After years of negotiations and false starts, Waymo is now allowed to operate a robotaxi service to and from San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The company owned by Alphabet said in a blog post Thursday it will begin offering access to SFO to a select number of riders before offering it to all customers in the coming months.

Pickups and drop-offs take place at the SFO Rental Car Center, accessible via AirTrain. Waymo said it plans to serve additional airport locations in the future.

Waymo’s SFO victory comes as the company faces criticism and concerns about safety in some of the cities it operates in. Waymo revealed Thursday that it is one of them robotaxis hit a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating the incident on January 23, where the child sustained minor injuries. So is Waymo interrogated by NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board over its illegal robotaxis behavior around school buses.

Access to airports, and SFO in particular, is critical to Waymo’s business model, which relies on geographic scale and high ridership.

“Serving rides to and from San Francisco International Airport delivers one of the most requested features for our riders and further deepens our relationship with the city,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a statement.

The company accelerated its plans last year, launching new cities, increasing the size of its fleet, and adding freeways where it operates. Waymo robotaxis currently serves most of the San Francisco Bay Area and down into Silicon Valley, where it has access to the San Jose Airport. It also operates in parts of Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, and most of Phoenix, including curbside service in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is an airport in the United States.

Waymo’s push to operate at SFO took years. Tried it and failed to obtain a permit in 2023 on the SFO map, a first step in bringing his robotaxis there. Let’s do it right away the negotiation is rebooted with the city and airport authority and was granted a permit in March 2025 that would allow it to map SFO with some data-sharing strings attached, according to language in the agreement seen by TechCrunch at the time.

By September, the SFO and Waymo signed a testing and operations pilot permit, bringing the company closer commercial operation at the airport.