A stakeholder-informed framework for staged robotaxi authorization in New York City

The transition from bounded robotaxi pilots to broader service in complex cities depends on a credible public authorization pathway that can review evidence, assign accountability, and determine when expansion is justified. Existing research identifies major governance, safety, accessibility, and legitimacy concerns, while offering limited guidance on authorization sequencing, barrier-instrument translation, and the revision of gate conditions after affected stakeholders identify operational failure modes. This paper develops a stage-gated framework for robotaxi authorization in New York City using fuzzy DEMATEL, the Best–Worst Method (BWM), and a Policy-QFD mapping, followed by an independent qualitative review based on 24 semi-structured stakeholder interviews across seven groups. The institutional analysis identifies two principal upstream domains: Policy & Governance and Safety, Assurance & Service Reliability. The interview layer produced 92 participant-level evidence units and showed that some safeguards with modest institutional or QFD weights nevertheless become non-deferrable gate conditions, especially end-to-end accessibility and privacy/security controls. Stakeholder evidence also refined accountability and redress, labor-chain disclosure and transition planning, site- and time-specific curb controls, public-value and neighborhood-burden evaluation, and the granularity of gate evidence. The paper contributes a staged public decision framework and demonstrates how stakeholder-identified failure modes can tighten gate conditions without overwriting the institutional dependency structure.