If Waymo Premier includes an [EVASIVE MANEUVERS] button on the infotainment screen I'm in.
I had a Uber driver block my Waymo at an intersection in SF some months ago just to be an asshole. Apparently some other people have been attacked and robbed while in a Waymo.
Waymo should treat it like a security flaw that anyone can stop your car and there's nothing you can do about it.
I've had a few similar cases, often teenagers on bikes coming dangerously close (e.g. forcing waymo to sudden break) and last one one bicyclist just blocking me for 5-10 minutes in SF (also just to be an asshole), with a street full of cars behind all blocked. I called the "connect to support" button and they could not anything. This is the only negative experience I had with Waymo; and I am hope something is done to be able to swiftly respond to such cases (e.g. remote driver take over, or at least capture their video and work with police to punish them later) in order to deter them in the long term.
People will reply to you calling you crazy, but SF/bay is the only place I have ever experienced where many people will literally leave their cars unlocked because a broken window isn't worth the hassle. Yes, locking your parked car is a hazard here... and the reason is obvious.
In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.
When I read this kind of stuff I am always happy I live in a normal country/place - Singapore. Absolutely insane lmao. Must be fun sitting in your Waymo hitting some panic button and it gets blocked LMAO
As a Brit who has spend time in both Singapore and SF, I'd say Singapore seems more normal currently. The tents of homeless people shitting in the street and dying of overdoses is weird, like something from Dickensian London.
I live in SF and I absolutely love so much about it, but here and especially in Oakland where I also lived for years, I'd welcome bringing back caning if it meant we could live as safely and securely as in Singapore
They blocked the Golden Gate Bridge which included ambulances, other emergency vehicles and thousands of people trying to get to work. I'm happy that the DA is throwing the book at them, I hope they bankrupt themselves trying to defend themselves and then spend a lot of time in jail.
Except the defense has shown that the police blocked opening an additional lane even after the protestors specifically requested it for emergency traffic, and in fact blocked more lanes unnecessarily.
> Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.
> Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.
While politically i'm on the opposite side of those guys, i do think that such severe prosecution is unwarranted and politically motivated (and may be intended to create chilling effect on all future protests no matter the cause) - blocking a road is a well established traditional form of protest which traditionally is expected to end with (if the judge is in a bad mood) something like disorderly conduct citation/fine, not anywhere close to felony.
Well, if they caused you any specific loss nothing prevents you from suing them in civil court like in any other situation when somebody causes you a specific loss. That though is a completely different thing from criminal prosecution.
Waymo and specific people there responsible for that programming/bugs could probably be charged with criminal negligence by an enthusiastic prosecutor, yet haven't been. Why? Probably common sense. Like recognizing that there weren't criminal intent. And such situations is a price of progress. The same with protests. They weren't conspiring to block ambulances. And such situations is a price of freedom of protests and speech. Though if somebody dies that way, i think they would have a civil case against the protesters. The same way like affected people can have a civil case against Waymo in the situations mentioned above.
Neither of those are acceptable. Why would you think Waymo not following the law is somehow a justification for it to continue to put people’s lives at risk to enable protesters to do the same?
I hope they succeed, for the sake of my mom who's legally blind and has dreamed about them for decades. but I'd be significantly more excited about self-driving if you could buy level-4 AVs that you can actually own.
Cars aren't the best option, but you can drop self-driving cars into an existing car-centric society one car at a time, with the car buyers paying for themselves.
Making a car-centric society meaningfully less car-centric requires the enthusiastic support of that society, along with competent political leadership, and probably a fair chunk of taxpayer cash too. Suburbs with huge lots make for long walks to the transit stop - but densifying those suburbs is not easy.
I don't own a car; I travel everywhere by bicycle and public transport - but the public transport I use was all built in the 1850s. Some time between then and now my society reorganised into a form that has a lot of difficulty delivering public transport projects.
This is a false alternative, because robocars do not exist, while public transit does exist but simply hasn’t been adequately implemented everywhere.
Politicians (and grifters alike) like to point to a future technology to solve an existing problem only to delay existing solutions which they don’t want to implement, most often for political reasons.
Robocars most certainly exist. They’re probably about 5% of car traffic in San Francisco. I’ve not taken one yet (taxis/ubers/Waymos are mostly impractical with a young kid in the US as you must use a car seat unlike in most European countries) but as a pedestrian they seem mostly a safer than other drivers. As a driver I expect they will eventually induce gridlock but the city can always create more bus lanes.
Portable booster seats are pretty small. I can’t see it working if you have a kid younger than the booster seat min though. Only a few states have strict rules here, Washington and California being a couple, although I think California has a taxi exemption.
Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe.
My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster with you unless you plan to hire a car the other end. When I travel back to see my family in Europe I take the train from the airport. So we bus and Bart to the airport even though it would be much easier with luggage to take a taxi.
My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat.
This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the US I know. As most such trips are low speed around town (e.g. getting to and from a train station or airport) it seems a reasonable trade off.
The robotaxis that do exist only do so in very limited places using very expensive technology (including off-shored service center for intervention) that is not available for the public consumer markets.
They mean consumer robocars as opposed to robotaxis. The latter exist, the former don't. And the latter are remotely controlled by operators when hard situations arise, but a blind consumer would presumably be on their own or would have to pay an additional subscription for that service.
In the USA where transit in most cities sucks? Seattle is supposedly one of the best but you can’t get to work downtown most days without being harassed by a fent zombie.
I really don’t know who told you that Seattle has one of the best transit infrastructures in the country, lol. It’s not even close to New York or Chicago, nor any of the forward thrust cities (DC, Atlanta). Hell, the light rail isn’t even as good as Portland.
> Could other public transit serve the same purpose?
Population density plays a big part. People think of Europe as a public transportation paradise, but a car makes your life easier outside Berlin, Paris, and other major cities. I live on the edge of Copenhagen and public transportation sucks the further you go from the downtown since the major city turn into a giant suburb really fast. Yes, people bike, but many do drive a car.
Surely, not until public transit networks covering literally everywhere regular roads can get you.
Public transit is better, but building it outside of dense metro areas to the extent it becomes competitive is probably even more difficult than building a self-driving car.
Walking to the station isn't even the bad part. The bad part is then walking 3min in tunnels smelling like piss to get to the platform, then waiting 7min more for the train to arrive, then walk 3min more to get out of another piss-filled station. That's 10-15 of absolutely-not-enjoyable subway station.
Can I ask why you prefer that some future technology will solve her problem when actual solutions (such as access vans; public transit; etc.) already exist?
And before anyone points this out, if your local government does not offer these solutions that is a political choice of your local politicians. Plenty of local governments all over the world (even in dictatorships) are able to provide these, and changing the policy of your local government should in theory be easier then to roll out technology that does not exist.
I'm blind. I wish to hop in a robocar and drive from Denver to go visit my folks back home in Florida. Is the Denver Access-A-Ride going to take me? Which public transit is available?
I preemptively addressed this. Not providing access is a political choice. The airports/train stations/bus stations in both Denver and Florida should have assistants ready to guide you to your flight/train/bus and the Colorado government could have an agreement with Florida to share services with residents of either state. If they don‘t, there was a political choice not to, which can be changed. If there is no public transit available... well... neither are robocars, but only the former is a political choice.
I want to drive. I want to bring my cat and bring some stuff back from my dad's house. My parents just drove up here to visit me, I would like to do the same. Not take a train. Not take a plane. I want to hop in a robocar and drive to Florida. The same thing that every other person with a car can do whenever they want to. Freedom.
I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not. In my mind a car is a liability in ways the bus is not. You have to insure your car, find parking, get a license, you cannot drive drunk, your license plate is tracked, etc. etc. vs. a bus which you can just hop in (as drunk as you want) fall a sleep or whatever and when you arrive the bus just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life. For me that is true freedom.
now imagine a bus, but its smaller and private only for you. for me that is true freedom! not only can you hop in as drunk as you want, and fall asleep, but you can also control the climate and the music and spread out. and when you arrive the waymo just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life
Like I said earlier, this technology does not exist. And even if it did, the infrastructure required for everyone to own and operate such a car would be orders of magnitude more expensive and much much much politically harder choice to approve then to build out public transit and to provide access services.
Funny enough, my local bus line does that. Admittedly it is unique among my local bus system (due to the rural nature of my local area relative to the rest of the system; and the relative length between bus stops). However the same bus system (King County Metro) also operates the access van, so if you are mobility impaired you do have the option to hail a ride which gets you door to door.
Because technological freedom has, historically, vastly outperformed political choice?
I can buy a robotic car, once they're available. I am nowhere near rich enough to afford even one politician, much less enough to get public transit to happen in California.
Political choices also take time. You have to get people to vote on a budget, you have to actually build the infrastructure, etc. - even busses require bus stops and drivers and maintenance facilities.
Given that robotic cars already exist today, and are planning to expand, basically every reasonable expectation says that robotic cars will happen before politicians change tack on public transit (especially in the USA, where Trump is currently our president - he does not seem gung-ho on public transit)
Like I said, dictatorships manage to do this. Claiming that America is different is just another form of American exceptionalism.
And no, robotic cars do not exist. A very limited version of robotaxis do, but they are nowhere near ready for public rollout on all public roads for the consumer market.
The policy of my local government is subject to a number of constraints beyond my personal desire for transit between points that are relevant to me and my lifestyle. I live in a place with pretty good public transit, but I still routinely drive to a place 3 miles away from me, because all the bus routes that take me there are indirect and would add an hour to my round trip.
that xkcd is always funny - but there's a white lie in it e.g on motorcycles in areas where you are allowed to ride median. there's instances of drivers actively tryin' to kill you by swerving onto the median when they see you comin'.
Numerous times now, using Tesla FSD, I've found the car seemingly drifting from the center of the lane, only to have motorcycles buzz by at high speed on the opposite side. It's very polite toward motorcyclists.
I started riding in AZ, which does not allow splitting.
I now live in CA, which does.
The actual justification for it is valid, but mostly outdated:
Older and less powerful motorcycles often have air-cooled engines, and if you sit idling in them in e.g. a traffic jam, they will absolutely overheat and die (at best).
Newer and more powerful bikes are liquid-cooled, and do not have this issue (though the driver overheating is another very real issue).
My personal take is that most riders who use bikes to commute are too reckless, and lane split at speed rather than doing so more safely.
25 mph or below, in fully-stopped traffic, is relatively safe. Ditto for <=35 in a 10-20 mph flow. Each of those gives you a relative stopping distance of about 50 feet, which is 3 or fewer car lengths, which is easy to account for.
60 in a 25mph flow OTOH isn't lane splitting, it's just weaving through traffic recklessly, hoping to God that no one in the next 20 cars lengths merges or drifts at all.
The good rule that most of Europe uses is that motorcycles can "lane filter" (i.e. go in between lanes but only for cars that are basically stopped and only at low speed). Going between lanes is suicidal at high speed, but if cars are <5mph and the motorcycle is ~10mph it's actually safer for the motorcycle because it removes the chance of them being rear-ended. (It also makes motorcycles faster than cars which is helpful for discouraging cars in cities)
Officially allowed in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and UK, from what I can tell. Interesting though, I'd have assumed it's permitted nowhere in the EU.
It's actually safer-ish. First: terms. Filtering is good, involves moving slowly through stopped traffic between the cars, usually under 20mph differential.
Splitting is less good, that involves weaving between cars at speed and is actually dangerous.
Some of the worst accidents are rear endings where drivers (not paying attention) just run you over while stopped in traffic.
This is offset by accidents where people do the stuff you're worried about but when it's practiced correctly that's not as big of a risk and generally leads to less catastrophic accidents than rear endings.
It's also just kinda dumb to force a class of vehicle that can get out of traffic jams to instead sit in them
Waymo was a target during the anti-ICE protests because of Google's collaboration with ICE. In addition, Waymo is seen as a symbol of the gentrification problem.
Agree or disagree with it, my point is that that xkcd doesn't take into account political motivations
Protesters block human cars as well as the only difference is that the Waymo driver doesn’t get frustrated and are pretty patient. So protesters need to physically damage the car to make their point, which is a tricky proposition with all the cameras it has (but face masks are common on both sides these days).
Except in this case, damaging cars belonging to Google—a collaborator with ICE—is the point. It's more comparable to people who were damaging Tesla vehicles or the Tyre Extinguishers in the UK than the very common tactic of halting traffic/economic activity to threaten "business as usual"
Property damage is just hooliganism, thugs make an excuse for it no matter if that’s what they feel like doing.
The eventual result of America falling into chaos will be countries like China having nice stuff like self driving cars (because they don’t tolerate thugs) while the us doesnt.
Perhaps sometimes a simplistic take like this is true - people destroying just for the sake of destruction and indifferent to the target.
However when destruction is targeted toward specific brands or toward infrastructure being used for specific purposes such takes can no longer be true.
Boycotting Waymo? Sure, it sends a message. Bashing in a car so someone else can’t ride it? It just makes the other side look like the good guys and their side look like the bad guys. Is that what they intended? No, obviously not, they just wanted an excuse to do property destruction.
This is why protests are hard. You have to somehow keep it peaceful by dissuading hooliganism who are ultimately attracted by the chaos to do carnage. Those hooligcans aren’t on your side and don’t care about your cause, they just want to bash things in and do some looting. They might as well be working for ICE with the bad rep they are giving to the anti-ICE protestors.
