Total monthly distance traveled by passengers in California’s driverless taxis
What you should know about this indicator
- This indicator tracks the total distance traveled by paying passengers in robotaxi trips operated by licensed services in California, expressed in passenger-kilometers.
- A passenger-kilometer is one kilometer traveled by one passenger. For example, a five-kilometer trip with two passengers equals ten passenger-kilometers. If passengers join or leave during a trip, each segment is counted separately based on the number of passengers in the vehicle.
- Only passenger-carrying trips are included. Empty vehicles traveling between pickups and test rides are excluded.
- Both Cruise and Waymo reported data until October 2023, when Cruise suspended its service following a safety incident. Waymo has been the sole reporter since December 2023.
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Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
The original data reports distance in miles. We converted to kilometers by multiplying by 1.60934.
We summed values across all approved robotaxi carriers operating in California to produce monthly totals. Both Cruise and Waymo reported actual trip data through November 2023. After that, only Waymo data is included, as Cruise suspended its robotaxi service following a safety incident in October 2023. Cruise continued to file regulatory reports with zero trips through at least mid-2024.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Total monthly distance traveled by passengers in California’s driverless taxis”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Edouard Mathieu, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from California Public Utilities Commission. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260331-144750/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.html [online resource] (archived on March 31, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
California Public Utilities Commission (2026) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
California Public Utilities Commission (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Total monthly distance traveled by passengers in California’s driverless taxis” [dataset]. California Public Utilities Commission, “CPUC AV Passenger Service Deployment programs - Quarterly Reports” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260331-144750/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.html (archived on March 31, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/passenger-miles-traveled-self-driving-taxis.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear