For context, this is coming in as TriMet is laying off staff, reducing service frequency, eliminating bus lines, and cutting parts of light rail routes due to a $300M budget shortfall. The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners, so the budget is going to get worse before it gets better.
So at the same time that public transit is retreating and rideshare company labor overhead is threatening to increase, Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does, and also doesn't have human drivers who need to be paid subject to the laws of the city of Portland. But it doesn't actually matter all that much what is going on municipally in Portland at the moment - Waymo (or ideally, a wide variety of competing robotaxi services) should exist everywhere in the country and be as widely available as cars and roads themselves. And eventually this will happen; the concept that Waymo entering a new local market is a newsworthy event is a temporary state of affairs.
The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
If Portland is really forward-thinking, they would be smart to use this opportunity to jump to the next stage of public transport by focusing on flexible bus routes and Waymo/rideshare subsidies for the poor and disabled.
Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.
I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.
It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.
They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.
> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month;
An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators.
> A scheduled increase to Oregon’s transportation taxes, including those that help fund TriMet, is on hold after an effort to repeal the hike secured enough signatures to send the issue to the ballot next month.
from the Oregonian article I linked
The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.
> “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote.
And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether.
I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.
The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.
I'm sure that they'll just dodge regulations like every other Service as a Software company. Literally taking the money out of the City's hands and providing a slower, less safe, less equitable service. While taking profit too. Sheesh.
By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here?
I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
>TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners
just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers.
Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all.
"payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.
> you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those
If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.
>If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes,
yes, I took a lot of micro (and macro too for that matter) but if what you say were true, neither political party nor activists would go on and on about taxing "corporations". You should direct your comments toward the parties that do that. But of course, you would get downvoted because the parties that do that don't want to hear otherwise. That's what I was doing, trying to explain ecomonics in ways they'd be receptive to, because telling people how things work is always a good thing even if they are not ready to go all the way.
also, in terms of pure micro, indirectly taxing things is never as efficient as directly taxing them, which you are not accounting for. The inefficiency tax in the form of "lower overall employment" is not easily measured even though we know it's quite significant and as impactful as "well this tax averages out the same" when it's not the same.
> The Oregon Department of Revenue administers tax programs for the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (TriMet). Nearly every employer who pays wages for services performed in this district must pay transit payroll tax.
> The transit tax is imposed directly on the employer. The tax is figured only on the amount of gross payroll for services performed within the TriMet Transit District. This includes traveling sales representatives and employees working from home.
ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves.
the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.
the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.
I am self-employed and have been since 2007-ish and while paying "both sides" is the downside, there are soooooo many upsides to being self-employed (especially since the Trump tax sh#t has been enacted and especially if you are setup as S-Corp) that I seriously* do not mind paying both sides at all.*
you probably have a high wage profession, and you max out FICA etc. and stop paying payroll taxes around April every year. You don't like the income uptick at that point cuz you're just so darned happy to pay payroll taxes? There's a line on the form, you could throw in some more. But housekeepers are also self-employed and those taxes fall much more heavily on them. While they are in a lower tax bracket and pay less as a percentage of their income tax, payroll taxes don't work that way (till somebody chimes in to say "no, Portland Oregon is absolutely confiscatory on this score, we practice Bolshevism!" which would be missing the point)
I seriously don't mind living in America and paying taxes here but, but when better and more efficient tax regimes are available, or when socialist tax proposals derail local economies, I seriously want to educate people about them.
I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.
At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.
I looked at taking the train from my town to Glacier National Park along with my bike. The route goes from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, and has a stop at south glacier.
Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars.
So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my bike, the box, and some tools to break it down to our local amtrak station. Then partially dissasemble the bike, and box it. (of course, our train station has room in it for 5-10 people, and most sit outside, uncovered, which is fun in spring.)
Then, get to the main Portland Train station, with my bike box, and backpack with my stuff and tools. Wait up to 9 hours for the hawaitha train. (its often many hours late, and only leaves once per day).
Load Bike in cargo car, and then board train late at night.
Wake up around 5am, (or later, if train is behind schedule) and disembark at Glacier, re-assemble my bike. Figure out how to get it, and the box (i'll need it for the return trip) to a hotel or AirBnB.
For the return trip, its about the same, 1 daily westbound train, that is usually hours late, then hope you get to portland before the last train for the day leaves for my town, or else find a place to stay with a bike, backpack, and bike box in the sketchy area around the trainstation...
Or, hop in a car with a bike rack, and drive 10 hours. Which is easier, and MUCH cheaper if I split the cost of gas with someone else. So 2 extra travel days back for vacation, and much less stress.
> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
Why? Isn't Amtrak that, but just geographically-scoped? Isn't Caltrain workable? Subways also function fine in NYC, DC, Boston, and even LA
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.
the actual cost of a trip between times square and the national mall is about $200 all things considered based on the ~0.80 federal mileage reimbursement rate for 250 miles. that train corridor is overwhelmingly successful as well so the idea that amtrak isn't a good deal is at odds with reality.
That's assuming you don't already have a time-depreciating asset in your possession. Per mile cost is about halved if you drive significantly more than average.
Amtrak (where it exists) is often deprioritized for freight travel, and other times is often limited to extremely low speeds, resulting in extremely slow travel. Your road trips are only possible if you have extremely relaxed time constraints and specific destinations in mind.
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
Amtrak simply leases the lines in the West from freight providers rather than owning the track outright. The reason Amtrak can offer so much better service in the Northeast Corridor is because they own the track. Incidentally the NEC is the only part of Amtrak operating at a profit.
It's better if trains prioritize freight travel and car-focused roads prioritize passenger travel, than the other way around. Human beings have more pressing time constraints than nearly all shippable physical goods.
The remaining dregs of Amtrak are the result of the nationalization of the failing private passenger lines in the US.
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't (like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it), and whatever those reasons were are behind us.
It may seem superficially easy to just put it all back, but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail.
So that's what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car, and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
Amtrak started out as a holding company for private passenger rail companies that went bankrupt. It's never had a static amount of funding (until the Biden admin, Amtrak had to renegotiate its budget regularly) and many of its stations are just pet projects for rural Congress reps who want to give their district a way to leave their area, so Amtrak runs many trains at a loss.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
I’m 99-100% a car user now after living in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Here’s why - I gave up my car for a bike when I lived in Portland, however when people openly smoked fentanyl on the trains the train operators had to stop the train during my morning/afternoon commute for ~15 minutes (this happened often). Also the last straw for me was getting my place broken into and having my bike stolen. Therefore I moved to cars because I didn’t have to inhale secondhand fentanyl smoke or deal with unscheduled delays. As a man in Los Angeles I had to deal with a drunk man on a bus touching my thigh and hitting on me and people trying to sell me drugs/solicit me for money/phone calls/etc. As a regular hiker I’m also not sure public transit would service trailheads in the Cascades or the Sierra Nevadas. As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy, so I think this problem will likely go away.
I welcome Waymo in Portland, I’m just concerned for the well being of the vehicles!
I am a huge proponent of increased public transit (I'm of the opinion that every city should have a massive congestion tax with large swaths only accessible on foot or by public transit), but trains and buses would be wildly inconvenient for what op is describing.
Trying to take something like a windsurf board on a train, and then having to navigate multiple train changes along with whatever other baggage you have makes it a non-starter.
The "last mile problem" you mention is unresolved when it comes to getting from the closest public transit stop to the actual destination (frequently in a park or even off road).
And finally, the final cost to the rider would be significantly higher, as sleeper trains are not cheap.
