Waymo's self-driving taxis will start using freeways again in Phoenix on July 29, 2026, according to the company's X account and confirmed by Engadget and TechCrunch. Freeway service in Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area will resume "soon," per a Waymo support page.

The return ends a pause that lasted two months. Waymo launched freeway taxi service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix on November 12, 2025, according to Reuters. On May 21, 2026, the company stopped all freeway rides nationwide and paused Atlanta operations entirely amid safety fixes, as Reuters reported. The reason: several incidents where Waymo vehicles drove into sections of freeway that were closed for construction. On June 18, 2026, Waymo recalled nearly 3,900 self-driving taxis in the U.S. because a software problem could cause the vehicles to enter closed construction zones, per Reuters.

Waymo told Engadget it "identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones" and paused highway operations to fix it. The language is calm, but the risk was real. A self-driving car entering an active construction zone at highway speed could cause serious harm. The recall meant the fix required a software update sent to nearly 3,900 vehicles.

Riders in Phoenix who want freeway trips can join an "interest list" in the Waymo app. Once approved, they will be notified they can take freeway rides. Even then, Waymo may still reroute a vehicle away from the highway, citing reasons such as heavy traffic. Riders can check the route and estimated dropoff time before hailing. This step-by-step approach suggests Waymo is being careful about bringing freeway driving back, rather than simply switching it on for everyone at once.

The broader safety picture helps explain that caution. Through March 2026, Waymo has driven 220.6 million miles with no human driver behind the wheel, according to the company's safety data. Its latest safety report covers five areas, including Atlanta for the first time. Compared to human drivers in the same areas, Waymo's system had 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer crashes where airbags deployed, and 82% fewer crashes involving injuries. For people walking, cycling, or riding motorcycles specifically, the numbers were similarly low: 93% fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians, 84% fewer involving cyclists, and 84% fewer involving motorcyclists.

In Atlanta, across more than 5.4 million fully self-driven miles, Waymo recorded 94% fewer airbag-deployment crashes and 86% fewer injury crashes than the human benchmark, with zero crashes causing serious or fatal injuries. Waymo now drives more than 4 million miles every week across its fleet. It estimates its operations prevent one serious-injury-or-worse crash every eight days compared to what human drivers would have done in the same situations. Over the lifetime of its operations, the company estimates 47 fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 305 fewer airbag-deployment crashes, and 707 fewer injury crashes than would be expected from human drivers.

Carol Flannagan, a research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), has publicly endorsed Waymo's safety methodology and the consistency of results across locations. Waymo has also published the criteria it uses to evaluate whether its system is ready for public roads in a paper on arXiv, an open-access research site.

The construction-zone incidents, though, are a different kind of problem from what those crash statistics measure. Waymo's overall safety record is strong when it comes to the outcomes that matter most: serious injuries and fatalities. But the issue that triggered the suspension was not about crash rates. It was about whether the car's software could correctly detect and respond to lane closures and construction barricades while moving at highway speed. Construction zones are especially hard for self-driving systems because they are set up in unpredictable ways, may not have standard signs, and can look completely different from one day to the next.

Waymo's choice to resume with an interest list rather than opening freeways to everyone suggests the company is not yet confident the fix works in every situation. The ability to reroute away from the freeway, even for approved riders, adds another safety net.

Looking ahead, Waymo plans to launch its taxi service in London by the fourth quarter of 2026, per Reuters. Driving in London will mean dealing with traffic on the left side of the road, different road markings, and construction zones the system has never seen before. How the construction-zone fix holds up in that completely new environment will be an early sign of whether the Phoenix restart is a quick local fix or a real, lasting improvement to the software that helps these cars see and understand the road.