As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone.
Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in.
So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking.
Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?".
it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost.
It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.
Sarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about setting up a cooling station in a town square during a heat wave, and someone condescendingly commented "god, I love how europeans will do anything but install air conditioning." It's just not that easy and one doesn't preclude the other
You're avoiding the point and wrong in assuming the analogy is incorrect. The US has around 1/5th the heat related deaths that Europe does despite being hotter, more often and mostly of European background. https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-w...
One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough.
Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated
The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
It's not a matter of the size of the country, but the density of the metro areas: See Spain, a low density country with high density cities. The US' high suburb, low density metro design is the one thing ruining transit
Public transit is at its most useful and effective connecting dense, walkable locations. That's why it's so great in the world's best cities. The problem is a metro like DFW doesn't have the density to have said good public transit. If anything, many American cities have more bus lines and light rail lines than they would if you asked an European transit authority to decide where to build.
Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail. There is no way that traditional forms of public transit could outclass it. This is Waymo's big moneymaker: public contracts. The bus drivers and taxi drivers unions will fight it, but smaller towns looking to build denser housing and make their public spaces more walkable will happily adopt this as policy, and it will eventually spread to the bigger cities.
> A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail
[citation needed]
Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
You also can't do inter-city train trips in most of the US either. Inter-city autonomous car trips will almost certainly happen before the trains arrive.
I agree with you, but the car is embedded deep into the American DNA, mostly because it perfectly feeds into the dream of single family homeownership. I've come to the conclusion that the cities where public transit works got lucky and invested into it at the right time in history. I would love to be able to take a comfortable train to suburbs an hour away, but most people think that's freedom-limiting and won't vote to pay the taxes for it.
It's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.
Waymo is more until you factor in the tip for Uber. Ive also found that waymo is a lot more correct in estimating time to pickup in SF. Because Uber/lyft drivers can turn you down (presumably) I find that "your Uber can be here in 4 minutes" when I open the app turns into "but it will actually be 20"
Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.
Yea, it not that most uber/lyft drivers are bad (most are good), it’s just that all Waymos provide a good experience.
It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.
I don't have to listen to the driver argue with his girlfriend across the entire span of the bay bridge, I don't have to worry the uber reeks of week (or worse, cigarette) smell on the way to an interview etc etc. Given the choice I will choose driverless every time.
This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product).
Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normie people wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
Safety is normally ok in an uber but in a Waymo it’s much higher. Whether I’m talking about driving safety or personal safety from the/for the driver, you pick. But generally you can charge more for a safer product.
This comes up in conversation at office events, every woman in our office always agrees they will choose waymo over uber every time, due to the lack of (presumably male) driver.
They absolutely will. I'm a very social person but when I'm going home from a date with my girlfriend I always want a Waymo just because I don't want a 3rd person involved. And sometimes I'm having a bad day and don't want to have to make small talk. And it's nice that I can talk on the phone without disturbing someone.
but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
As someone who has lived in and around Dallas for a long time, parking is a constant source of tension, going in both directions of not having enough and having too much. It's a massive cost factor as well.
The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.
I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.
these things will be evaluated based on the net benefit such a service would provide. more people having affordable commute to dallas would end up increasing the net benefit and value that dallas has.
cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc
I'd go further and say that in most smaller cities that try to run a bus service but just don't have the ridership to support adequate service they would be better off just subsidizing Ubers or Waymos or whatever is available. Pare down the bus service to only the heavily used routes and run them way more often.
100%. Most bus routes are terribly expensive to run, multiple drivers, benefits and then the physical equipment. It would be interesting if you could work out a subsidy program for low income riders.
This is already the case. A lot of transit agencies have a vanpools, rideshares, and ridehales for their low frequency areas. I used one recently in Tacoma because my ferry was late and the bus from the ferry arrives only ones an hour.
I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.
So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure?
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.
Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways.
[Edit] I am serious.
Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public.
No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.
Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.
This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.
In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.
The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.
The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).
So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.
It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing
... in the US
> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing
Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.
> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units
Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.
Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.
Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.
And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.
It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.
But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
I can't change, nor can a group of politicians change how broken the US land use and transportation policies are. But what can be done is leasing a car that can drive itself with minimal labor for $100k over 5 years that unlocked more housing to get built.
You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.
People don't car share in the US, and don't want to.
Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.
Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.
For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.
Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers
Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing".
All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.
Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas
Right now the average car occupancy during the rush hour is ~1.5 persons per car. By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity. This will completely resolve the congestion in the majority of metro areas, even with induced traffic.
No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
There's significant trouble with routing, delays, and reliability: A self driving car does nothing naturally different that a cheaper Taxi, and you can see the lack of popularity of the carpooling offerings Lyft and Uber had.
Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.
Uber Pool in SF was awesome when it was truly 50% of the cost. But they started hiking up the price (because they could) until it was maybe ~20% less than the full ride. And then COVID happened.
> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.
That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)
Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.
And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.
> By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity
Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.
Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.
So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
Cars give you point to point access. In Seattle I have to decide today whether to spend $100+ on an Uber that will take 25 minutes to get from SeaTac to Ballard, or spend $3.25 to use light rail plus bus that will take at least one hour and 30 minutes. And to think that Seattle is just one of the better transit cities in the USA.
The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.
> Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to?
Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.
The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.
But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.
> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.
The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.
So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.
That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value..
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
The actual savings are minimal at best, as demand for cars is all about peak, and how the peak travels typically in similar directions. You see this in trains. In downtown SF, you will find trains parked near the stadium all day, because there is no,practical use for them 9p% of the day. Most of the fleet is idle most of the day, and it would not be any better if it's a self driving car. You'd have a much better chance if trips were random, but they absolutely aren't.
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
An unused car parked isn't causing traffic jams on the highway. It's irrelevant to my comment that AVs increase traffic, not decrease traffic. I agree reducing parking needs is a benefit to AVs, but arguing it will reduce congestion is ignoring extremely basic traffic concepts.
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term.
There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.
To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
I actually hate the term affordable housing because you're right, its not affordable. The wood, concrete, roof, and mechanical system costs about the same all things considered whether you're renting for $5k/mo or $500/mo. I make the same point it should be called subsidized housing too.
> Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?
I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
The point is that some people have other options. Personally I will always choose to go where I want, when I want, in the privacy of my own vehicle. Even if Waymo were completely free I'd still choose those things, and I am thankful I have the option to choose.
Good for you, and I fully respect other people making choices like that. I don't believe that you should be forced into a situation that makes you use waymo despite your wishes, and I believe that you should be able to opt out (in case you want to).
Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?
If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?
"huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Most affordable housing is owned and operated by non-profit organizations or entities, most of which are very small.
plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.
How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.
People seem so used to it now. I love them, I think they're probably one of the most exciting tech I've used in the last ten years. They're also like magical little rescue pods when socially overwhelmed in a busy city.
the easiest way to understand their value is to be a pedestrian. it is insane how quickly you realize how safe and careful they are vs. humans. the "bugs" with getting stuck in intersections and stuff like that means very little to me if I can bike or cross a crosswalk with confidence
Realistically it's "too much 'environmental' review", aka NIMBYs killing any project that will actually implement good public transit because it will ruin the view from their kitchen
Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.
> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.
I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.
But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)
You're probably right about comparative costs. But the problem of getting to an autonomous bus will remain a significant barrier to public transportation use.
My neighborhood is close to the city center. Even so, bus service is very sparse, recently reduced to just twice a day. In addition walking to bus stops is long and difficult, or even impossible, for many elderly or disabled residents.
I envision a Waymo-like car service transporting people to/from destinations or if it's more practical, a transit center. I concur car services wouldn't be the cheapest option but may well be the most effective.
Nope. Fixed routes have chaos. You would have the same problem, converging on fsd. It’s the same reason Waymo isn’t deployed everywhere now. Not to mention buses are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than a car and would be slower for any given median occupant compared to a car.
They're also covered in cameras the police have access to, which have been used to track down legal protestors in the past. That's why there was a spate of people setting them on fire a few months ago. Basically, every Waymo car is a Flock camera.
Stop spreading FUD. The police do not in any meaningful way "have access" to Waymo cameras.
They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.
> Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.
That is the opposite of reassuring, because here are the stats for those processes as a whole (just ‘requests for user information’, not broken down by data type or Google product). Currently at 84% accepance rate i.e. the ‘process’ is a formality lol: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
I don't know what to tell you. The subpoena system has been around for a VERY long time before Google even existed. You seem to be unfamiliar with it so I'd encourage you to read up before you call it a "formality."
This is not some newfangled shiny thing. If you hold records that are important to a court case you can be forced to give them up by court order. This is true regardless of who "you" happens to be. If police "have access" to a Waymo, it's only because they also "have access" to your phone, your medical records, your car rental history, etc., etc.
So they do have access after all—just have to ask nicely.
That process is fine, the best we have.
The problem is having roving surveillance vehicles driving around everywhere. I see a couple of them every day on my walk in a mostly residential area.
The addition of facial recognition is trivial if not already implemented. Can be done after the fact. The tradeoff is catching an occasional criminal while enabling all sorts of abuse from the powers that be.
More like: When an entity (including a corp like Waymo and you as a random person alike) has information (such as camera footage), then that information can be subpoenaed.
Even when you've got your own camera on your own front porch making recordings on your own hard drive using your own isolated network: There is are long-established legal processes by which you can be ordered to hand over [a subset of] those recordings.
Neither Waymo nor you, yourself, are exceptional to these processes.
I live very close to LAX, and we have hundreds of Waymos in our area. At first i was a little weary, and kinda weirded out by all of them.
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
>and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
Would we apply this same logic to Tesla Autopilot?
As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.
I'm sure we could, but since vehicles using Tesla FSD require human supervision almost everywhere and Tesla is aggressive about getting drivers in autopilot-related crashes to sign NDAs the comparison is kind of moot.
I'm under the impression (worth a check) that we do have verifiable safety statistics and that Waymos are significantly safer than Teslas at this point?
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Not really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly tested in the area it is being deployed. Whereas the Tesla Autopilot I believe can work in pretty much any area, so it may have more potential issues that come up.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
> It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second.
Per The Guardian:
“Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”
“The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
I kinda feel like "It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second" means it is still Autopilot's fault. It either needed to alert and hand-off control to the user well before the situation got bad- or stick with control. Getting into a bad situation and just handing off control is the worst possible way to do things. The human needs time to update their situational awareness, the Tesla needs to explain what is causing its concern to the human, etc. If it can't do that effectively- and quickly enough in the pre-accident moments- then it needs to not be used at all because it is more dangerous than just a human driving on their own. 20 years ago I did robot-human driving collaboration experiments for the US Army and I can tell you based on our experiments this is a really hard problem, but those experiments are why Tesla's entire approach has seemed suspect to me from the beginning.
It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.
To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.
And if anything, I'd expect machines to have faster reflexes than humans. The Medium article is walled off, but I found another source[1]:
"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."
Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".
> Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.
(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).
In SF, there's a crosswalk on a street near me where cars regularly go 35 mph, so they rarely stop for pedestrians. A few days ago, I was waiting on the sidewalk to cross, and a Waymo stopped. I was so surprised, at first I thought it was letting someone out. It took a few seconds to realize that no, it was stopping for me to cross the street.
I took one to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. Chaotic traffic environment: lots of cars, cones, people directing traffic, pedestrians everywhere. It did great.
Whenever I visit San Francisco I get the sense that these robo-taxis are nothing but public transit for those who are willing and able to spend extra money.
I would not compare the user experience to drivers, or the safety record to private cars. I would compare the user experience and the safety record to human driven taxis, buses, light rail, and metro. I am curious if the rider experience is actually any better then taking the M train from the Castro to SF state or the 49 bus between the Mission and Geary. The latter is certainly cheaper, and orders of magnitude more efficient.
If the train goes exactly where you want to go, I would always say take the train. It's spacious and clean.
But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.
There is a reason I picked the 49 as my example. When I lived there 15 years ago, the busses were lacking to say the least. Extremely slow, got stuck in traffic, crowded, etc.
Since the BRT lane on Van Ness, taking the 49 is more like taking a more shaky Muni train honestly. Frequent enough that it doesn’t get crowded, and it doesn’t get stuck in traffic, meaning much faster ride. As San Francisco builds more of these bus lanes, the case for the robo-taxis is only going to get weaker.
It's very interesting, because on one side we have clear data showing that autonomous cars at the Waymo level are safer than humans.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to novel situations" is probably the biggest blocker for people to trust them enough for widespread deployment. I'd love to see one of these things drive on a poorly mapped dirt road up in the mountains, for instance (I'm not saying it can't -- I just mean I would personally love to see how it can adapt to that kind of situation)
> I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
That is not the way human beings typically evaluate risks. 'Acceptable risks' are more about psychology and not a statistical calculation. A self driving car that is twice as safe as the human average would be considered an unacceptable risk.
Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.
I don't think that human beings factor the rate of injury or death in at all, because human beings are notoriously bad with expected values from extreme conditions.
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, they won't care. The bar is "safe enough for very few people to have a bad experience." If you take 10 robotaxi rides in a row and they all go flawlessly your subjective interpretation of the risk will be that there isn't any.
I feel confident saying this because if you die in the US to anything other than old age, it was almost certainly a car crash. Despite this, most people don't think twice before getting in a car.
> humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
That's an odd claim. Human failures are uncorrelated, but the Waymos all running the same software must be expected to fail in the same way, in the situations in which they fail. Which is why they often make the news; one Waymo stuck soon sees many of its brethren join it.
Don't humans fail in the same way too, broadly speaking? Wouldn't it depend on how you categorize failure?