>Bashing in a car so someone else can’t ride it? It just makes the other side look like the good guys and their side look like the bad guys
Not really. If your definition of "good" and "bad" (always a sign of a simplistic mind btw) is "good for Waymo's bottom line" and "bad for Waymo's bottom line" then sure. But if your community's people are suffering and looking to rideshare gigs for a lifeline, and then a company threatens them, then destroying their assets is easy to justify as "good" from a humanistic perspective, even categorically.
The US could avoid this by making sure that the social contract here is still in place. People destroy and protest self driving cars because they aren't liberatory automation; they're just another taxi billing us except that they also put humans driving rideshares out of a job. Does China have a problem with their people being forced to do rideshare gigs to get enough food to eat and competing with self driving cars?
If I had to choose I rather take free internet where I don't have to play with some VPN every time I want to do something or play a game in steam. Self driving cars are nice toys though but I don't mind having a driver.
I say this as someone who has lived in China, the system is just too closed and dumb.
I find it somehow like a dystopia that things like these happen. This isn't about kids dying in some foreign country on some distant continent and we're investing in fancy robot taxis. This is actually that some people have the privilege of living in a bubble and using this technology that these huge corporations put money in (for the profit of their shareholders) while in the same time ignoring the core issues of the society that lead to such acts happening (stealing in broad daylight stuff from a car while people are inside it). I know people will say that this isn't for Google to fix (yeah, they only fix and lobby for laws that help them make more money) or for the tech people working for these companies and browsing these forums to fix, but I do find it a bit disgusting.
So you're implying that someone in a locked Waymo was assaulted at gunpoint from outside the vehicle? These are rolling surveillance machines (in a good way?) and virtually every aspect of this would be caught on probably a dozen cameras. I'd be surprised if this hypothetical scenario has ever happened, and if it has, I'd love to see the evidence.
I think people vastly overestimate the extent to which would be criminals think ahead to the likelihood of being caught and the severity of the punishment.
You're laying on enough qualifiers that even a recent robbery of a Waymo is precluded, because (if we really want to victim blame) their window was down which is asking for it.
But overall, not sure why the tone of these replies: then Venn diagram of "wants to rob people" and "cares Google's AV will record it" doesn't include as much overlap as you're implying.
A Waymo has even been used as a getaway vehicle a few times now, once even successfully
The biggest advantage with public transit is that your mind is not engaged driving. But at some point, the speed advantage is overwhelming. And eventually the price advantage dominates. Taking my family and grandparents to the airport is $40 by car^W rideshare and $45 by BART and twice the amount of time for me: I live upstairs from a T-train / Caltrain stop. I'd invite anyone to price out the difference themselves.
Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.
I spent over a decade on a bicycle plus Muni/BART Fastpass and it's pretty good for the price if you're single and stay inside the city. As such a person I could crack open a book and a 15 min from Glen Park to Montgomery St. was the same as a 1 h from Montgomery to El Cerrito (the latter even preferable).
But the various policy choices popular in San Francisco (intentionally high labour usage, ill and violent people in public spaces, low cleaning capacity) do act against transit being a good choice. By comparison, I have family in Vancouver, BC where the politics are similar but the policy is different and the trains run very often and are fast (these are the most important things - made possible by removing labor from the equation) and are relatively clean. People will offer you a seat when you hop on with your stroller, elevators are functional and relatively clean, and it's overall a lot more usable as a family.
> Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.
Buses are fairly fast where bus lanes exist. With the kid I now take the bus far more often rather than walking 15 minutes to the Bart station and spending an extra 5 minutes each end navigating Bart’s incredibly poorly located lifts at each end.
I bought an e-bike once the kid was 2 and it has been pretty great. It would be absolutely wonderful if San Francisco created a network of real separated bike lanes or slow streets.
Bart seems much more cleaner and safer now than in years past. I don't know if free mental space is the main benefit of transit. During rush hour, you can't do much outside of listen to something, which you can do while driving too.
Not having to deal with parking and the fact that driving is actually very dangerous seem like stronger points in transits favor.
Fwiw, driving also has some negative je ne sais quoi for me that goes beyond the functional advantages. Maybe it's the aesthetic onslaught of ugly concrete, noise, heat and smell of sitting in traffic for an hour on the highway. Maybe there's something about getting around on your feet that makes me feel viscerally connected to the city. Maybe it's just the exercise that compounds over time. But I hate driving.
Driving is actually not "very dangerous" if you're sober, not distracted, and driving a properly maintained modern car. Like most any activity the risk isn't zero but you can cut it down a lot.
I know this goes against the HN groupthink, but a lot of those accidents are not the car or the drivers fault. I live in a small college town. We have huge problems with students just walking right off the curb, especially when drunk.
The pedestrian is not the one driving the weapon. It is your fault if you hit a pedestrian, even if they walk right off the curb, even if they’re drunk.
Unless they intentionally jump in front of your car in an attempt to commit suicide, it is always on you to ensure you can stop and respond to an emergency, and a pedestrian is such a thing, imho.
I think this is more a design problem with US road infrastructure. City streets are much wider than in other countries which encourages drivers to drive more quickly and allows them to pay less attention. We'd have far fewer pedestrian and cyclist fatalities if we didn't require streets to be so wide.
No, if the pedestrian walks out in the known-dangerour street without so much as a glance, not a crosswalk, that is categorically not the cars fault. Idiots are gonna idiots. Just like all the cyclists that get hit around here for not obeying stop signs.
ALL users of the road are responsible for following the rules. Not being in a car isn't a "I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, whyever I want" pass.
My point is Bart feels safe now and that it seems to be trending up not down. I am talking about the trend I have observed living in the bay area for the past 15 years. Why would not including the 70s in my window of comparison invalidate my point?
It is also a class marker. I intentionally lived without a car in West Coast city as a younger man, and I learned to be very selective about whom I told. The vast majority of people would assume that the only reason for not having a car is not being able to afford one, and would judge me accordingly.
I have the same situation here. We live intentionally without a car, and our quality of life is fantastic. People assume poverty, given the lack of car, as opposed to I just don't see the value, and value controlling my time (the walks are force exercise, a win for me). I learned along time ago to not play other peoples games.
I only recent got my driver's license again, at 40, after it expired a decade ago. Having a car just didn't make financial sense to me (and still doesn't, I just want the option to be able to drive one sometimes).
I had to learn pretty quick that, if this trivia topic came up, I'd need to mention "I lived in NYC so long that I just never used it and didn't realize it expired" because otherwise people would assume that I lost it because of too many DUIs.
I chose not to drive as a teenager (public transit even in my smallish city seemed fine, I wanted to spend my money on a computer not a car) and it was interesting to watch the assumptions go from "you are incapable / afraid" to "you must be too poor or have a DUI" over the last 30 years.
It's inconceivable to most people that it could be a choice.
West Coast cities (or pretty much all cities in the USA except maybe NYC and Chicago and sometimes SF) suck without car. Yes, you can do it. It will be a chore.
That attitude and class marker disappears in big cities in much of Asia and Europe
Because living in west coast cities without a car sucks. They see a decision you made, question why you made it, and can only conclude it's because you cant afford the other one. People in areas where public transit is good dont come to the same conclussion.
