By the Coral Gables Gazette editorial board

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a Jaguar I-Pace pulled up near Coral Gables Wayside Park off of Red Road. No driver sat behind the wheel. A passenger climbed in, pressed a button, and the vehicle moved through residential streets — past tree canopies, red-tiled roofs and the familiar intersections of a neighborhood built nearly a century ago — and delivered him to the Biltmore Hotel without incident. Nothing dramatic happened. That is precisely the point.

After years of testing in the Miami area, Waymo opened its fully autonomous ride service to public riders in January. Its 60-square-mile service area explicitly includes Coral Gables. The vehicles are here. They are operating on city streets today. And there has been no formal public briefing, that we know of, before the City Commission outlining how Coral Gables intends to respond to their presence.

The revolution did not feel like a revolution. That is the most important civic observation to emerge from the Gazette’s firsthand account of a Waymo ride in Coral Gables. The experience was unremarkable. The car behaved. The ride felt ordinary. And therein lies the governance challenge: technology that feels routine has a way of embedding itself before public institutions visibly address it.

We do not oppose autonomous vehicles. Waymo reports that across more than 100 million fully autonomous miles, its vehicles have been involved in significantly fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers, including reductions in pedestrian and cyclist injury incidents. Those figures are the company’s and should be understood in that context, but they are not trivial. If autonomous systems ultimately improve roadway safety, that will be a public good.

What they do not deserve is a civic free pass.

In January — the same month Waymo opened its Miami service to the public — one of its vehicles stopped on the Venetian Causeway during the evening commute, backing up traffic and forcing drivers to maneuver into oncoming lanes. Federal regulators have also opened investigations into certain Waymo incidents in other states, including school bus compliance questions. These inquiries are ongoing. They establish that this technology operates in complex, real-world environments where edge cases matter.

Florida law narrows what Coral Gables can do. Florida Statute 316.85 prohibits local governments from imposing taxes, fees or operational requirements on autonomous vehicles or automated driving systems. The city cannot require Waymo to obtain a permit. It cannot restrict where the vehicles operate. The Legislature made that policy choice before most residents knew these vehicles would be sharing their streets.

What the city retains — and what it must exercise — is the authority to prepare.

The first question is whether Coral Gables police officers and firefighters have completed Waymo’s first responder training — and whether the city is prepared to confirm that publicly. Residents deserve clarity that those responsible for emergency response understand how to approach and manage incidents involving a vehicle with no human driver.

The second question is what guidance the city has provided to residents. Coral Gables maintains a substantial digital reach and communications infrastructure capable of rapid outreach. Those channels are well suited to explain how autonomous vehicles function, what to do if one stops unexpectedly in a travel lane, and how incidents involving these vehicles are handled. Providing that information is prudent public safety communication.

The third question is whether city leadership has requested a formal, on-the-record briefing from Waymo now that public service is active. The city cannot regulate the company’s operations. It can request transparency. A public briefing would clarify service boundaries, emergency protocols and reporting mechanisms. It would also demonstrate that Coral Gables intends to engage emerging technology deliberately rather than silently.

There is a pattern worth naming. Ride-sharing services arrived before curb management policy caught up. Short-term rentals expanded before regulatory frameworks were fully formed. In each case, the technology felt ordinary before governance was visible. The result was reactive policymaking under pressure.

Autonomous vehicles operate at a different scale and with different stakes. In rare edge cases, the decisions made by an automated driving system carry life-and-safety consequences. That reality warrants attention.

Coral Gables prides itself on the quality of its civic life — its walkability, its public spaces, its institutional memory. The presence of autonomous vehicles on its streets may, over time, complement that identity. But receiving this shift without public discussion or documented preparation falls short of the standard the city sets in other domains of governance.

The future arrived quietly, first through testing and now through public rides. The question before city leaders is whether Coral Gables will meet it prepared — or whether governance will once again arrive after the technology has already become too ordinary to examine.