Robotaxi Firms Are Buying Up the Garages Before the Votes

The leases are outrunning the laws

Robotaxi operators are signing depot leases faster than city councils pass laws. This year alone, Lyft, Uber, Waymo and Zoox took nearly 1M SF of industrial space to store, clean, charge and repair fleets, against a combined 830K SF across all of 2022 through 2025, in single-source Cushman & Wakefield figures reported by Bisnow on 28 September 2026↗ ¹. Tenants keep their names off the deals, brokers say, so landlords do not raise rents and opponents do not mobilize ¹.

The leases reach cities where none of the four can operate

The leasing has not stayed inside legal markets. Operators are hunting 50K to 100K SF in Long Island City and the South Bronx, where none of the four can legally operate ¹⁸. The named 2026 deals add up to 196K SF: Lyft's FlexDrive broke ground in April on an 80K SF Waymo depot near Nashville's airport↗ ⁵; Uber holds a 50K SF Houston depot with a dedicated charging pit stop ahead of a mid-2027 launch ⁷; Zoox signed 34K SF in Hayward, beside its 219K SF plant (single-source) ¹; and Waymo is building a 32K SF service center in Northeast Washington↗, across from a Metrobus depot ².

Waymo's pitch: tens of millions and hundreds of jobs

Waymo told the D.C. Council it has "committed tens of millions of dollars↗" to service centers in Wards 5 and 7, and that its local workforce will grow from dozens to hundreds ³. In Nashville, roughly 70 depot workers, about half of them former Lyft drivers, charge and wipe down the cars two to three times a day ⁶. The cars cannot clean themselves.

The other side calls it a job killer

"It's a job killer. Make no mistake about it," SEIU Local 32BJ's Jaime Contreras testified at a 13 July 2026 hearing that drew 81 witnesses across 17 panels↗ ³⁴. New York has already ruled: Mayor Zohran Mamdani let Waymo's testing permit lapse on 31 March 2026, and Governor Kathy Hochul pulled a statewide pilot proposal a month after proposing it ⁸. Religious groups and unions plan a 6 October 2026 rally against the D.C. bill (single-source) ¹.

The choke point is the power queue

A depot is not a parking lot; it is a substation application. ConEd hookups at depot scale take years and are not provided on spec ¹. Each lease is a bet that a utility queue, a council vote and public trust land in that order. The federal version of that bet is due 30 September 2026, when Tesla must show NHTSA, under oath, how a no-pedal Cybercab is legal to sell; Zoox took the slower route and won an exemption capped at 2,500 vehicles a year ⁹.

A 200-car cap, a 15-cent tax and a 2028 start

Ward 6 council member Charles Allen's bill caps fleets at 200 vehicles until 1 January 2028 and funds driver retraining with a 15-cent-per-mile tax ³. A final vote could come this fall or winter, and fares cannot start before 2028 in any case ². Nashville's depot opens in October with cars already in service ⁶. Washington's opens toward a vote that may not land before winter.