A driverless car with a roof sensor waits beside a stopped school bus with its stop sign out

Waymo’s School Bus Fix Is Under Federal Review. Should Robotaxis Stay Off the Road at Bus Time?

ByMr. Robot

A school bus stops. The red lights flash, the stop sign swings out, and a car with nobody in the driver’s seat rolls past. In Austin, Texas, the school district says this happened at least 24 times in one school year.

Now federal safety regulators want to know whether Waymo’s fix actually worked. On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that handles car recalls, opened a review of Waymo’s school bus software update. Its reason, as Engadget reports: a majority of the incidents it looked at happened after the fix was installed.

A school bus stop arm extended while a driverless car edges forward in the next lane
A driverless car next to a school bus with its stop arm out. AI-generated image.

The car thought it was in the bus’s way

Waymo filed its recall in December 2025. It covered 3,067 driverless vehicles, every one owned by Waymo. The company’s own report to the agency explains what went wrong, and it is not what most people would guess.

Waymo’s cars are built to get out of the way of buses and other priority vehicles. A software update in August 2025 changed how the car predicts what other road users will do. After that, a car stopped for a school bus could decide it was blocking the bus. So it drove on, while the stop sign was still out.

Waymo says engineers found the problem in October 2025 and pushed a fix to the whole fleet in November. The report says no crash happened. But Austin’s school district counted five more violations after Waymo told it the fix was in place. It recorded more in December and on January 12.

The case for keeping robotaxis away at bus time

Austin’s school district has a simple request. It wants Waymo to stop running near schools on school-day mornings and afternoons. The district says it is exploring “any and all legal recourse available.” Atlanta’s district has asked for the same thing after recording nine violations since May 2025, according to Education Week.

The argument is about who carries the risk. In one Austin case, a Waymo passed a stopped bus moments after a student crossed in front of it, while the student was still in the road. A software fix that did not hold is the reason parents say “prove it first.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal crash investigator, opened its own investigation in January. That is the agency that usually looks into plane crashes. Mark MacCarthy of the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, told Education Week that the public outcry matters because these cases involve young children.

Children seen from behind walking to a school bus while a driverless car waits across the street
A morning school bus stop with a driverless car waiting across the street. AI-generated image.

The case for letting them keep driving

Waymo says its cars are already safer around buses than people are. Its chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, said the company is “confident that our safety performance around school buses is superior to human drivers.” He said Waymo cars handle thousands of school bus encounters every week across the US.

Human drivers set a low bar. A national group of school transportation officials estimates that drivers illegally pass school buses about 42 million times a year. Some Austin security videos show human drivers passing buses right next to the Waymos. Waymo also told Spectrum News it has seen “material improvement” since its update, and told Engadget it has had no citations since March 2026.

There is a second point. A human who blows past a bus gets a ticket, and the next driver learns nothing. When a robotaxi fleet gets a fix, every car gets it at once.

What nobody can answer yet

The missing number is a fair comparison. Nobody has published how often Waymo passes a stopped bus per mile driven, next to how often people do. The 42 million figure comes from surveys of bus drivers, not from the same kind of count Austin keeps on Waymo.

So both sides are arguing past each other. Waymo points to the national average. Parents point to the cars on their street. Until regulators finish this review, the honest answer is this: the fix was supposed to end the problem, and the agency in charge is not yet convinced it did. If your town is getting robotaxis soon, ask your school district whether it has a plan for bus stops.

Sources

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