I think America could do quite well if it focused on public transit in and between densely populated areas. Fewer cars in cities could make for denser cities, which in turn could allow for even more public transit. But outside of population centers, America is much more spread out than Europe, meaning that trains are less economical, and often wouldn't get the ridership that would allow them to make sense.
I appreciate what you're saying and am a big fan of long distance train and bus journeys myself and have done a lot of both, sleeping and not.
But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.
I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.
It is a chicken and egg problem. As long as the majority of people who would maintain the social environment are avoiding the social environment, the healthy consensus/operating regime can never emerge.
In my experience the majority consensus is to maintain a quiet, generally polite environment on trains and buses.
But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.
Correct. But the golden question is, do what? The authorities don't care. Rules and laws are rarely enforced, and when they are enforced they're done so unevenly. If you decide to take matters into your own hands, it's much more likely that you will be punished by the law than the person you were correcting. So, what do you expect people to do?
It's not. Pass a law that continuing to be noisy or disruptive on a bus or train after a warning results in 10 years of prison time with no parole and consistently enforce it. The problem will solve itself without a chicken and egg problem. Problematic people can simply be removed from society to make for a good social environment. Adding more good people is not the only option and in fact only hides the problem instead of solving it.
This would involve incarcerating a lot of homeless people, which is expensive, and pro-homeless activists would see it as a human rights abuse and fight it.
People just do not understand how big and spread out the US is compared to other countries. "Last mile" dramatically underestimates how much heavy lifting the personal transportation part would need to do. More like "last 50 miles".
there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods
> Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car.
Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving.
> This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both
I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.
That sounds like hell. Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats, and unlike trains there isn't even an option to pay exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment.
Napaway briefly offered ticketed intercity service on busses with 18 sleeper pods, but has (temporarily) discontinued it in favor of focusing on charter service.
You are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. I like trains but they can't and don't address the issue the OP is raising. Even if the US already had public trains it still isn't a "last mile" problem. Especially in the western US, it is a "last hundred miles" problem.
No public transport system that remotely makes any kind of economic sense, either in terms of infrastructure or operational cost, can replace the established network topology that exists for cars in the US. The connectivity is much more like a mesh than a hub-and-spoke model. Even though the US has a strong regional jet system that connects arbitrary nodes in that graph it still doesn't entirely avoid the "last hundred miles" problem.
A lot of American long-distance travel is not between two big cities. Even in Europe, similar kinds of routes have no train service and limited bus service.
You're right, but in the US a government providing any sort of public service is an immediate target for the right (and an unfortunately significant portion of the "left"). We insist on paying more for less rather than ever allowing a poor person to benefit in a way they don't "deserve". So public transit hardly exists or is woefully inadequate in most places.
And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
The European mind does not comprehend how big and sparsely populated the American West is. You can't even pitch a tent in most places in the Alps, and why would you, when you just stop at a hut that has a staff and you can get fed and sleep in bunks with 20 other people? Meanwhile I can drive to numerous places where there isn't a structure or even another person in a 20km radius. No one is going to run a train to a place like that.
Connecting two Waymo geos with a train would be an interesting company idea. You could lease freight track the way Amtrak already does it in the American West but try to negotiate a contact more favorable than Amtrak's. You could try to work with Waymo to work on bundles.
Amtrak could do the same thing but because of how Amtrak is organized in not sure that it would be possible. Most of the current Waymo geos are not connected by Amtrak directly and require transfers.
> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
So, let's say you take public transport from SF to Yosemite/Los Angeles.
Now, how do I cover the last mile (or even multiple points)?
Take more public transport? Hitchhike?
The reason long-distance public transport works well in Europe is that there is good local public transport in both the source and the destination cities. When that does not exist, you are better off driving.
Public transit only works if you live in the densest of the dense part of a city. If you live out in Beaverton or Gresham these bus lines lose money hand over fist, not to mention farther-flung places.
Unfortunately, until something big happens in the US, autonomous vehicles will be more accessible to working class americans than good and reliable mass transit, especially outside of major population centers.
It's a train or bus that is exclusively yours, goes exactly where you want it to go, when you want to go. Sounds objectively better than a train to me.
It would also be satisfied by magic flying carpets. Between flying carpets, functional public transport, and self-driving cars, only one of these three things is not utter fantasy in the near-ish future in the United States.
In my experience, night trains with private cabins are fan service for rail fans, environmentalists and/or masochists, not real transport options.
One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].
The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.
Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.
Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.
Enough with this public transport bullshit. We live in very spread out suburbs where you need to drive to everything and everyone has big backyards because we like it that way. Most people here don’t want to live in a tiny coop sharing walls with neighbors on all sides and live the vast majority of our lives in a 15 min public transport bubble. Further, having a train line is borderline not feasible the way the vast majority of the US lives. There is no way having a train station with even a 30 minute walking distance is feasible or even desirable. I also don’t want to get into public transport with a whole bunch of other people no matter how nice it is. It’s not going to be able to compete with a self driving EV of my own that I charge with my solar panels for free.
That being said I’m in full support of metros for large cities and high speed rail between major cities but it’s hard to beat a domestic airline you can show up for an hour before it leaves at an airport and gets you there 10x faster for anything other than the shortest trips.
Snowstorms are probably when I’d most want self driving. Back in February driving from Tahoe to SF, they closed the road, not because of conditions, but because too many impatient drivers spun out. I trust Waymo to go the recommended speed and not get impatient.
Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.
Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.
My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down
When it comes to controlling the wheels to prevent sliding and slipping, the AV control system is unbeatable. The ABS and traction control on a regular car has to cope with whatever control inputs the driver has made; on an AV, the computer models the grip limits of the wheel and plans a trajectory to not exceed them. It's not just for snow but also for changing pavement surfaces and the rain.
The main limitation is still sensors in the snow, but it seems to not be that big of a deal to build sensor packages that are better at seeing in the snow than a human is.
Being able to plot a series of inputs that can more efficiently use available traction than a human doesn't prevent you from blundering your way into a dumb situation where the laws of physics dictate that the only possible outcomes are various flavors of bad ones.
It's not clear how often the software will chose poorly and need to brute force its way out with traction/handling. The fact that they seem to be hedging against this by putting the hardware on particularly performant cars indicates it must happen enough to matter or be rare but bad enough to matter when it does happen.
Waymo will probably also rack up a ton of technically not at fault accidents by being obtuse in traffic since there's when there's snow there's a lot less margin for the "two people trying to pass each other in a hallway" type missteps that behavior tends to create.
I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day.
You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.
I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
The entire city shuts down and loses their mind with just a millimeter or two of snow here. Last time we got 0.25 of an inch there were ~9 accidents within a 2-mile span on the highway in the morning, and we just ended up shutting the highway down for the day.
I love Waymo in other cities, but it'd be especially helpful here during the 1 day every other year that we actually get any snow ... if we ever get snow here again.
After skiing in Utah, I wonder why the driving conditions around Tahoe get so bad. In comparison, for most places around Salt Lake/Park City, you never need chains or 4-wheel drive.
Utah snow at its elevations and climate is more dry and fluffy. Tahoe snow or similar when the temperature is only marginally below freezing is more likely to be wet, slushy. Same thing as snow/ice buildup on the mountain passes over the Cascades in WA when the temperature is hovering just below zero C.
In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on.
Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".
Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
Turnouts exist. Unfortunately, head-of-line-blockers are very commonly already overwhelmed by the task of keeping tab of their own vehicle; would be a far stretch to expect them to simultaneously stay aware of traffic situations, spot the turnouts ahead, and then take the turnout.
Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).
I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber.
The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car.
All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares.
The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go.
The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
> The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
Love this concept.
As self-driving vehicles become a larger share of road use, roads can be more efficiently designed just for them: no speed limit, just 2 strips of pavement for the tires, no signage or striping, etc.
We'll just build the cars with parts that seldom fail. And we'll make them very strong, so that the only risk from hitting a deer or even a cow is a splash of gore.
That should help eliminate the need to turn. A loud horn and flashing lights will do pretty well for any errant humans that cross the path.
We can even reduce rolling resistance by using steel wheels instead of rubber, and we can make the road a surface of continuous steel for durability.
We can even hitch the cars together so they can't collide with eachother and they can collectively share the propulsion load. (Maybe even with automatic micro payments, so a car with low battery can pay the others to help it along.)
> You might even call such an arrangement a "train"
Joking aside, though, the big issue with trains is last-mile. The road network covers a lot more land than the rail network does, and can reach places that trains can't. And this seems to be inherent to the physics of it, driven (hah) by cars ability to turn where trains cannot.
Mass transit enthusiasts love to gloss over the very real convenience issues that mass transit has, saying "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that. Hence why I think a hybrid system of dockable autonomous vehicles that can be linked up into a train in high-throughput thoroughfares gives you the best of all worlds.
I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making
It depends what you mean by self-driving. The car drives itself without any input; I would argue that fits the definition of self driving. Legally you must be supervising it, which is a valid criticism, but the car drives itself well enough that I can provide basically no input on 20+ hour cross-country trips, which allows me to do things like not stop to sleep.
Self driving means self driving. If I drive myself to work, my wife doesn’t need to keep her eyes on the road for me.
The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.
A Waymo was recently stuck on some light rail tracks in Phoenix this year [1]. Portland has a rather diverse bunch of streetcars and trams concentrated in its downtown core. Hopefully they don't get stuck on the tracks or block the trams.
From the article it doesn't sound like it was physically stuck as much as it's maps might not have been updated with the latest addition of that light rail and/or it was confused by the ongoing construction.
Definitely a big concern, but given the number of times in my lifespan that I've seen pictures or video of human-driven vehicles that have got stuck on railroad crossings (or just straight up drunk people trying to drive linearly down a railroad track)...
I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around crossing barrier arms, vs 100,000 hours of automated driving. I would bet the automated driver does a lot better.
I recently saw a video from (I think not Phoenix) of 3 waymos that were next to each other blocking traffic in an intersection, refusing to move, because they were facing a traffic signal intersection where the signals had reverted to blinking red mode. Humans who paid attention when learning to drive will understand this means the intersection has reverted to a 4-way-stop due to the traffic signal failure.
The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
> The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?
This is the right way to look at it. For autonomous fleets, there are typically tiers of intervention, starting with a simple remote check - "can I drive through this?" type confirmation, to much more detailed remote instructions that are slower to give, to getting someone from operations out (or in an emergency first responders) to manually move the car. One reason why you might want to keep traditional controls in the vehicle for the near term.
It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.
Stiff competition for humans, especially drivers outside the top quartile or so. Waymo appears to its passengers to drive much more competently than certainly any sub-average rideshare driver.
Although I like jobs for humans, I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities. Want to find a way for offline vehicles that can go 65MPH to remain legal though. Without Flock every block either unless we (in USA) forget what the whole USA thing’s about.
Edit: @Waymo would LOVE to see an industry-leading privacy pledge so good the EFF slaps their logo on it (even caveated), also your engineers are amazing
Waymo undoubtedly drives better than your average rideshare driver - I have taken dozens of Waymos in SF and the experience is unmatched. Also no chance of being harassed by the driver, which is a big plus.
Pick-up, drop off, and routing remain a challenge for Waymo. I hate having to walk a few minutes to get to the Waymo. Not that big a deal usually, but it became a problem when I was on crutches after spraining my ankle. Same for drop-offs, with the caveat that a human driver is going to see that I'm being dropped off in a bad neighborhood and not have me walk a couple blocks and is going to drop me off right outside my destination. Finally, routing. Waymo's take the weirdest routes sometimes. There was one trip I'd swear the Waymo Driver was the digital equivalent of drunk, the route it took was so convoluted. Which is kind of interesting. It means the system can reroute on the fly based on traffic conditions elsewhere and avoid getting jammed up. It's like when Google maps has you take a weird route to somewhere you're familiar, and then you look at traffic and there's an accident it's taking you around. Still a bad experience when a 10 minute ride turns into a 20 minute ride because the Waymo decides to go a weird way.
I report these issues in the app whenever I do take a Waymo, so hopefully they'll get better.
The one to ride is Zoox though. They have limited deployment but their vehicles have no steering wheel, it's like a gondola ride to your destination.
The one feature that Waymo has over other rideshare apps is that the cars presumably actually show up.
With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.
Yes exactly. I loved that when i opened up the app to go some where the first thing I saw before I even put in where I'm going, was how long until ill be picked up. the cars don't care about the trips, not trying to tip/ride max.
> I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities.
Doesn't matter.
At this point, if the US doesn't lead, China will.
They have a massive population imbalance that they can only crawl out of with automation. Someone is going to have to drive around all those seniors. Once it's a proven model, it'll spread to the rest of the world.
Waymo inflates their prices to be above that of Uber/Lyft because they don't have enough vehicles to meet demand. But their operating costs / mile are lower than that of Uber/Lyft. I'd estimate their internal cost per mile is approx. half that of Uber/Lyft. They pocket the rest because they need to recoup decades of expensive R&D.
There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?
The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.
It's not clear to me if their costs are lower yet. Waymo's vehicles are rather expensive (estimates for their newer Zeekrs are around $75k each), and they need to pay some number of remote monitors for exceptional situations (as noticed during the recent blackout in San Francisco). They also have to collect tons of data to build & maintain high resolution 3D maps of the areas they operate in. And they have to pay engineers to improve the self-driving software.
Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.
I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.
We're looking at different metrics, you're analyzing the average total cost, while I'm analyzing the marginal cost. Waymo has enormous fixed costs like you mentioned, mapping cities and paying engineers are not cheap, which need to be amortized over a massive self-driving fleet. But those are fixed costs which don't increase with fleet size. Waymo currently operates only ~3000 vehicles, which is not enough to amortize those fixed costs into overall profitability.
What matters most are marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost for Waymo to add 1 more ride). Looking at marginal costs, Waymo takes in more money than it spends on each ride, so projecting outwards when Waymo operates a large enough fleet, Waymo will be profitable.
Uber/Lyft run enormous fleets of ~2 million vehicles in the US, and that's how they are able to maintain profitability. They can spread their engineering and management expenses over millions of rides.
---
Doing my own math, the marginal costs for Waymo are:
Revenue: Each Waymo vehicle brings in ~$50/hour
Expenses: Waymo must pay for
* Assume the cost of a vehicle is $100k
* Amortized depreciation of the car (assume vehicles need to be fully replaced after ~25,000 miles, vehicles average 25 miles / hour, vehicles need to be fully replaced after 10,000 hours, cost is $10/hour)
* Maintenance (Assume the total cost of maintenance is an additional 25% of the vehicle price, vehicle price is $100k and vehicle lasts 10,000 hours, cost is $2.5/hour). This is likely an underestimate, I didn't model the cost of a mechanic, so this could be as high as $5-7/hour.