If a Waymo failed because it missed a stop sign, and then another Waymo failed because it was confused about some strange markings on the road, is that not failing "the same way" in the same sense that a person failing to yield or driving drunk?
Statistics is still the most reliable indicator, because you can’t really tell if a situation is “novel”. How novel is novel? I doubt even Waymo knows for sure.
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
My understanding is that they only operate in areas they’ve had approved and pre-mapped out for them though. Practically I don’t think the scenario you’ve described would ever happen, but I too would like to see it (I suspect they wouldn’t handle it well).
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
IDK, I've been in the car with someone when they just up and up drove off the road because they failed to notice that there was a corner - and that's a sober human. Another time, someone else, they rounded a corner, saw a tractor in the other lane, and were so surprised that they hit a tree. My mother has totalled six cars - she insists it was someone else's fault every time, but the statistics are somewhat damning. My wife's driving has given me haemmorhoids, I clench so fucking hard. Blind corners at twice the speed limit, looks over her shoulder to talk to passengers, and I constantly find myself buying wing mirrors, fenders, headlights, body panels, hubcaps, and anything else she can break off on traffic, rocks, or street furniture. Well, I did until someone finally took her license away from her for a year.
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
> meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
When a human driver messes up, there's a person to hold responsible. When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible? If the human messes up to the point they are no longer allowed to drive, that person is no longer on the streets to cause more mistakes. When a robot car messes up, are all of the other cars pulled off the streets as well until the glitch is fixed? Every robot car is essentially the same driver.
While we hold humans financially responsible for all accidents, we don’t hold them personally responsible in every case. Most accidents end with no arrests or even tickets. If your hand slips on the steering wheel, you don’t go to jail.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
Don't we have automated systems all around the world with the same element at play? Elevators? Trains/Subways that are autonomous, robotic lawn mowers, self-driving little delivery vehicles on sidewalks, all kinds of automated machines in factories that kill people, etc...
I feel like you could come up with long lists of cases where there is no direct human to blame. Someone may be at fault down the chain, but nobody who was directly controlling the machine. Just like if a mechanic screws up my brakes and I end up crashing, it wasn't directly me who caused the crash, even though I was sitting in the seat.
Why would it work any differently than any other category of product or service? If you’re rich you can sue them, if not you’re fucked.
Unless there’s a very bad and widespread issue. Then you join a class action and get $24 on a visa giftcard you can’t figure out how to redeem and then forget about.
On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.
Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.
> autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside
If a human makes a mistake, we give them the liability to own up to their mistakes, and carry the costs.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
We have a much higher level of tolerance for things that benefit us while posing a risk to others ("should my own car have FSD") than we do for things that benefit others while posing a risk to us ("should Waymos be allowed in my neighborhood").
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
Tesla, in particular, has given those skeptics so much ammunition to be mad at. The delay isn't purely due to luddites but also somewhat driven by prior obvious bad actions by self-driving car companies.
It's also likely that if a switchover is aggressively pursued it'll cause a massive social backlash and likely evolve into a culture war issue.
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
We don’t tolerate machine incidents because who is liable if an accident occurs? A company with a $4.6 trillion market cap? They’re not a legal opponent any of us really want to take on.
Lawyers are salivating at the possibility of suing Waymo if they ever make a mistake. Much better to be hit by a Waymo (or a Tesla Robotaxi) than the typical uninsured, "judgement proof", human driver.
Exactly, imagine the huge sums of liability insurance Google is carrying to make payouts when the worst-case scenario happens. That financial burden is a prime driver of their operational safety record.
Been in a Waymo in SF — impressive tech. But I keep wondering: does the math actually work? Car + all the sensors + maintenance + mapping. Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.
Good calculation approach. Waymos will drive a lot more than 200K miles in their lifetime. Taxis often do a million miles. There are already photos out there of Waymo odometers over 100K.
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
These companies are taking a very long view (and are funded accordingly). The future vision is one in which cars with drivers just aren't a thing in cities anymore. Nobody owns a car to use in day-to-day intra-city journeys; instead, you just take a drive in an autonomous vehicle on demand.
Back of the envelope, three car costs $200k, charge $20/ride, say that ride costs $5 to operate, $200k/$15 gets you 14,000 rides (rounded). Say 10 rides a day... shy of 4 years to break even.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
I thought about this as well. The dsytopian world I think will exist in the future where the Waymo is priced higher and people will want to take it more, over a cheaper Uber. Precisely because the human driver is removed from the equation.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
So, uh, you don't really tip your Uber drivers much then do you?
Right now, Tuesday 3pm, Waymo will cost me 13.76 cross town. UberX 10.95, Lyft 11.95. If I don't tip Lyft/Uber they'll be cheaper but I definitely don't tip the Waymo.
I'm happy that Waymo's finally lighting up Dallas, but they need to expand its service area quickly for it to be useful there, IMO.
Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason.
Dallas is built around and between Dallas and Fort Worth, kind of like LA, but more sparse. Fort Worth is still very attached to their downtown (Sundance Square and University); Dallas is very much not. When I think of Dallas, I think of Addison, Plano, Grapevine/Irving/Las Colinas, Carrollton, Richardson, and the HEB (Hurst/Euless/Bedford) none of whom are represented in this service area.
This will be useful for hanging out in Bishop Arts and Deep Ellum, and the rich SMU grads up in old money Dallas, but I hope they're doing this to train up on highway driving.
(My critique of Waymo's service area also applies to DART, their public transit network. They have trains built around downtown in a way that's meaningless for most folks that want to use it for daily commutes. With most of their non-downtown bus routes running on hourly schedules, it's no surprise that DART posts anemic ridership numbers every year.)
Interesting, I went to the link they gave and to the safety section and it says:
> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.
My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.
I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc.
This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?
I doubt the geofence exclusion is because of the demographics of those areas and not the demand for autonomous vehicles in those areas, although I don't doubt the latter is a result of the former.
I doubt this is correct. “It’s expensive to be poor” — a lot of people who can’t afford cars (or have bad credit) end up Ubering to/from work every day
If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
The most evil thing I heard was companies like Doordash and Uber buying up data on who has credit card debt, so they know which driver is more desperate for cash, so they can low-ball them and give them a worse offer because they're more likely to take it because they're desperate for it.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
They showed their work and named their units. Their math is fine.
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
Ish. The problem with Waymos is there's no human driver, so they'll adjust pick up and drop off in a way that could be dangerous for the passenger. A human driver isn't going let a passenger off into a dangerous situation. They'll block traffic to drop the passenger off at their destination instead of a few blocks away in a dangerous neighborhood.
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
> The problem with Waymos is there's no human driver, so they'll adjust pick up and drop off in a way that could be dangerous for the passenger. A human driver isn't going let a passenger off into a dangerous situation.
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.
Tesla has fewer miles than I have driven in my lifetime. It’s currently still a half baked product. This might be a story in a few years but today you’re comparing an F150 to a Delorean.
DFW is amongst the top 5 metroplexes in the US and is extremely low density, high sprawl with few public transit options and a car heavy culture. This is a a welcome change.
That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.
Uber also partners with Zoox and Lucid on self-driving, missing this wave may be an existential risk, so they aren't putting eggs in one basket. Nevermind a level of duress due to the Uber/Waymo partnership being (almost certainly) part of a settlement agreement regarding alleged IP theft from Google by way of Anthony Levandowki.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
Elon may have been technically correct about 'if humans can do it with vision only then theres no reason why vision-only cannot work' but turned out to be the wrong strategy for learning how to get there. lidar gives you a constant stream of data to check your vision yourself against and interatively learn. Once trained you turn it off. whereas teslas strategy ended up having to rely on human drivers for error feedback which made the learning loop way longer.
This urbanist youtuber did a really in-depth video on what the future could look like (both good and ugly effects) if self-driving cars become enough of a success to affect the way we build infrastructure
I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.
Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.
I watched a bit of it and it's mostly stating their own conjectures as facts. There's nothing objective about it, it's just pushing their own personal agenda.
Urbanist youtubers inevitably come to mix in some advocacy in their videos. You'd be hard-pressed to find one that isn't critical of car-centric design. That being said, NJB is a well-respected educational youtuber and all their videos are built on a lot of research
Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it
I'm just curious how it works on the legal side: if a human run the red light he gets a fine, who gets fined with a waymo car?
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.
If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to run a red light, who is liable? Humans can get persuaded to do illegal things by criminals just as well.
I used to give out speed camera tickets. How do you think this worked? We didn't know who was the driver. It didn't matter. We ticketed the vehicle owner. Not sure how this is different? There are workplace injuries all the time in places like factories due to automated machines. Elevators/Escalators have caused fatalities or injuries and don't have a direct operator. I mean there are tons of things in life with no direct human to blame immediately on scene.
It sounds too much like "parasite" for me to be comfortable using it. I'm assuming some random person made it up. It's okay to just say "people of/from <place>", guys.
I am really wondering, how they tackle the long trail problem of unknown situations. Sure they are monitor them constantly but I am asking precisely, how to handle situations that occur ridiculously infrequently: do they sample them 1000x in sim? Or do they use a different model and track uncertainty in the model constantly?
How to get another 0 between the dot and the percent sign in situations where the model makes the wrong choice with a significant probability?
