uber’s competitive position, noting that Uber uses internal tracking for decision-making and offered Yipit’s data as an externally available reference. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told Fast Company in a June profile that his company is recruiting fewer drivers in some cities where autonomous vehicles operate, while also saying more drivers are signing up organically as rider demand grows.
Lyft pointed to prepared remarks by CEO David Risher for the company’s second-quarter earnings call on 6 August. “We believe the future is hybrid and, as AVs scale, the market will expand,” he said, adding that Lyft rides within San Francisco’s AV operating area grew about 20% year over year.
Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute who has studied Uber drivers, told Business Insider that the absence of granular platform data (utilisation rates, wait times) makes displacement hard to measure. Because drivers are independent contractors rather than employees, displacement may never register as a clean employment decline in official statistics. Wells and her co-authors tracked a cohort of 40 Uber drivers over five years and found that the prospect of automation had already shifted driver psychology, with drivers describing their own work as temporary. “Uber drivers kept saying to us, ‘Well, automated vehicles are coming, so they won’t need me anymore,'” she said. The Gridwise Q4 2025 data, showing AV-city trips-per-hour declining at twice the national rate, suggests that psychological shift is now being validated by the numbers.