Are cars convenient? Drivers are constantly complaining about inconveniences. Parking, storage, maintenance, repairs, citations, congestion, construction, registration, insurance, the toil of driving itself, negative interactions with other drivers, etc.
Are cars predictable? According to google maps, my route to downtown Los Angeles could be 30 to 150 minutes depending on the time of day, the train is always 50.
It seems you would have to be unaware of alternatives to make those claims.
This is very much location dependant. Cars are convenient, predictable, and affordable in most of the USA. People just drive to their destination and park in one of the abundant free spaces without worrying about it. There are only a handful of dense cities where traffic and parking are a huge hassle. Public transit can sometimes be a great option and we should build more of it, but realistically most people will continue to rely on cars (possibly autonomous) in our lifetimes.
> Cars are convenient, predictable, and affordable in most of the USA. People just drive to their destination and park in one of the abundant free spaces without worrying about it.
This. I don't know what places people have in mind when they say that driving is inconvenient. Even in NYC driving isn't as bad as people claim, except perhaps in Lower Manhattan where there just aren't any parking spots. In most other places, a car takes you from door to door cheaper and faster than any alternative.
This is a huge difference between NYC and SF. There are certainly some in NYC who would prefer Waymo (direct route, no driver chitchat), but I don't think many New Yorkers would be proud of taking Waymo's. Most people feel embarrassed to admit they took an Uber somewhere!
> Most people [in NYC] feel embarrassed to admit they took an Uber somewhere!
High income women (or women married to high income men) -- of all ages -- not at all. Most women under 30 with a good job expected to be "Uber'd" home from a date. As a joke, if you are very high income, you would be embarrassed to ride Uber because your car and driver were diverted for an unexpected repair.
in nyc any car based transportation is slower than subways often, but everyones so narrow minded they just think about their own life. if you're old in nyc cabs/ubers/waymo are a big deal, without them you're stuck walking to a bus stop or subway and that gets hard in your 70s and 80s.
Public transit in the US just mostly sucks. It tends to be sparse, slow, unreliable, and yeah sometimes there are crazies who make the environment feel dangerous.
You send Americans over to visit Tokyo and they have zero problems taking the train. The problems isn't with individual Americans.
Americans don't want to live in dense neighborhoods, so public transit is not viable (the operating costs would be too high). Foreigners are often amazed by the quality of life in American suburbs relative to what they experience at home for this reason. Our homes, cars, stores, cafes, are a lot more spacious for example.
If you are talking about a city where this makes sense like Phoenix, the public transportation is very poor. It can take 90 minutes to cover the distance you could drive in 20.
They have a light rail, but it only goes between downtown and a few suburbs. Your other option is several bus transfers.
If you’re thinking of cities like New York or London, public transport is more practical in many cases.
The HN commentariat skews young and male so opinions seen here are often disconnected from average people in the real world. Many women feel unsafe riding on US public transit because other riders act out in antisocial ways. We can argue about whether this perception is rational based on crime statistics or whatever but you're not going to convince them to ride until the police and transit system operators start enforcing basic rules of behavior and cleanliness.
Can confirm. My partner has had far too many bad encounters on bart. I had a female coworker say she saw a guy get murder with a hammer on bart.
Obviously everyone’s experience is different but public transit had a bad rep for a reason and it had nothing to do with class/status and almost all to do with safety. Uber/lyft is getting a bad rep too due to safety.
Not saying you're 100% wrong, but there are tons of markets where Uber is robust enough to rely on and get you where you need to go, and public transit absolutely is not. (I'm half an hour outside of Pittsburgh.)
More like want to avoid being in an enclosed space with mentally ill, people smoking meth, people that smell of petrified urine, with uncomfortably hot temperatures and crowding.
I have been in an SF muni car with someone actively smoking something that was not marijuana or a cigarette. I think it was fentanyl but I’m not sure. This was about two years ago. I hope this is tolerated less now than it has been.
San Francisco public transportation is neither reliable or safe enough for my family. The only thing that’s remotely decent is Caltrain, but that has the last mile problem.
I am on the fence about this comment. Without doxxing yourself too much, what neighborhood do you live and where do your children and (I assume) wife work? I would disagree for about 50% of the city in the "western zones". Sure, it is slow, but it is reliable and safe (both trains and buses).
I use public transit but it comes with a lot of inconvenience. You need to stand on a moving vehicle more often than not, it takes more time, there are panhandlers, you might not feel safe, transfers don't generally seem to time well, going up and down multiple flights of stairs is a fair bit of exercise, some people don't shower as often as you'd hope, etc. People generally pay for convenience. I certainly would if I could budget for it. I couldn't care less about status or class.
I'm much less likely to get randomly harassed or robbed or stabbed or catch COVID in a car where I am the sole occupant. I'm happy to pay extra to drop the chances of those things down to 0.00%.
If that makes me some kind of class supremacist in your silly world, then guilty as charged.
How often do you think that happens to transit riders? Your concerns seem overblown. And by driving, your odds of getting hurt or dying in a car accident go way up. You’re trading one set of risks for another, not eliminating risk entirely.
People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
Both things can be true. People can have exaggerated fears about the dangers of transit (especially compared to driving, which people seem to pretend is relatively risk-free), and the crazy / shady folks on transit can still be a problem and still need to be addressed.
I can only speak from my own experience riding transit in Seattle for 9 years. I've never had any issues. Sure, there are sketchy characters, but I've never been bothered, and never had anyone bother me. I definitely see news stories about bad shit happening on transit, but when you look at the number of people riding transit vs the amount of bad things that happen, and you look at the number of people driving and how many people die or get seriously injured in the city daily from car-related accidents, it's a no brainer. You don't see people dying on transit every day, but car-related fatalities are a daily occurrence.
Yes I am trading one set of risks for another based on my judgement of which risks I prefer to bear, as it is my right to do. Simply leaving my house entails a set of risks. I get to choose how I want to handle and prioritize those.
The point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with "class".
I have been puked on when riding the bart and know several people who have seen a person die or get murdered. This dismissal of the very real problems of public transport is why public transport has the reputation it does.
> Wealthy people in NYC have no problem with the subway.
No trolling: I gotta ask: Is this humor? If so, hat tip. Else: "Wealthy people in NYC (Manhattan)" have a car and driver. They don't care about the subway.
What I do believe: People that earn 200K to 400K in NYC/Manhattan still frequently ride the subway to work. Why? They rent/buy an apartment on an extremely convenient subway line to their office. They are not quite rich enough to have a car and driver.
> People that earn 200K to 400K in NYC/Manhattan still frequently ride the subway to work. Why? They rent/buy an apartment on an extremely convenient subway line to their office.