There was an article a while back that talked about their simulated world model. It has the ability to do things like floods, elephants on the road, etc.
How do the cars do when breaking a rule is necessary? For instance, a car is broken down in the one forward lane of a two-lane road, requiring the waymo to cross the double-yellow line to get around it. Or, a signal is red for so long that obviously its car detector isn’t working.
It handles these circumstances. Definitely seen it cross to the other side with oncoming traffic to get around a truck blocking a lane. For the signal light, never experienced that, but I imagine after awhile it'd figure it out. Possibly with the assistance of a remote human telling it.
I was in one stopped as the first car at a red light. The next section of road was full of cars waiting on another red light.
Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.
Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles. Indeed, the vast majority of trips are taken by single people and it's ridiculous to have a giant machine for them. It would also be okay to have a handful of larger, Model Y-sized vehicles for the multi-person trips.
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
I have one of the most inefficient EVs and it's only 2.4x hungrier than the cybercab. It can comfortably carry 6 adults. I've been in Tesla 3s as Ubers before. They only need 31% more energy than the cybercab.
If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.
The Waymo I-Pace is much less efficient than the regular roadgoing I-Pace. One X user posted a pic of the dashboard of a Waymo with 111,000 miles on the odometer, and it averaged 1.0 kWh per mile [1][2]. This is about 2.5x worse than the EPA rating of a normal Jaguar I-Pace. Probably the difference is because the Waymo has tons of compute and the sensors have a surprisingly large impact on aerodynamic efficiency. I was being generous to the Waymo in my original comment. If we compare the actual rating of the Cybercab at 165 Wh per mile, it would be 6x as efficient.
Also, whereas the stock Jaguar I-Pace was $70k, the Waymo one with all its sensors and compute have estimates ranging from $150k to $200k. In a comment made in late 2024, Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov mentions that the sensors and compute themselves cost $100k [3].
> The equipment on Waymo’s fifth-generation robot taxis — electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles — costs as much as $100,000, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said on a podcast in February.
That is the same generation as the current I-Pace fleet that makes up the majority of Waymos.
Referring to the example from the Twitter post you cited, wouldn't the KWh per mile simply be a lot higher because these vehicles are engaging in much less efficient travel overall? City driving itself is often pretty inefficient because of all the stopping and going, and these vehicles likely are driving in a lot of the rush hour traffic and high density areas everyday. Not to mention they probably idle around a lot more than a normal persons car would in a day.
So wouldn't that be the reason the figures would look 2.5x worse than the regular Jaguar? I'm sure there are other factors of course since running the computer systems, lidar and all the other features will also consume more power, so I'm sure from a baseline it will be less efficient anyway, I just think because of the kind of driving it engages in, this will make it also look far less efficient.
Possible, but EVs tend to be more efficient in city driving than highway driving, thanks to regenerative braking and the fact that the dominant form of energy loss, air resistance, scales quadratically with speed.
Why would it make more sense? It isn't like a car half the size would cost half as much, but it would severely limit the capacity. Now, you can get a waymo for 1-4 people, but if some (or all) were single occupant, you would be limited.
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
It would make more sense to make them even bigger, and to have one vehicle service many people. Maybe they could even be linked together for efficiency, and put on rails so the self driving is super reliable.
I’m thinking that since 2015. Like BMW C1 just with doors on the side and a bit more security. This would approx allow 3-4x as many travellers on a given route compared to traditional cars.
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Boston, according to Waymo[1], is dependent on the legislature making autonomous vehicles legal. Apparently NY state laws also require a human driver at the wheel.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
NYC has Mamdani, who is a very progressive populist mayor, and a longtime (active) supporter of the taxi drivers union.
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
It is unfortunate, but we're still in the early days of AV's. I think that more cities and states will be amenable to them once they have proven themselves as indispensable.
maybe weather events that disrupt travel, but impact things like visibility, lane definition, etc? That's still super-common in Chicago and a lot of the US.
It’s an extremely consistent experience, and you can sit in the front seat (something I like personally). With Uber and taxi services, you never know what kind of driver or ride you’re going to get.
They use to be (along with Lyft). But it's been a very long time since that was clearly true.
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really haven't been for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
I love Waymo. The only problem I have with it is that it further siphons wages from local economies into Silicon Valley, beyond what Uber/Lyft already did.
You could argue that cheaper/safer local rideshare would boost traffic to local bars and restaurants in denser areas though. If you want to keep the $ local, just add an AV tax that goes to the city.
You certainly could argue that! As you could argue any number of contrived political inferences which are more fun to think about than be of any real use.