* Support (assume 1 support agent can support 10 vehicles, Philippine support agent costs $10/hour, so amortized $1/hour per vehicle)
* Cleaning (needed daily, costs $1/hour per vehicle)
* Datacenter compute for vehicle coordination ($0.50/hour per vehicle)
* Electricity (Assume $2/hour)
10 + 2.5 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 + 2 = $17/hour to operate a Waymo.
In conclusion, the marginal costs for Waymo is very profitable.
Even when just looking at marginal costs, I doubt Waymo is half that of a human driven vehicle. If we assume a robotaxi lasts 200k miles before being retired, then the cost of the vehicle alone ($75k) is 37.5 cents per mile. If a vehicle drives 200 miles a day, that's $5 of electricity (250Wh/mile x 10 cents/kWh), maybe $15 of labor to clean, and the space to park it near downtown ($3/day). That's another 12 cents per mile for a running total of 50 cents per mile. Then factor in maintenance (tires, brakes, suspension, etc) and you're probably close to $1/mile. Then you also need support staff, remote operators (approximately 1 per 50 vehicles, but paid significantly more than Uber drivers), and plenty of compute and storage for the high resolution maps (which must be constantly updated as the environment changes). And none of that includes the R&D costs to improve the vehicles or the self-driving software. Yes many of these costs decrease as fleet size increases, but it'll be a while before it gets below $1/mile. (Nationwide, Uber's rates are $1-2/mile depending on the area.)
There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.
I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.
In San Francisco, it has to be. Because of prop 22, Uber/Lyft must compensate drivers a minimum of $22.40/hr, plus $0.36/mile for vehicle expenses. Waymo doesn't have this cost, so it's effectively ~$25/hr cheaper to operate than Uber/Lyft.
I looked up the numbers - the estimated Uber/Lyft cost per mile in SF is ~$4.50/mi, and Waymo is trending around $1.40/mi (estimated 2025 number).
Where is this estimate? I found a wide range of estimates in my web search, from a per-mile cost of revenue of $2 (meaning a loss of $2 per mile excluding capex), to up to $50/mile.
The Gemini results when I searched for this cited this Reddit post [1] which cites this Reddit post [2], which conveniently gives your $2/mile answer.
Anyway, digging into the Reddit posts which gave your lower-bound number, the reasoning seems very suspect. In particular, the biggest methodological problem is that they use retail price numbers when Waymo is almost certainly getting wholesale prices. So it assumes $110K ($70K for a Jaguar iPace + $40K for sensors and other AV equipment) for the car depreciated over 5 years, but $70K is the retail price for a Jaguar, including dealer markup, distribution, marketing, etc, and when you are buying thousands of them you are almost certainly not paying retail. Likewise, it figured 25c/kwh for electricity, which is retail off-peak PG&E rates, but Google just buys their own solar panels and pays pennies for electricity. The AV equipment figure of $40K was I recall what it cost back in ~2014; the cost of LIDAR has come down dramatically since then and now runs $500-1000/vehicle, so that number should also be suspect. And if vehicle cost is more like $50-60K/year than $110K/year, $7K/year in insurance is way too high. Hell, Google could just self-insure with their $250B in cash, they've got a stronger financial position than every insurer other than Berkshire Hathaway.
Engineering costs are capital/fixed costs, they're paid once to develop the technology and don't scale with the number of trips. Operating costs (which is what I'm discussing here) are what it actually costs to run each ride. Waymo's marginal cost per trip doesn't include a chunk of some engineer's salary.
Once there are enough trips, the fixed engineering costs are spread across more and more trips, exponentially trending towards zero, driving the cost per trip even lower.
IIRC, in SF they're slightly more expensive before tip, but having ridden in them in SF, LA, and AZ I've always felt they were cheaper. Over the long run, they will probably end up being cheaper from the wholesale perspective since eventually the parts and technology cost will come down with time and scale while human wages will continue to rise.
That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.
The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).
I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.
Alphabet/Google/Waymo is a technology business, with emphasis on business. They're not running a charity. They're in it to make money. If it's a $20 Uber ride to somewhere, they're not going to leave money on the table and charge $10 because they don't have a driver to pay. They're going to charge $22 for the premium experience because they know people will pay that.
That sounds right. Passenger pays for lower risk, etc. The market sees the company making $2 extra and a competitor will see if they can do it for just $1 extra.
If a waymo costs $200k (car+sensors+install labor) and drives 200k miles, then amortizing up-front costs alone are about $1/mile. We don't really know what the TCO of a waymo is, and it's possible it could go down with economies of scale. Rideshare drivers can get paid $1-2/mile although it varies a lot.
That's just the current cost. The long term cost structure should be based on cars that come out of the factory with all the right stuff pre-installed. There's a BOM for some extra components; many of which you might already find in some cars. Otherwise it's just another EV. So, long term the extra cost per mile relative to a driver driving the same car should be cents rather than dollars per mile. And of course if there is no driver, some components like manual controls, dashboards, mirrors, etc. actually become redundant as well. So the total BOM might actually be lower long term.
The driver cost is of course the big saving. And they need breaks as well and don't drive 24x7. A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
Mostly what Waymo is doing currently with customized vehicles is not actually super scalable. But it helps at their relatively small current scale. You wouldn't design a custom vehicle + factory for their current growth rate. That becomes more interesting when they start scaling beyond tens of thousands of new vehicles per year. They are probably in the lower thousands currently.
I think they raised close to 20-30B so far. They say they are doing 500K rides per week. At 15$ per ride that adds up to ~390M/year. That's revenue, not profit. But if they could 100x that by rolling out to more and more cities and larger and larger areas, it's going to add up to annual revenues that add up to more than what they raised. That's not going to happen overnight, obviously. But they seem on a path where they are scaling, optimizing, reducing their cost, and growing.
The risks here are mainly that they won't have the market to themselves. Others are doing robo taxi's too and if any of them starts scaling faster and cheaper, Waymo could hit some growth issues. Also, with multiple companies competing, prices per ride would eventually go down. The next five years are going to be interesting.
> A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
It's wierd to see this fantasy of machines on HN, of all places - that they have no downtime, no additional costs - it's only a savings from employing people), and (not said here) they don't make mistakes.
Lots of machines have far more downtime and cost than people. Many have more maintenance hours than operating hours.
During peak hours Waymo is more expensive than standard uber/lyft - I don't pay attention to black/premium pricing. Off-peak the price can be comparable. I mainly check because my wife prefers it.
Depends on the region, I think. Lyft and Uber partner with them in certain cities, so you transparently are charged the same as a similar ride with a human driver. It's only a better experience than a human driver, though, in my view. No chance of yapping, more privacy, no chance of your driver being a psycho, cars are better maintained.
It's hard to measure "cheaper" as an end user consumer, the price you pay for the service, because it's very likely they're operating at a loss to gain market share and growth.
Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.
Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45
Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.
I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.
Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.
But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.
Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.
I don't see why you should prefer jobs for humans. If a robot can do a job as well better and more cheapy than a human, it should, and that goes trebly for any sort of safety-focused job. The right fix is eliminating the need for make-work and not creating more unnecessary jobs.
That is, of course, tremendously challenging. It's impractical to look at a job performed by millions and just saying "well fix capitalism" when eliminating the jobs. But it's still the right solution. There shouldn't be gas station attendants, there shouldn't be redundant bureaucratic figuers and managers, and, when possible, there shouldn't be millions of paid car drivers.
Ironically, Uber used the same tactics to replace taxis with rideshare:
(Taxis/rideshares) are dangerous, drivers harass you, etc. Ours are so amazing, people love them.
The reality is that I have zero problems with rideshares (or taxis, when I'm someplace that still has them). Being a social animal like other Homo sapiens, interacting is a positive but drivers have no problem giving me peace. I'd much rather have the intelligence and flexibility of a human who can communicate, adapt, and solve problems.
I wonder if at some point we'll see a hockey stick adoption of self-driving cars. For now every new city is worth a blog post, eventually they'll allow intercity drives. Will international adoption take off? Will I be able to use it on a country road to visit my family in 10 years?
If Waymo's announcements come to reality, that is happening this year. Phoenix entered full service in 2020, then San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024, and Austin and Georgia in 2025 (in partnership with Uber). But this year they are planning on rolling out in 13 cities! Miami and Orlando are already in full service. Nashville, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are running invite-only service. Tampa, New Orleans, Minneapolis are in testing. San Diego, Detroit, Las Vegas and D.C. have been announced to launch this year, but haven't started testing yet. And that is on top of eight other cities that they are already testing in, but don't have timelines for offering full service.
That is already a huge jump from two cities a year.
The DC rollout is mired in regulatory red tape and is most likely dead until the mayoral election goes through, and if the new mayor is anti-Waymo unlikely to go through in the near future.
I'd assume so. Even the city launches are extremely limited to a section of the overall metro area that one would consider necessary for full local service. They are dropping a lot of seeds and then will allow them to grow. While it seems very slow, I have always enjoyed watching Google's taxi service GTM approach much more than I did watching Uber's.
Waymo and Baidu are the only big players and both are working on launching in foreign markets for the first time this year, in addition to big expansions in their home markets. But country roads are not on the agenda. I predict an eventual public-private partnership to bring AVs to rural areas. It would be a cost-effective way to support the healthcare of ageing rural populations who are facing hospital closures.
I'm a little sad to see this because I'm moving northward to Seattle next month, I've lived in Portland proper for over 16 years, and Seattle doesn't have Waymo yet. Great timing lol.
Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.
God willing. Unfortunately Seattle has a recent history of award-winning marksmanship when it comes to turning its own feet into Swiss cheese. A few years ago we passed a brilliant gig worker minimum wage law which:
1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in
2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so
3. drivers end up making less than before, and
4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.
Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.
Multiple factors: market viability, climate compatibility, capacity, and definitely regulatory factors. Currently DC, NYC, Boston and Chicago are all being slowed down by anti-Waymo groups like Uber drivers and public-transit lobbyists.
Waymo is a sort of public transit. It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit, but an order of magnitude more efficient than private passenger cars.
Depends on your definition of efficiency. Any ride service will drive more miles thus resulting in more congestion and more energy use than personal vehicles, because in addition to driving from point A1 to B1, they have to drive from B1 to A2. They get closer with density but never match. They will also always be more expensive to operate per mile because you need to cover the cost of the driver (human or machine).
The flip side is drastically fewer parking spaces needed, most of which can be located outside of the city core. And decreased costs due to fewer accidents.
> It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit
Waymo is less efficient in the narrow case of transporting hundreds of people between two specific points at a specific time, but more efficient for almost every other case.
If Waymo had dedicated right-of-way in the same way trains do, it would be more efficient.
We do get ice and snow in Portland, along with flooding and landslides. No, it's not the same as Midwest, but we do get a few days every other year or so that you just don't drive out in. The black ice around a couple curvy sections of i-5 are notoriously bad at night in winters. (Terwilliger)
I have lived in the midwest, as well as Portland. It is good that Portland only occasionally gets ice, because in like-for-like conditions it is way more dangerous than the midwest. Primarily because of hills. I found driving in snow & ice in the midwest to be mostly a non-event, even on inadequate tires.
I really hope we're able to get them without the city council messing things up. The way they reacted to the news at first, you'd think Minneapolis was the first city to ever have autonomous vehicles. That, mixed with a heavy dose of "What about the buggy whip makers??"
If it's the latter then Portland makes little sense. There are no regulations allowing it and the bill to enable it is still in motion at the state level (and not a slam dunk).
> Hannah Schafer, communications director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said Waymo is welcome to map out the city streets.
> “All they’re doing right now is basically taking pictures. Taking pictures in the right of way, anyone is allowed to do that. That’s not something that we regulate,” Schafer said.
> However, she said the city would regulate the testing and driving of autonomous cars.
> “No one can drive driverless vehicles in Portland without a permit,” Schafer said. “That is not allowed.”
...
> Portland fought vigorously with Uber over the terms of its local arrival a decade ago and a battle is already brewing over Waymo. Portland council member Mitch Green staked out his opposition in January, telling constituents on Bluesky, “You should know I don’t support that.”
...
> Oregon legislators considered a bill earlier this year that would have set statewide rules for self-driving cars, and would have prohibited local governments from imposing blanket prohibitions on autonomous vehicles. The bill died in committee following opposition from local governments.
How about a Waymo competitor that uses nonporous, impervious materials for the interior, and automatically sanitizes itself in between passengers? You pay with Monero and logs are only kept long enough to solve any murders you might've committed, and for the next rider to report if you still managed to mess something up.
OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?
Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.
I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues. They have your whole travel data, your face, your voice, "private" conversations.
And the people in the Philippines who can intervene in the "self" driving can comment on your bodily features if bored.
> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).
It recently became very real for a lot of people. The US government is buying that harmless advertising data to target, locate, and arrest/deport people.
If I was an immigrant of any legal status, I would now absolutely think twice about providing a real name or address to any online service. Any benign good-faith "its only for ads" argument has been destroyed within the last year. GrapheneOS/Librem/Pursim should start advertising heavily in immigrant communities.
Of all the organizations with access to my data (e.g. ISP, social networks, cellphone service provider, current US government, etc.), I absolutely trust Google the most.
Do you think Google is lying about the microphone?
I wonder how long Google will continue to subsidize this at a substantial loss? Estimated $30–40 billion spent in the last decade that only really pays off if they dominate the market.
I don't think Waymo needs to dominate the market to succeed. They just need to scale up (time)x(number of vehicles) enough to amortize the R&D costs of the self driving capability. Paying a driver is a big chunk of a taxi/Uber's costs, so eliminating that leaves a lot of room to maneuver.
They have the money to do so, and investors are aware that it is a long term play. Waymo is already dominating the market for all intents and purposes.
I rode the MAX when living there for a few years. I vividly recall screaming drugged out homeless riders being a regular feature. The last time I rode, a year ago, there was someone in the throes of the fent-bends in my section, who smelled like he was dying (he well may have been).
These incidents haven't made me fear, because I am a relatively big and tall male, but they _definitely_ will for others. And even then, they aren't pleasant.
You simply don't run into those things often on trains/subways in Europe (I lived in Spain for a year and traveled extensively in Europe during that time, and on other europe trips prior). So fix those issues, and then I am sure people will want to ride the rails.
Has it been shown that screaming drugged out homeless riders avoid the presence of crowds? Is there any physical mechanism where having more people on the trains leads to Daniel-Penny-like suppression of drugged out homeless riders? Or does "getting more people onto the trains" just mean removing their options until they are forced to ignore the drugged out homeless riders?
As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".
There absolutely are serious issues at all times, regardless of how busy the trains are. I'm sorry, but as someone who actually lives in Portland I'm telling you that mentally ill drug users do not give a crap about how many people there are in the train car. After the third time I had to move my kids to different cars or even exit the train entirely due to open drug use and dangerous behavior, I swore off public transit for good.
I'm saying it _is_ and _was_ an issue during the day and heavy commute hours, those were the only hours I rode it! Other places in the world with nice train systems do not burden their riders with "safety in numbers", the places are just plain safer, period. And a great place to start is Don't let people smoke fentanyl on the train :) (And make sure everyone has affordable housing and healthcare, ofc)
Because MAX is on rails it can and does come to a complete halt for indefinite periods of time whenever some jackass in an Escalade parks it on the track. I know this firsthand and I only lived in Portland for one month.