Sure, this is mostly what I was referring to. The overwhelming number of people in SF would never dream of choosing where to live based off public transit access. I cant speak to billionaires, but the upper middle class of NYC(imo these people are all wealthy but we can change that word if you like) are mostly happy or at least open to public transit. Its not a class thing until you get to billionaire level. Therefore the reason people don't use public transit isn't because it's associated with the underclass, it's because almost all of it in the US is objectively worse than other transportation options.
I don’t think this is entirely wrong, in that there is a ‘class thing’ about riding the bus, but it’s more practicality than a class marker for a lot of people.
- In SF you can either walk 1-10 minutes to the bus, wait 0-15 minutes for the bus, tap on (while watching most other passengers evade the fare), get dropped off, and then walk 1-10 minutes to your destination… or spend an additional $5-10 to get Ubered door to door at a third of the time. First and last mile are real costs.
- In SF I Uber, unless Muni/BART is a straight shot. In NYC I take the subway. It’s not really a class thing. In NYC it takes longer to Uber much of the time and it costs several more times than the subway. You still have a 1-5 minute first and last mile problem, but headways on trains is decent and above ground taxis are incredibly inconsistent with traffic.
That about matches up with the experience with social groups in similar classes in these areas too. Most of my SF friends Uber. Most of my NYC friends take the subway.
This comment is legit! So many of these comments here are wildly biased to people's own personal experiences (usually the male/female Karens are the most noisy). You make many good points here.
My question(s): Why do you think Uber works so well in SF? Why don't they get trapped on Market Street with crawling speeds?
I lived in NYC (Manhattan) many years ago and I always felt that when I needed a taxi (cold/snow/rain), they were hard to get. As a result, I almost never took a classic yellow cab in NYC/Manhattan.
When it's as bad as SF's then yes, trams/trains/busses can often suck. I used them but it was rarely plesant. Other cities (Europe, Asia) are much better.
Do you think people avoid the underclass because it depletes their aura, or because they like avoiding clearly mentally ill people, or people with no ability for personal hygiene, or people who need to smoke meth on the bus?
The first two are what I experienced today on a bus in SF, and the guy smoking meth was about 6 days ago
> If you need to go to Brisbane from Powell, the 2 mile car ride is worth the effect.
I checked Google Maps. I don't see any BART stations that are only 2 miles (3 km) from downtown Brisbane (California). What I am missing? Or are you taking Caltrain, then getting an Uber from 4th and King Caltrain terminal to Powell?
Don't tell me... you are a man? I guess so. How many middle class women and above want to ride SFMuni after dark? Few.
The future of self-driving taxis is women (customers) who want to live in a big city, but don't want to ride mass transit, nor ride in a ride-hailing services (Uber, etc.) with a human driver... because most drivers are men.
This kind of gender politics is tiresome. You could easily point out that for women public transit is untenable after dark instead of bringing the OP’s identity into it.
I imagine that Uber can also be somewhat sketchy but with a different risk profile (getting into the car with a stranger, often a man, and needing to trust that they'll drive you to the right location), which means that self-driving taxis would be a potential safety upgrade over that as well.
1000%. Ask any women who uses ride-hailing services: Have you ever had a situation where the driver made you uncomfortable or fear for your safety? I would conservatively estimate 100% of women. I think men just do not understand how much women are willing to pay to guarantee they can avoid this situation.
I definitely was not aware of this when I was younger, but after years of learning to be a better listener and learn about experiences outside my own, my perception is that there are unfortunately quite a lot of situations that most men would consider quite mundane but pretty much all women will have had to fear for their safety in. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that when others have trouble conceiving of this phenomenon given how long I went without picking up on it, but now that I'm aware of it it's impossible not to see it everywhere.
Not a single woman has even asked or cared if I felt uncomfortable at a gas station at night, or ATM, or walking down the street.
Yet data shows men are more likely to be physically assaulted and/or killed by strangers.
This framing ignores the fact that most people who commit crimes like the ones you mention are men. A man encountered in one of those situations alone is a lot more likely to be a threat, so I'm not sure why you'd expect that a woman would try to initiate conversation with him.
? I'm not saying women are supposed to chat up random men.
I'm saying of the women I know well, not one has ever cared about the danger non criminal men face in the world. All they talk about is the danger women face.
Uber and Lyft both provide an option for women to request female drivers. In both cases, they say they can't guarantee it and that they may end up matched with a male driver. (In Lyft's case, they group "nonbinary" with women.) I suppose you could cancel if you see it's a man, and if that's rare enough, maybe that's workable. (Though, it seems, that would happen only if there aren't any female drivers available, and thus you'd have to fall back to other transportation.)
Yeah, but imagine you live in Phoenix, AZ, and you can't/won't drive for whatever reason, you've got to get to work every day. Phoenix has buses, but they're not going to be convenient for lots of possible daily commutes. Daily taxi/Uber/Waymo rides are probably a pretty good choice.
Or imagine that you work a professional travel job and you're flying to/from the airport on a weekly basis. Your employer will pay for your ride to the airport, so why would you take public transit? Now you're doing at least 3-4 taxi/uber/waymo rides a week.
I have a job where I fly frequently, my employer pays my way to/from the airport, and I take transit whenever possible because uber/lyft/taxi services seem to select horrible drivers.
I'd certainly consider a Waymo if I was flying to an airport they serviced though.
Time to start traveling, average walk amount per trip, total trip duration, coverage parity, etc.
I suspect you can get into a waymo quicker and with less walking than a subway, unless you live very close. I imagine total trip time is pretty variable. Coverage parity is hard to guess about - in theory a waymo can go anywhere but I suspect public transport has longer "tendrils."
For just the two daily BART trips that I do within SF, it would be $1200+/mo for Waymo/Uber/Lyft. So from that perspective perhaps the extra $30/mo for the small convenience of getting priority and being able to cancel a few rides could be seen as “cheap” by comparison.
If I include the walks of 30+ minutes and bus rides, it’s probably pushing $2k/mo in rideshare costs.
10% off is practically nothing and also irrelevant because it is the total cost of the trip that matters and they can easily increase that over time behind the scenes in a way that makes up for that 10% and then some once they determine the price elasticity of these premium customers which I imagine is quite higher.
If you spend $300 on waymo per month, which is easy if you take it to work 3x a week, it's free after the 10% cash back. I don't see how its mind boggling, it's clearly not for anyone who takes Waymo as a last resort.
I take public transport a lot and walk a lot (I live 3h walk from central London - I know because I've walked it, for fun), but I still also use Uber regularly because sometimes I simply don't have time. If I lived in the centre I probably would have very little use for it, but for people even slightly outside the core of cities well served by public transport, it's usually nice to have options.
It wasn't that interesting. I had a healthcare appointment near Victoria and had a half day off and decided to walk home. I regularly do 2h walks, so it wasn't a big stretch... It wasn't a particularly exciting walk - mostly very similar stretches of semi-urban areas after the first 30m or so.