Dear American government regulators: nationwide autonomous driving is proving to be easier than delivering fiber to every home. Why do you hate Americans?
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
It is. I do not use credit cards for about 8 years except for having just one credit card for renting cars a few times per year when I travel. I have zero problems paying for Uber, Lyft, hotels, and everything else with my debit cards.
There are tons of automated systems which take cash. I do agree it would add some complexity to the equipment in the car, but its not like it would be that difficult to do it. These cars have to go back to the depot eventually, emptying the cash bins would just be one more cleaning step. I do agree though they don't bother because it probably would cost more to manage in the end than the amount of rides they're losing not accepting cash.
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
Accepting the cash can be easy enough, in and of itself.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
---
Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
They mean the rewards. You can get some % cash back with no annual fee. Effectively my credit card costs me nothing, comes from the same bank as my checking and savings, and gives me cash back.
the other end of this is that all of those rewards are paid for through merchant fees, which lead to higher prices at the register. it's not free money. it's a fraction of a percentage of the profit credit card companies receive in fees paid by the places you shop. i would not be surprised to learn that even with rewards points we spend more money now that those programs are commonplace.
Still worth it so I can chargeback shitty merchants.
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
It does seem necessary to have cameras inside driverless cars but I don't want to if Google is running the show. Your biometrics will probably be stored for "enforcing Google's policies" at a minimum [1].
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in.
So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking.
Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?".
it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost.
It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.
Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
[citation needed]
Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.
It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.
Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normie people wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.
I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.
Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.
tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.
Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc
I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.
So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.
There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.
Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.
And now, it is stuck this way.
Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.
This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
[Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.
Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.
In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.
The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.
The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).
So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
... in the US
> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing
Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.
> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units
Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.
Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.
Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.
And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.
It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.
But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.
$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit
Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.
Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.
For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.
Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers
Dallas in the United States.
All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.
Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.
> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.
That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)
Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.
And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.
Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.
Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.
So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.
Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.
The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.
But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.
> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.
The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.
So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.
That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.
There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.
To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely an advantage over government run transportation
Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?
I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?
If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?
plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.
How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.
But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)
My neighborhood is close to the city center. Even so, bus service is very sparse, recently reduced to just twice a day. In addition walking to bus stops is long and difficult, or even impossible, for many elderly or disabled residents.
I envision a Waymo-like car service transporting people to/from destinations or if it's more practical, a transit center. I concur car services wouldn't be the cheapest option but may well be the most effective.
They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.
> Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.
The point is that there's a process, it applies both to Waymo and to you as a rando. The police don't have special access to Waymo cameras.
That is the opposite of reassuring, because here are the stats for those processes as a whole (just ‘requests for user information’, not broken down by data type or Google product). Currently at 84% accepance rate i.e. the ‘process’ is a formality lol: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
This is not some newfangled shiny thing. If you hold records that are important to a court case you can be forced to give them up by court order. This is true regardless of who "you" happens to be. If police "have access" to a Waymo, it's only because they also "have access" to your phone, your medical records, your car rental history, etc., etc.
That process is fine, the best we have.
The problem is having roving surveillance vehicles driving around everywhere. I see a couple of them every day on my walk in a mostly residential area.
The addition of facial recognition is trivial if not already implemented. Can be done after the fact. The tradeoff is catching an occasional criminal while enabling all sorts of abuse from the powers that be.
Even when you've got your own camera on your own front porch making recordings on your own hard drive using your own isolated network: There is are long-established legal processes by which you can be ordered to hand over [a subset of] those recordings.
Neither Waymo nor you, yourself, are exceptional to these processes.
https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/subpoena
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
Per The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehic...It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.
To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.
Okay two, Avenue and the shopping center.
"As the Waymo approached the double-parked SUV, a child ran out from behind the SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo."
Waymo cannae change the laws of physics. Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."
Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/new-details-released-in-way...
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...
[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/
Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.
(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).
That's really cool but makes sense. Can't wait for them to be available in London. I'd use them instead of Uber even if they cost much more.
I would not compare the user experience to drivers, or the safety record to private cars. I would compare the user experience and the safety record to human driven taxis, buses, light rail, and metro. I am curious if the rider experience is actually any better then taking the M train from the Castro to SF state or the 49 bus between the Mission and Geary. The latter is certainly cheaper, and orders of magnitude more efficient.
But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.
Since the BRT lane on Van Ness, taking the 49 is more like taking a more shaky Muni train honestly. Frequent enough that it doesn’t get crowded, and it doesn’t get stuck in traffic, meaning much faster ride. As San Francisco builds more of these bus lanes, the case for the robo-taxis is only going to get weaker.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
You and I are thinking with a purely logical thought process, but most people don’t reason that way.