MAX has dedicated right-of-way outside the city centers, but in the cities it shares city streets. Tourists drive / stop-at-lights in the dedicated lanes a lot.
Streetcar is more susceptible to being stopped because someone parked over the white line, but with 20 minute headways it takes longer to cause a problem.
I wonder how large the footprint will be. I live in the greater Portland area, but not in the city proper. There are definitely situations where Waymo would be great, but my guess is that they won't start off serving my specific area.
Surprised Portland is allowing Waymo in, considering that they have a decent public transport system (judging by US standards, not European standards), with light rail.
Public transport ridership took a massive hit with the pandemic and never fully recovered.
Waymo does not solve a public transport problem. I don't mind that it takes money from Uber, Lyft, etc., but the damage it also transfers income from human taxi drivers (what little they can salvage from Uber, Lyft) to a large corporation.
I see it as a net negative for society, not a net positive.
That seems like a dream environment for these cars. They are very good about waiting for humans to cross. To be honest, a Waymo at the front in an intersection means that it's going to be much more relaxing as a pedestrian or bicyclist crossing. This is especially true in intersections with a no-right-on-red where Waymos will obey but human drivers in San Francisco rarely do.
Every town says the exact same thing when Waymo shows up, and it's never true. There's nothing unique about Portland drivers, streets, sidewalks, or pedestrians.
I feel like I've lived in enough places and they're pretty small relatively speaking but whatever, seems like we'll see how it actually plays out.
I'm not saying it's going to randomly speed up to 80mph and crash into a building and explode. Just that I'll finally have a chance to witness those hilarious videos in person
This is a false blanket statement. Portland has very short (walkable) blocks, many one way streets, and it is true that most often than not cars actively stop for pedestrians to cross the street
One of my friends talks about this skate park on Stevenson st, which is a cobblestone road in San Francisco. It's ostensibly a two way road, but with street parking, it isn't really. Or rather, in order for two full sized cars to fit, one of the cars has to go up on the curb. Waymo's don't seem capable of doing this (yet, on that street), and jam up that road whenever there's traffic on it. Waymo's has problems with that narrow SF street and any amount of traffic on it.
Seems like a hostile market for Waymo. Many Portlanders despise tech giants and are strongly anti-car & anti-AI, far more than SF. Not to mention Portland's political / governance / people problems already inclines the population to anger.
How long does Waymo generally take to map and otherwise get ready for a new city rollout (permits, etc.)? I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't even started offering rides in 2027.
Are they sure? Portland is a special kind of crazy. I can say this cuz I’m a native now living in Berlin. locals are going to trash the cars and do all sorts of damage.
The same Waymo that says that they don't give a shit that they're stopping in bike lanes because their selfish passengers pay for it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912645
Human drivers (especially Uber/DoorDash drivers) stop in bike lanes all the time without repercussion. Pointing the finger at Waymo for this doesn't negate the larger problem of it not being enforced by local traffic enforcement.
I've personally reported a taxi driver for parking in a bike lane, and I hope he lost his cab license for it because it was really egregious. PBOT actually asked me for official testimony.
My personal enthusiasm can come off this way, but I'm excited for it as a cyclist, someone whose brother was killed by a driver, and general cutting edge technology hobbyist.
Same here, as someone who doesn't drive much, and is generally a "vulnerable road user". I've seen Waymos drive. When they screw up, it's by stopping dead under an abundance of caution. They never speed. They can spot a ped or cyclist from blocks away. Every time I take an Uber home, the driver is guaranteed to drive 40+ on the 20mph road in front of my house while blasting through crosswalks with people waiting to cross. The data is not really in yet (still not enough miles to really say if they are safer), but they pass the eye test.
People are interested as its a sci-fi promise long hoped to be filled. It is the first step to alot of other changes that will happen as higher majority of vehicles on the road transition to actual full self driving.
> Portland has always been a pioneer in urban design, balancing its independent spirit with a deep commitment to sustainable, forward-thinking living.
People should research the racist history of American cities before publishing broad, vapid, and likely LLM-generated statements like this.
If you're going to say a place has "always been a pioneer in urban design", you should take the time to acknowledge that Portland's early urban-design efforts were deeply racist and explicitly segregated.
https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/04/trimet-official...
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/trimets-present-crisis-...
At the same time, Portland's city council is debating whether to cap the cut of driver pay that rideshare companies take: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/13/uber-lyft-driver-pay-...
So at the same time that public transit is retreating and rideshare company labor overhead is threatening to increase, Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.
I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
That's absurd. Waymo exacerbates the problem. It doesn't provide public transport.
You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. You think Waymo is going to cost anything close to that?
An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators.
https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...
Sorry to nitpick, but why is the next month's ballot (and in general the issues that have not been voted on yet) affecting current service?
from the Oregonian article I linked
The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.
> “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote.
from the Mercury article I linked
No it didn’t. Bus rides cost $2.80 in Portland.
I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.
I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.
just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers.
Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all.
"payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.
If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.
yes, I took a lot of micro (and macro too for that matter) but if what you say were true, neither political party nor activists would go on and on about taxing "corporations". You should direct your comments toward the parties that do that. But of course, you would get downvoted because the parties that do that don't want to hear otherwise. That's what I was doing, trying to explain ecomonics in ways they'd be receptive to, because telling people how things work is always a good thing even if they are not ready to go all the way.
also, in terms of pure micro, indirectly taxing things is never as efficient as directly taxing them, which you are not accounting for. The inefficiency tax in the form of "lower overall employment" is not easily measured even though we know it's quite significant and as impactful as "well this tax averages out the same" when it's not the same.
In Oregon, TriMet is funded by a payroll tax: https://www.oregon.gov/dor/programs/businesses/pages/trimet-...
> The Oregon Department of Revenue administers tax programs for the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (TriMet). Nearly every employer who pays wages for services performed in this district must pay transit payroll tax.
> The transit tax is imposed directly on the employer. The tax is figured only on the amount of gross payroll for services performed within the TriMet Transit District. This includes traveling sales representatives and employees working from home.
If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from.
A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.
the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.
the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.
I seriously don't mind living in America and paying taxes here but, but when better and more efficient tax regimes are available, or when socialist tax proposals derail local economies, I seriously want to educate people about them.
I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.
Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars.
So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my bike, the box, and some tools to break it down to our local amtrak station. Then partially dissasemble the bike, and box it. (of course, our train station has room in it for 5-10 people, and most sit outside, uncovered, which is fun in spring.)
Then, get to the main Portland Train station, with my bike box, and backpack with my stuff and tools. Wait up to 9 hours for the hawaitha train. (its often many hours late, and only leaves once per day).
Load Bike in cargo car, and then board train late at night.
Wake up around 5am, (or later, if train is behind schedule) and disembark at Glacier, re-assemble my bike. Figure out how to get it, and the box (i'll need it for the return trip) to a hotel or AirBnB.
For the return trip, its about the same, 1 daily westbound train, that is usually hours late, then hope you get to portland before the last train for the day leaves for my town, or else find a place to stay with a bike, backpack, and bike box in the sketchy area around the trainstation...
Or, hop in a car with a bike rack, and drive 10 hours. Which is easier, and MUCH cheaper if I split the cost of gas with someone else. So 2 extra travel days back for vacation, and much less stress.
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't (like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it), and whatever those reasons were are behind us.
