A recurring claim in the AV-skeptic debate is that traffic deaths have not declined in any city where Waymo operates (source).
Resolves YES if, in calendar year 2030, traffic fatalities have NOT declined relative to each city's pre-commercial-launch baseline year in any of the 5 largest Waymo deployment cities.
Resolves NO if at least one such city shows a decline relative to its pre-Waymo baseline.
The 5 cities (locked in at market creation): Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta.
Pre-commercial-launch baseline year: the full calendar year before paid public Waymo service began in that city.
Resolution source: NHTSA FARS data, CY2030 vs each city's baseline year. If FARS final data is unavailable by close, preliminary FARS or city DOT data may be used.
1,000The argument in the post is pretty ridiculous, the proportion of traffic that is AVs is even in the cities that have them is low, so even if AVs did have an impact it wouldn’t be noticeable in the statistics.
According to the stats, there was 1.1 deaths per 100 million miles driven in 2025 https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-deaths-2025-early-estimates-2024-annual.
Through December 2025 Waymo had only driven 170 million driverless miles total. https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
@JaundicedBaboon agreed, but I couldn’t get him to agree to that many falsifiable stats, and this was his main one.