Waymo is slowly adding highway routes to its service area more than two months after the company stopped driving on these high-speed roads due to the behavior of its robotaxis near construction zones.

Waymo announced Wednesday in a publish in X that would gradually add highway routes, starting with Phoenix, the company’s first driverless transportation market. More cities, including Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, would follow in the coming days, a Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch.

In an emailed statement, Waymo said it was “resume[ing]highway operations throughout its service area, including areas under construction, after implementing software updates designed to improve performance in highway construction zones.”

Those software updates included improved scene recognition and routing, according to the company.

The highway pause — and restart — comes amid increased scrutiny on Waymo and other robotaxi operators, particularly over how these autonomous vehicles behave in certain high-traffic situations and around emergency services. Earlier this week, Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.) proposed a bill that would direct federal regulators to set minimum national safety standards for autonomous vehicle operators following a series of incidents in which autonomous vehicles blocked ambulances and fire trucks, entered active crime scenes, and failed to recognize safety signs such as traffic cones and flares.

Waymo began offering robotaxi rides using freeways in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles in November 2025, a critical expansion for the company as it sought to attract passengers with shorter travel times and faster access to airports. He would later add highway routes in Miami.

The expansion proved popular, and when it suddenly disappeared in May, users took to social media to ask why. At the time, Waymo told TechCrunch that it wanted to improve the performance of its robotaxis in construction zones, noting that it was in the process of integrating “recent technical learnings into our software and expects to resume these routes soon.”

Weeks later, Waymo voluntarily recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis after identifying at least 13 cases of its robotaxis driving on sections of highways that were closed for construction, according to a filing in June with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A Waymo spokesperson said no injuries or collisions were reported in connection with these events. However, after reviewing the incidents, the company said it decided to temporarily restrict highway operations.

This was Waymo’s sixth recall of its robotaxis. Previous recalls included software fixes after its robotaxis drove through flooded roads and behaved illegally around school buses.