While lawmakers in Springfield are still debating legislation for an autonomous vehicle pilot project, Waymo is testing its cars on Chicago streets. The state’s regulatory framework is unclear, but the cars are already out there. Let us set aside that rushed entry for a moment and ask a more fundamental question: Is Waymo truly ready for Chicago?
When I moved to Chicago from my home country of Turkey in 2018, before I started working here as a civil engineer and learning this city that way, all I had was a bicycle. And hope.
Like every immigrant, I needed to earn money without waiting, so I jumped into delivery work. From Logan Square to Lincoln Park and from Hyde Park, where I lived, to the Loop, I learned the veins of this city by turning pedals. My bicycle was stolen twice, but I kept trying to smile through it. Then I got behind the wheel and became a driver. Hard work, no question about it. Demanding, delicate work. I worked as both an editor and an engineer back home, and suddenly taking on these jobs was not easy. But hope keeps a person standing.
I have been an engineer for a long time, but because of Chicago’s public transportation system, I still drive every day. Public transit is unfortunately not safe in many places, and like every Chicagoan, I find myself behind the wheel each morning. So I became friends with the roads. I know by heart where every crack is. That big crack at the corner of Grand Avenue and Columbus Drive, the one that hasn’t been fixed since I arrived, dodging it is a reflex for me.
The way I came to know Chicago’s roads has never changed: by hand, by body, in real time. Changing a tire on the side of the road is just part of life here.
So when I heard that Waymo had started test drives in Chicago, my first thought was not excitement. It was a question. Do these cars really know Chicago?
I ask that because of nature. Every winter, the freeze-thaw cycle cracks the asphalt from within. The wind, the true owner of this city, knocks down utility poles, trees and sometimes traffic signs. The potholes that appear every spring can be so deep that they swallow a bicycle tire or blow out a car tire.
I did not learn this through abstract knowledge. I learned it with my body. When I first arrived, I thought the bumps on DuSable Lake Shore Drive were built on purpose to keep drivers from speeding. It was not until the summer of 2023, when a major DuSable Lake Shore Drive investment finally happened and the road became as smooth as a toll highway, that I understood. But that was the exception, not the rule.
There is a joke everyone in Chicago knows: This city has two seasons, winter and construction. And that joke carries a bitter truth. Infrastructure problems are so chronic that instead of finding quick solutions, we have learned to live with them. And blaming the existing system is too easy, because winter brings its own problems as does construction. On top of all that, the wind brings down poles and trees, and the fact that electrical cables still have not been buried underground is a whole separate issue. These are the root problems that can disrupt traffic at any moment, anywhere.
Waymo is a system that was developed and tested in San Francisco. What does it do in a Chicago winter? In Chicago wind? When it needs to make a split-second decision on an ice-covered road? When it needs to read a lane marking that is half collapsed? When it decides to pass through a fallen tree branch? When it needs to detect a new pothole left by the previous week’s storm or a stretch of road still covered in shattered glass from a blown windshield that the wind and rain have not yet cleaned away?
These questions are not technical. They are safety questions. And the answer they require is not an algorithm. It is experience.
Let’s be honest. It is true that autonomous vehicles will threaten the livelihoods of thousands of immigrant drivers. But that cannot be a reason to try to stand in front of technology. Technology is inevitable. That is not what should be debated.
What should be debated is this: Which technology, for which city and when?
Waymo’s entry into Chicago could become a success story. But only if it truly comes to know this city. Not just through map data, but through that crack at Grand and Columbus, through the unpredictable ice on DuSable Lake Shore Drive, through the closed lanes in the middle of construction season on the famous Interstate 90/94 that connects the city to the airport and gets only partially repaired every summer.
I learned this city on my bicycle, behind the wheel, living it from the inside, every single day. It took years.
I wonder how long it will take Waymo to complete that same learning. And I wonder who is safe on Chicago streets while that process unfolds.
Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union.
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