It may seem superficially easy to just put it all back, but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail.
So that's what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car, and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
And will probably go bankrupt this year: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
Trying to take something like a windsurf board on a train, and then having to navigate multiple train changes along with whatever other baggage you have makes it a non-starter.
The "last mile problem" you mention is unresolved when it comes to getting from the closest public transit stop to the actual destination (frequently in a park or even off road).
And finally, the final cost to the rider would be significantly higher, as sleeper trains are not cheap.
I think America could do quite well if it focused on public transit in and between densely populated areas. Fewer cars in cities could make for denser cities, which in turn could allow for even more public transit. But outside of population centers, America is much more spread out than Europe, meaning that trains are less economical, and often wouldn't get the ridership that would allow them to make sense.
But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.
I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.
But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.
The majority consensus is to desire a peaceful environment but do nothing when it is violated.
1. https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2025-Q4-Ride...
Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving.
> This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both
I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.
That sounds like hell. Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats, and unlike trains there isn't even an option to pay exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment.
No public transport system that remotely makes any kind of economic sense, either in terms of infrastructure or operational cost, can replace the established network topology that exists for cars in the US. The connectivity is much more like a mesh than a hub-and-spoke model. Even though the US has a strong regional jet system that connects arbitrary nodes in that graph it still doesn't entirely avoid the "last hundred miles" problem.
A lot of American long-distance travel is not between two big cities. Even in Europe, similar kinds of routes have no train service and limited bus service.
I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.
And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
Amtrak could do the same thing but because of how Amtrak is organized in not sure that it would be possible. Most of the current Waymo geos are not connected by Amtrak directly and require transfers.
So, let's say you take public transport from SF to Yosemite/Los Angeles. Now, how do I cover the last mile (or even multiple points)? Take more public transport? Hitchhike?
The reason long-distance public transport works well in Europe is that there is good local public transport in both the source and the destination cities. When that does not exist, you are better off driving.
One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].
The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.
Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.
Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/espresso/f...
That being said I’m in full support of metros for large cities and high speed rail between major cities but it’s hard to beat a domestic airline you can show up for an hour before it leaves at an airport and gets you there 10x faster for anything other than the shortest trips.
Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.
My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down
The main limitation is still sensors in the snow, but it seems to not be that big of a deal to build sensor packages that are better at seeing in the snow than a human is.
Being able to plot a series of inputs that can more efficiently use available traction than a human doesn't prevent you from blundering your way into a dumb situation where the laws of physics dictate that the only possible outcomes are various flavors of bad ones.
It's not clear how often the software will chose poorly and need to brute force its way out with traction/handling. The fact that they seem to be hedging against this by putting the hardware on particularly performant cars indicates it must happen enough to matter or be rare but bad enough to matter when it does happen.
Waymo will probably also rack up a ton of technically not at fault accidents by being obtuse in traffic since there's when there's snow there's a lot less margin for the "two people trying to pass each other in a hallway" type missteps that behavior tends to create.
You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.
I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
http://cadcd.uwaterloo.ca
Disclosure: My grad student advisor.
I love Waymo in other cities, but it'd be especially helpful here during the 1 day every other year that we actually get any snow ... if we ever get snow here again.
Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".
Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car.
All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares.
The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go.
The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
Love this concept.
As self-driving vehicles become a larger share of road use, roads can be more efficiently designed just for them: no speed limit, just 2 strips of pavement for the tires, no signage or striping, etc.
We'll just build the cars with parts that seldom fail. And we'll make them very strong, so that the only risk from hitting a deer or even a cow is a splash of gore.
That should help eliminate the need to turn. A loud horn and flashing lights will do pretty well for any errant humans that cross the path.
We can even reduce rolling resistance by using steel wheels instead of rubber, and we can make the road a surface of continuous steel for durability.
We can even hitch the cars together so they can't collide with eachother and they can collectively share the propulsion load. (Maybe even with automatic micro payments, so a car with low battery can pay the others to help it along.)
What would we call this thing?
> You might even call such an arrangement a "train"
Joking aside, though, the big issue with trains is last-mile. The road network covers a lot more land than the rail network does, and can reach places that trains can't. And this seems to be inherent to the physics of it, driven (hah) by cars ability to turn where trains cannot.
Mass transit enthusiasts love to gloss over the very real convenience issues that mass transit has, saying "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that. Hence why I think a hybrid system of dockable autonomous vehicles that can be linked up into a train in high-throughput thoroughfares gives you the best of all worlds.
"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"
So a Tesla?
As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.
I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.
Always feels a little weird to read a comment that is plausibly going to end up being referenced in a future news article.
So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world
The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.
[1] https://www.azfamily.com/2026/01/08/waymo-passenger-flees-af...
I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around crossing barrier arms, vs 100,000 hours of automated driving. I would bet the automated driver does a lot better.
I recently saw a video from (I think not Phoenix) of 3 waymos that were next to each other blocking traffic in an intersection, refusing to move, because they were facing a traffic signal intersection where the signals had reverted to blinking red mode. Humans who paid attention when learning to drive will understand this means the intersection has reverted to a 4-way-stop due to the traffic signal failure.
The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?
It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.
Waymo. Slightly better than an irresponsible alcoholic. As long as the maps are up to date.
Although I like jobs for humans, I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities. Want to find a way for offline vehicles that can go 65MPH to remain legal though. Without Flock every block either unless we (in USA) forget what the whole USA thing’s about.
Edit: @Waymo would LOVE to see an industry-leading privacy pledge so good the EFF slaps their logo on it (even caveated), also your engineers are amazing
I report these issues in the app whenever I do take a Waymo, so hopefully they'll get better.
The one to ride is Zoox though. They have limited deployment but their vehicles have no steering wheel, it's like a gondola ride to your destination.
With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.
Doesn't matter.
At this point, if the US doesn't lead, China will.
They have a massive population imbalance that they can only crawl out of with automation. Someone is going to have to drive around all those seniors. Once it's a proven model, it'll spread to the rest of the world.
There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?
The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.
Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.
I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.
What matters most are marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost for Waymo to add 1 more ride). Looking at marginal costs, Waymo takes in more money than it spends on each ride, so projecting outwards when Waymo operates a large enough fleet, Waymo will be profitable.
Uber/Lyft run enormous fleets of ~2 million vehicles in the US, and that's how they are able to maintain profitability. They can spread their engineering and management expenses over millions of rides.
---
Doing my own math, the marginal costs for Waymo are:
Revenue: Each Waymo vehicle brings in ~$50/hour
Expenses: Waymo must pay for
* Assume the cost of a vehicle is $100k
* Amortized depreciation of the car (assume vehicles need to be fully replaced after ~25,000 miles, vehicles average 25 miles / hour, vehicles need to be fully replaced after 10,000 hours, cost is $10/hour)
* Maintenance (Assume the total cost of maintenance is an additional 25% of the vehicle price, vehicle price is $100k and vehicle lasts 10,000 hours, cost is $2.5/hour). This is likely an underestimate, I didn't model the cost of a mechanic, so this could be as high as $5-7/hour.
* Support (assume 1 support agent can support 10 vehicles, Philippine support agent costs $10/hour, so amortized $1/hour per vehicle)
* Cleaning (needed daily, costs $1/hour per vehicle)
* Datacenter compute for vehicle coordination ($0.50/hour per vehicle)
* Electricity (Assume $2/hour)
10 + 2.5 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 + 2 = $17/hour to operate a Waymo.
In conclusion, the marginal costs for Waymo is very profitable.
There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.
I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.