For many people this makes sense, but once you reach a level of money where your basic needs are met, most people trade their money for time, and things like this are one of the most obvious ways.
Not long ago I walked from downtown SF up to the Golden Gate and walked across and back. My feet were tired and I didn't want to walk back downtown. It took me long enough to figure out where buses pick up that I missed one; at that point my decision was something like "70 minutes to wait for bus, take bus, transfer or walk to my hotel" or "23 minutes + $20 to get a Waymo" and I consider that a great value for my money.
I am a huge fan of public transit and try to avoid driving whenever I can. When the public transit goes approximately from where you are to where you want to be, or when it comes frequently enough that transfers don't cost you half an hour if you miss a connection, it's great, but there are so many edge cases.
I've never needed to call a taxi/Waymo in London, and in NYC the only time I did was getting from the airport to Manhattan the first time I went (every other time I know how to take AirTrain to public transit). In nearly every other city I've taken a Lyft/Waymo/Taxi at least once because the system isn't good enough to be universal.
> most people trade their money for time, and things like this are one of the most obvious ways.
Non-sequitur but that reminds me I lived in Tokyo where the trains stop around 12am to 5am. It is (was?) a commitment to decide to stay out late because I knew I'd have to say out until morning. Eventually though, 4-5 years after living there, I realized $50-$75, 2 or 3 times a month to cab it home at 2am or 3am was better than not going out because I didn't want to stay out until 5am. And even then, my total transportation expenses were below a car.
My current car, owned for 5 years, not including electricity, but including replacing the tires once, and paying car ins, effectively costs $1350 a month, $337 a week. In other words, a train/bus pass + a few cabs/uber/waymo rides is generally less than $337 a week. At 10yrs, assuming no repairs, and no change in car ins, the car would be $216 a week. Remember, that's not including fuel/electricity.
If I used it to commit my fuel bill would be $75 a month currently (short commute) so add that in.
It would be nice if they had Bart first class with fast wifi and premium interior. The green vinyl seats are better than the old cloth ones but it’s still pretty gross.
This is for the people who uber to work every day. Yes, they somehow exist. It blew my mind to meet one — he was spending something like $40/day on transport, as a new grad SWE!
I see this constantly in my industry. Mid-level managers (and above) are always trying to max travel miles on company expense. If I ran my own company (dream!), I would never allow employees to reap "travel miles" from travel paid for by the company. It is ridiculous.
The company isn’t using the travel miles. You’re basically saying, “I’ll take away a small perk from people who are forced to travel.” It’s not like they’re stealing from the company, the company sent them somewhere else and they just got a tiny bonus for it.
The proper thing to so is stop those managers who travel too much.
The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.
I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.
Every travel system I have worked with at [big corps] required the cost of my flight to be within a specific range of the average for that route. I wouldn’t have been able to take a $1k if a $400 was available without an override by the person whose budget it was coming from.
Most of them we couldn’t pay on our own card either, so no points from that, but I’m not aware of any way to block someone from adding their frequent flyer number to a booked ticket.
I travel quite a bit for work, e.g. the last 30 days I've been home for 4 while travelling to 6 cities spread over 4 countries and 5 time zones, and that's not how I understood what they are saying at all. If you want a perk for travelling, these points based systems are the most Kafkaesque way imaginable to give so little for it.
And often it is like they are stealing from the company. I remember seeing on LinkedIn a ${seniorExec} of a place I worked at posting how they are a million miler first class traveler on airline X but they'll be switching to airline Y exclusively from now on because X's point system isn't as good anymore. The moral of the post was supposed to be something about treating your customers right for loyalty or something, what I took away from it is this person is throwing away my entire trip travel budget on individual flights because they are selecting how to get the best kickback. Meanwhile I'm trying to get approval to chop 4 hours off what should be an 8 hour door to door flight by spending $120 more than the recommended flight to avoid an extra hop and layover because that just makes no $ sense from a hours perspective.
The best perk I ever got for travel was an actual pay increase for it, many times larger than any hotel or flights points program has ever been worth to me. If you want to give your travelling employees a perk then that is a real way to do it, not a few brand specific dollars for each part of the trip you have to sign up for.
Are you going to ask your employees for their 2% cashback if you reimburse them for a purchase they made with their credit card too?
At the end of the day, it seems more practical to focus on ensuring that they picked the appropriate value product/service. If they picked appropriately, does it matter if the company gives them employee a kickback? Sure, the employee will then be incentivized to get the most expensive thing they can, but this was already the case because it's not their money and they want the best thing they can get away with.
It is surprising that business travel still exists. I would've thought that due to improvements in video calling tech during covid, the need for travel to customer site would decline precipitously.
If you’re wondering what a “K-shaped economy” looks like, this is exactly it. A moderately expensive subscription service that simply provides priority access to something you’re otherwise already paying good money for.
“I mean’s it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost, ten dollars?”
They are public works, often in states that simply can’t afford to build or maintain their own infrastructure. But the point remains.
I’m not saying there is any wrong with the service, but I think it’s a worthwhile indicator of what life will be like as wealth inequality continues to accelerate.
The vast majority of modern American toll roads are. I grew up in Austin. We have the Mopac and 183 expansions, route 130 was mostly privately constructed, but is under TxDOT.
Perhaps other parts of the world have privately operated roads, but I’m not aware of them.
The part of route 130 you are referring to is technically owned by texas, but under a long term lease/manage situation, I believe the lease is 50 years. It's private in practice. There are many more such situations in the US than folks realize. Chicago Skyway, Indiana toll road and others. Cities/states will contort structures to be able to say "we still own it!" while economically not owning it.
So, the ones in states that can't afford to build or maintain them are often private roads or PPP.
Australia is one of the top toll roading countries. Sydney had most tolled roads world record for awhile not sure who holds it now. I don’t know whether it is the state or private companies who operate them.
Since you live in the area, and are talking about toll roads, I assume you also probably know of the name Cintra, who are Spainiards. And Cintra is, in fact, a private toll road operator who has owned roads around Austin previously
My point here is that a privately operated toll road that exists purely as a toll road, does not parallel the concept of a moderately expensive subscription for what is effectively an existing product. A more apt comparison would be a toll lane in an existing road, first class compartments, etc.
It will pay for itself if you spend >300$ per month. I personally wish Waymo have a 399$ per month subscription that give 2 free ride per day so I don't need to own a car just for work.
Did you mean no one who does 100% of their driving in urban cities? I could maybe see that happening some day, but 10s of millions of Americans don't fit that description and to one degree or another drive in areas that Waymo has no interest in supporting since the unit economics will never be that good.
Depends where you live. In SF, parking alone is more than $300/mo if you have to pay for a spot. Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.
Add tag tax, residential parking, subsidized work parking, maintenance, incurred violations, tolls.
400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.
If you live in a city, parking tickets are fairly inevitable. I am sure some folks get away with none but at least in SF I have gotten tickets that were not even for the correct meter and it’s takes more time (at least used to) to fight it than pay the money.