A lot of people want to be able to hold someone accountable, and that is more important than the pure probabilities.
They want to be able to blame a person for making a mistake.
Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, they won't care. The bar is "safe enough for very few people to have a bad experience." If you take 10 robotaxi rides in a row and they all go flawlessly your subjective interpretation of the risk will be that there isn't any.
I feel confident saying this because if you die in the US to anything other than old age, it was almost certainly a car crash. Despite this, most people don't think twice before getting in a car.
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
If a Waymo failed because it missed a stop sign, and then another Waymo failed because it was confused about some strange markings on the road, is that not failing "the same way" in the same sense that a person failing to yield or driving drunk?
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
I feel like you could come up with long lists of cases where there is no direct human to blame. Someone may be at fault down the chain, but nobody who was directly controlling the machine. Just like if a mechanic screws up my brakes and I end up crashing, it wasn't directly me who caused the crash, even though I was sitting in the seat.
Unless there’s a very bad and widespread issue. Then you join a class action and get $24 on a visa giftcard you can’t figure out how to redeem and then forget about.
When a robot car makes a mistake, all robot cars learn from the experience. When a human messes up, only that human learns from it.
The company owning and operating the robot?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM
On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.
Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.
Every city has courier services, including Uber.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
It's also likely that if a switchover is aggressively pursued it'll cause a massive social backlash and likely evolve into a culture war issue.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"
I can’t wait for broader adoption of self driving cars.
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
Right now, Tuesday 3pm, Waymo will cost me 13.76 cross town. UberX 10.95, Lyft 11.95. If I don't tip Lyft/Uber they'll be cheaper but I definitely don't tip the Waymo.
Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason.
Dallas is built around and between Dallas and Fort Worth, kind of like LA, but more sparse. Fort Worth is still very attached to their downtown (Sundance Square and University); Dallas is very much not. When I think of Dallas, I think of Addison, Plano, Grapevine/Irving/Las Colinas, Carrollton, Richardson, and the HEB (Hurst/Euless/Bedford) none of whom are represented in this service area.
This will be useful for hanging out in Bishop Arts and Deep Ellum, and the rich SMU grads up in old money Dallas, but I hope they're doing this to train up on highway driving.
(My critique of Waymo's service area also applies to DART, their public transit network. They have trains built around downtown in a way that's meaningless for most folks that want to use it for daily commutes. With most of their non-downtown bus routes running on hourly schedules, it's no surprise that DART posts anemic ridership numbers every year.)
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e71380706dc865d40a6f...
> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.
My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.
This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
Hmm. Maybe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Texas?
Tesla also has a robotaxi service in Dallas, FWIW, in testing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.
Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.
Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.
PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.
Please state your concerns.
Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?
Dallards?
It should be Dallan?
Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.
Does that include the suburbs?
so, no suburbs, only enclaves
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.
Also, whereas the stock Jaguar I-Pace was $70k, the Waymo one with all its sensors and compute have estimates ranging from $150k to $200k. In a comment made in late 2024, Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov mentions that the sensors and compute themselves cost $100k [3].
> The equipment on Waymo’s fifth-generation robot taxis — electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles — costs as much as $100,000, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said on a podcast in February.
That is the same generation as the current I-Pace fleet that makes up the majority of Waymos.
[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymos-retrofitted-robota...
[2] https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/2073967445509882286?s=20
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/technology/waymo-expansio...
So wouldn't that be the reason the figures would look 2.5x worse than the regular Jaguar? I'm sure there are other factors of course since running the computer systems, lidar and all the other features will also consume more power, so I'm sure from a baseline it will be less efficient anyway, I just think because of the kind of driving it engages in, this will make it also look far less efficient.
I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.
Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
1 - https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
Not if they’re stupid laws!
Sure. OP's point is these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states. Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
My state (CA) is doing well this. If your state is not, and this is important to you, I suggest you get involved in the process.
Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process.
Is this true at the city level?
> Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
Surely it's a worse pitch to suggest that companies can ignore laws they don't like, and operate above the law?
It’s also worse to murder kittens. That isn’t the choice at hand.
The difference is between states adapting with a regulatory framework and those sticking with economic incumbents.
(Also, when the taxi medallion industry was at its peak, lenders did run roughshod over the law.)
>> that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us
> Not if they’re stupid laws!
States won't adapt to new technologies at the same time, this is embedded in the design of federalism.
A government that listens to the people it governs is a good government.
https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
People hate human drivers more than they hate the idea of AI drivers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/business/uber-sexual-assa...
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really haven't been for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
https://www.worldatlas.com/places/the-most-dangerous-highway...
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
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Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027861
[2] https://www.404media.co/waymo-called-police-on-teens-san-mat...