I looked up the numbers - the estimated Uber/Lyft cost per mile in SF is ~$4.50/mi, and Waymo is trending around $1.40/mi (estimated 2025 number).
Anyway, digging into the Reddit posts which gave your lower-bound number, the reasoning seems very suspect. In particular, the biggest methodological problem is that they use retail price numbers when Waymo is almost certainly getting wholesale prices. So it assumes $110K ($70K for a Jaguar iPace + $40K for sensors and other AV equipment) for the car depreciated over 5 years, but $70K is the retail price for a Jaguar, including dealer markup, distribution, marketing, etc, and when you are buying thousands of them you are almost certainly not paying retail. Likewise, it figured 25c/kwh for electricity, which is retail off-peak PG&E rates, but Google just buys their own solar panels and pays pennies for electricity. The AV equipment figure of $40K was I recall what it cost back in ~2014; the cost of LIDAR has come down dramatically since then and now runs $500-1000/vehicle, so that number should also be suspect. And if vehicle cost is more like $50-60K/year than $110K/year, $7K/year in insurance is way too high. Hell, Google could just self-insure with their $250B in cash, they've got a stronger financial position than every insurer other than Berkshire Hathaway.
I'd bet the true cost per mile is well under $1.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1oiqerw/ho...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...
Waymo has other costs, such as engineering driverless operation.
Once there are enough trips, the fixed engineering costs are spread across more and more trips, exponentially trending towards zero, driving the cost per trip even lower.
Or less depending on how you tip.
That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.
The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).
I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.
(nobody would confuse me with an economist!)
The driver cost is of course the big saving. And they need breaks as well and don't drive 24x7. A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
Mostly what Waymo is doing currently with customized vehicles is not actually super scalable. But it helps at their relatively small current scale. You wouldn't design a custom vehicle + factory for their current growth rate. That becomes more interesting when they start scaling beyond tens of thousands of new vehicles per year. They are probably in the lower thousands currently.
I think they raised close to 20-30B so far. They say they are doing 500K rides per week. At 15$ per ride that adds up to ~390M/year. That's revenue, not profit. But if they could 100x that by rolling out to more and more cities and larger and larger areas, it's going to add up to annual revenues that add up to more than what they raised. That's not going to happen overnight, obviously. But they seem on a path where they are scaling, optimizing, reducing their cost, and growing.
The risks here are mainly that they won't have the market to themselves. Others are doing robo taxi's too and if any of them starts scaling faster and cheaper, Waymo could hit some growth issues. Also, with multiple companies competing, prices per ride would eventually go down. The next five years are going to be interesting.
It's wierd to see this fantasy of machines on HN, of all places - that they have no downtime, no additional costs - it's only a savings from employing people), and (not said here) they don't make mistakes.
Lots of machines have far more downtime and cost than people. Many have more maintenance hours than operating hours.
Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.
Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45
Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.
Not always.
I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.
Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.
But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.
Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.
Can’t stop until cross traffic can simultaneously use intersections all at 100 miles an hour with inches to spare
Heck I'd just be happy with banked curves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fm567YGy5c
That is, of course, tremendously challenging. It's impractical to look at a job performed by millions and just saying "well fix capitalism" when eliminating the jobs. But it's still the right solution. There shouldn't be gas station attendants, there shouldn't be redundant bureaucratic figuers and managers, and, when possible, there shouldn't be millions of paid car drivers.
(Taxis/rideshares) are dangerous, drivers harass you, etc. Ours are so amazing, people love them.
The reality is that I have zero problems with rideshares (or taxis, when I'm someplace that still has them). Being a social animal like other Homo sapiens, interacting is a positive but drivers have no problem giving me peace. I'd much rather have the intelligence and flexibility of a human who can communicate, adapt, and solve problems.
> your engineers are amazing
They say the same about you!
That is already a huge jump from two cities a year.
Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.
1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in
2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so
3. drivers end up making less than before, and
4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.
Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.
The flip side is drastically fewer parking spaces needed, most of which can be located outside of the city core. And decreased costs due to fewer accidents.
Definitely, and at no cost to taxpayers.
> It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit
Waymo is less efficient in the narrow case of transporting hundreds of people between two specific points at a specific time, but more efficient for almost every other case.
If Waymo had dedicated right-of-way in the same way trains do, it would be more efficient.
No, we have them in St. Louis and it snows a few times per year here.
https://www.botanicalinterests.com/community/blog/usda-hardi...
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/04/self-driving-car...
> Hannah Schafer, communications director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said Waymo is welcome to map out the city streets.
> “All they’re doing right now is basically taking pictures. Taking pictures in the right of way, anyone is allowed to do that. That’s not something that we regulate,” Schafer said.
> However, she said the city would regulate the testing and driving of autonomous cars.
> “No one can drive driverless vehicles in Portland without a permit,” Schafer said. “That is not allowed.”
...
> Portland fought vigorously with Uber over the terms of its local arrival a decade ago and a battle is already brewing over Waymo. Portland council member Mitch Green staked out his opposition in January, telling constituents on Bluesky, “You should know I don’t support that.”
...
> Oregon legislators considered a bill earlier this year that would have set statewide rules for self-driving cars, and would have prohibited local governments from imposing blanket prohibitions on autonomous vehicles. The bill died in committee following opposition from local governments.
I will feel so secure and private being recorded at all angles in a car I don't own and can't sue.
"Waymo: ‘no plans’ to use in-car camera data for targeted ads"
(https://www.theverge.com/news/644770/waymo-interior-camera-a...)
OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?
Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.
This is even worse in an Uber where the drivers can put cameras anywhere and do anything with the recordings.
And the people in the Philippines who can intervene in the "self" driving can comment on your bodily features if bored.
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).
Waymo microphones are only activated when you contact support.
Do you think Google is lying about the microphone?
Because nobody is forcing you to take a Waymo? I dont think it is as hard to understand.
Its like saying "You dont understand why people arent more upset about spicy food because your stomach cant handle it.."
These incidents haven't made me fear, because I am a relatively big and tall male, but they _definitely_ will for others. And even then, they aren't pleasant.
You simply don't run into those things often on trains/subways in Europe (I lived in Spain for a year and traveled extensively in Europe during that time, and on other europe trips prior). So fix those issues, and then I am sure people will want to ride the rails.
As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".
Streetcar is more susceptible to being stopped because someone parked over the white line, but with 20 minute headways it takes longer to cause a problem.
Public transport ridership took a massive hit with the pandemic and never fully recovered.
Waymo does not solve a public transport problem. I don't mind that it takes money from Uber, Lyft, etc., but the damage it also transfers income from human taxi drivers (what little they can salvage from Uber, Lyft) to a large corporation.
I see it as a net negative for society, not a net positive.
I'm not saying it's going to randomly speed up to 80mph and crash into a building and explode. Just that I'll finally have a chance to witness those hilarious videos in person
Good luck to Portland getting fucked by Waymo.
The rain will be a real test though!
...while high on marijuana and watching TikTok
> The rain will be a real test though!
Maybe, between the fog of San Francisco and the downpours of Miami, they Waymo Driver is very experienced.
I would rank it up there with mobile broadband and smartphones in terms of influence.
What will they tell the unemployed drivers? "Coal miners need to code" doesn't work any more. Become a data thief/labeler perhaps?
People should research the racist history of American cities before publishing broad, vapid, and likely LLM-generated statements like this.
If you're going to say a place has "always been a pioneer in urban design", you should take the time to acknowledge that Portland's early urban-design efforts were deeply racist and explicitly segregated.
https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
https://habitatportlandregion.org/the-early-history-of-portl...