I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.
Great? Too many variables such as not having to park on the street or bad/good luck. If you live somewhere that has street cleaning, street parking and meters there is a good chance of getting a ticket. Not everyone but the likelihood increases and most of LA does not really check most of those boxes at least in the areas I have been.
Spread across a city probably more than you think, especially if you include parking tickets. I've never had a driving ticket, and maybe 4 parking ones over decades, but I'm probably on the lower end of the curve. In their first 40 days of operation, Oakland's speed cameras issued 82,000 tickets according to reports. I welcome those as they make streets safer, and I think they should be low cost, but high frequency.
Or lower because the system is under public scrutiny and they don't wanna tune it for revenue just yet. Hard to say because nobody who makes such decisions gets that high in government by writing down their deliberation on such matters.
Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".
You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"
They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.
I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.
Did you know before hand this would be the case ? cause even when choosing a model that was deemed well made and long-lasting, we hit an unfortunate engine belt timing failure (100k cars were concerned, we got one..) and had to replace the whole thing.
Yes, if you get a Toyota and maintain it, it would be expected to make it past 200k miles. They are by far the most reliable cars. Timing belt failures are only catastrophic for interference engines, and most cars use timing chains now, which have a much lower failure rate.
It was a nissan micra k12, and I used the wrong term, it's not a belt it's a timing chain (metallic) allegedly designed for longer longevity, but there was an industry issue (bad alloy or something) that made them stretch and lose sync with the timing chain counter circuit. The ECU would trip and rapidly the engine would just stop (quite dangerous depending on which road your on). Car mechanics had to swap the whole engine.. we sold it not long after that.
This stuff varies a lot by location. Sure in San Francisco and a handful of other cities parking and tolls cost a great deal, but that's not the case in most locations and presumably Waymo's goal is to expand far beyond a few locations. People in, say, Phoenix aren't paying for parking. If you don't have a car payment your monthly transport costs are going to be much lower than that.
You're correct. I was trying to build on the parent comment about convenience.
Worst case this is an option I don't take, best case is that this would give me more time (shorter commute) with the benefits of being able to read or create.
If you're tying to budgetmaxx, why are we having a car payment on our total?
Gone are the days of $500 dollar drivable shitboxes, although you can easily get cars in the US for under a few grand. Why you'd be penny pinching and taking a loan out is beyond me. You ideally don't want a loan for anything, but some may excuse a home loan...
If two Waymo rides per day is covering your driving needs, there's no way you're spending $120/month on gas. Also, car insurance in CA is a huge ripoff, but I still don't pay anywhere near $180/month for very thorough coverage on my ~$40k car. Believable enough otherwise though.
Comprehensive, collision and 500k liability through USAA, $120/month. Deductibles are as high as they will allow, which is $1k IIRC. I was recently forced to consider a move to Utah. Thankfully I didn't end up moving, but a quote for the exact same coverage in SLC was just $40/month.
I shop around regularly. USAA isn't even remotely the cheapest option, and the handful of experiences I and family members have had suggest that they are just as shitty as any other insurance company when it comes to handling claims. I only stick with them because they are consistently within 20% of the cheapest option and I value having all of my banking and insurance handled in one place.
I think they are just saying something like 400 * 72 gives you an absolute hard ceiling of 28k and change. Once you add in interests, sales tax, and other fees, you end up with something like the numbers you're saying. 72 months sounds stupid, because it is, but extremely long car loans are becoming increasingly common these days https://www.marketscreener.com/news/new-experian-automotive-... and you can even sometimes go to 84 if you really want that 28k number at $400/m.
well, you voluntarily purchased a condo without deeded parking. if you want private storage for your private vehicle, pay for it.
i have a sports car and two motorcycles, and consequently, i did not buy a condo in the mission. instead, i bought a house by 19th street bart and my commute to the city is shorter than some of my coworkers who live half as far as me (by distance).
"the total average annual cost of ownership—which includes your car payment, depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and taxes—is approximately $12,297 per year (or $1,025 monthly) over a 15-year lifetime"
that's crazy. my 2005 volvo, 1991 nissan, and 1986 toyota altogether cost me a little over $1k per year (mostly insurance) and it was less than $10k total to buy them all. goes to show average financial literacy in the US. people won't save a few grand for a used car (or take out a small loan even!) and then pay 10x the cost for new
I think you and I may be a rarity. Most people seem to value having new vehicles, and I don't say that dismissively- there's definitely something to be said for modern safety features as vehicles continue to grow bigger and heavier.
true, not all of these are created equal. that old volvo has side curtain airbags and other safety features that were ahead of its time. but it takes experience to know what you're shopping for. I turned down a corolla that was 10 years newer for the same price because the older volvo was actually the better vehicle inside and out
Oil changes cost like $35/year if you do it yourself. Decent tires last 4-5 years, so that's like $100/year (to be generous). Air filters are so cheap and need replacement so infrequently as to not even be worth counting.
I can only get 1-2 years out of tires, but I also drive 25K+ miles a year. (And its a heavy EV Van) Tires are $800ish a set for the affordable ones (also due to heavy van)
Cabin air filter is twice a year at $18 a filter (I replace them as soon as it smells weird)
Even with "expensive" electricity, and using your worst case scenario, it's still usually cheaper to charge 400 mile EV from 0-100% (another worst case scenario), than it is to fill up an equivalent gas vehicle. Even before the current gas prices spike.
But let's use your "worst case" scenario.
Worst case 300 mile EV charge (100%, during peak hours): about $50
Filling up a highly fuel efficient ICE vehicle: about $40
Of course, if you only charge the EV to 80% (as is recommended, and more efficient), and only set it to charge it off-peak (as is normal), then the numbers are much better. There are, of course, worst case scenarios, but it's actually hard to make an EV more expensive than an ICE vehicle.
I would say that to charge an EV with a 350 mile range to 300 miles would be about $25 here in California. Right now, a 300 mile range tank of gas is easily $60 or $70.
You have to lose the old mindset of a gas vehicle, ie, you "fill it up" once. EVs are much more convenient: it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when you get home and then the next day it's fully charged - and they're almost all grid pricing aware.
Like, on my BMW PHEV, if I try to fast charge during peak times, the charger actually makes me confirm i want to spend more, instead of trickle charging until 8PM.
The increased frequency of tire changes for EVs is not something I realized when I bought an EV. Those batteries are heavy, and put a lot of extra wear on the tires.
Another factor is that brake-regen is putting additional stress on two tires if it is a single motor car. So they get a lot of workout accel/regen if you aren't using your brakes as often and driving economically to regen as much power back as possible.
Plus how fun it is to get going in an EV leads to a lot of extra tire wear.
