The article says that they’ve been preparing for awhile, but they are now looking to start commercial service.
Waymo has had a small fleet of vehicles mapping the streets of LA since at least 2019, but it only began to make preparations for a commercial service in recent months. Aside from mapping, Waymo has been following its traditional playbook of deploying its vehicles in autonomous mode with a human safety driver behind the wheel before transitioning into a commercially available service.