I've found that rotating my tires more often helps spread the wear out from having a single motor EV.
yep, it's dirt cheap to maintain yourself. and only a few hours per vehicle per year tbh. lots of people on hn don't know basic real life skills so this all seems insurmountable to them, and there's the ev cope that somehow your 60+ grand car is going to save you money in gas and maintenance in the long run. I have 8 cars and motorcyles for less than the cost of that one car lmao
Oil changes are cheap. A lot of places will put your tires on for free or cheaply if you buy tires from them. Assuming the car is free, the cost of car ownership is dominated by gas, insurance, and the raw cost of materials needed to maintain it. Whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it isn't going to move the needle much.
How much liability coverage are you getting for ~ $100/month? In other words if you injure or kill someone with your vehicle how much of that cost will be covered by your insurance company? With Waymo the answer is "not my problem".
I pay ~100/month per car for full coverage on two fairly new cars and $500k in liability from the auto policy plus a $1m umbrella policy. And that's in CA which is comically expensive. I find it very believable that you can get excellent liability only coverage on 3 cars for $100/month depending on the state and drivers.
For comparison, I live in SF and am low-risk on all the dimensions you'd expect on HN, and I pay $100/month for non-owner coverage with similar limits - i.e., I don't own a car and my coverage only applies when I rent one. When I owned a car it was much higher, of course.
Hmm, for my €209/year (~$20/mo) liability insurance I get unlimited coverage for personal injuries and €5M coverage for property damage (both mandated by Finnish law).
One major reason is probably that most of the liability portion is going to be covering medical bills in the US. I only did a quick skim of the Wikipedia summary but it looks like Finland, like (almost?) all of Europe wouldn't have that particular liability?
Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.
All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.
Medical bills are covered (the Wikipedia summary seems accurate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance#Finland). But I'm going to guess that those medical bills, and related damages, are much lower than in the U.S.
Maybe also lower average value of cars and less accidents here plays some part. But not sure how large that difference actually is.
Could also be some difference in the insurance premium systems: The amount of accidents changes one's cost for next year based on fixed rules - the ~$20/mo is with the highest discount (no liability insurance covered accidents in many years). The maximum it can grow to (for me, with my modern car) is ~US$100/mo, by having 4 consecutive covered accidents without accident-free years. Not really sure how wildly this varies in other countries or if the systems are similar...
The optional car insurance is more expensive, my full coverage (including damage, theft, parking, glass, fire, towing, substitute car etc.) is in the ~US$100/mo range, with ~$230 deductible on most coverage, and towing, substitute, glass repair at $0.
Who cares? Liability coverage is only there to satisfy the state and little more IMO. If you do need it the counterparty will exhaust the limits of your liability coverage and call it quits. It is not worth it for the other guy's insurance to sue you unless you're a million bucks in the red.
do you buy things just to look at them? my vehicles (all 8) are for driving. fuel costs vary, and as another commenter in this thread said they were comparing $50 (max) to recharge an EV vs $40 (min) for gas. so depending on where you live, what you drive, and how you drive it you'll get wildly different ideas about fuel costs. fueling up is not maintenance either. even in the best case the difference in fuel cost is a drop in the bucket vs the difference in vehicle price
Ok, I think the situation is different when you have 8 cars which are for driving. It's not really fair to compare per vehicle costs when you're dividing your usage up among 8 vehicles whereas most people are dividing it among 1 or maybe 2
sure, but also that would drive new car prices down and put pressure on dealerships to stop adding ridiculous fees on top of the MSRP. and more used cars on the road means more independent mechanics means cheaper service. Japan is a great example. in addition to their strong domestic market, the driving culture there is a decent size tourist industry unto itself. there are more tracks per capita in Japan than any other country
Can you explain where this comes from? I mean, that's not even close to what the norm is in Europe. Though, to be fair, we don't normally count fuel into TCO and the reasoning is: if you want to go distances then you are always paying for them. Whether it's public transport or taxis or whatever. Is fuel the major contributor in the number?
If you want to go some distance you're always paying something to do it - you can't therefore assume all means of going a distance cost the same and that factor can be ignored, though. A plane, train, bus, car, and taxi are all going to have different cost efficiencies (some more different than others) of going on a given type of trip. From a different perspective, they all require purchase, maintenance, licensing, and registration as well - but those are still part of TCO because it's part of the total cost. If you remove them for being the same type of cost rather than the same actual cost then you wouldn't really end up with much going into TCO even though the total cost of each is wildly different.
In general, you're almost certainly no longer on the path to calculating anything that should be called TCO once you've started removing costs associated with using the item. Apart from that, you're probably not on your way to a very meaningful cost comparison either.
As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.
Registration: $600/year
Insurance: $1,500/year
Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)
Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated
Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.
And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.
I wonder how the subscription would respond to a person's area being blocked off.
There construction happening a block down the road from me. As part of the work, the rightmost lane is often blocked during the day (in between rush hours), so that things like concrete pumping can take place. The lane block starts just before where I live.
Around the same time, I noticed that when I would try to take Waymo (which I used to get to PT), I'd be told that things are busy and rides are paused. Recently, I've noticed that if I'm at work (or the PT place) and I want to take a Waymo back home, I'm told "Can't get to that spot right now".
If I had Waymo Premier, I wonder how hard it would be to get a refund on my subscription.
The above talks about a complete block (or, a complete-enough block) to using the service, but what about a major impediment? For example, let's say I travel regularly, and use Waymo to get to/from San Jose airport. Waymo's been disabling highway routes, which for me equates to 20-minute (or more) travel-time increase from home to airport. Would that be enough to qualify for a refund on the subscription?
I checked in the Waymo app; it would be several blocks. Please reference the context "which I used to get to PT". I'm happy that, today, the extra blocks are doable. Some weeks ago, those extra blocks would not be doable.
Finally, besides the point of having to walk the distance, the main issue is the way in which the blockage is being conveyed to me: The Waymo app is not saying "We cannot get to you because of construction", the app is telling me that requests have been paused. Specifically, it's telling me "All of our cars are busy with riders right now" and "We're pausing requests in order to catch up — please check back again".
Is 20 minutes of extra time a major impediment? I don't think I would get a refund on an Uber if they were a little late to pick me up and drove slowly so I lost 20 minutes in total. Although if that does happen maybe I'm just naive about refunds
I said “20 minutes (or more)”. The 20-minute case is for a pickup at 5 AM. If I travel to the airport later in the morning, the time difference is worse.
And although 20 minutes doesn’t seem much, the variability of airline baggage check and TSA means 20 minutes doesn’t seem an lead to increased stress.
Unless I’m missing something the “early access” benefit is just plain evil.
They’ll expand to new cities, but not allow residents of those cities to use the service. Instead, you need to be from SF or some other place they operate, and pay a monthly fee.
Which will quietly drive you in circles and ultimately to a completely different location if your target location is associated with some things like security/autonomous/etc.
Hm, don’t like the offering. It seems standoffish.
If you want to make Waymo into a SaaS and get people really using it, then it’s easy:
$100 per month - Unlimited rides
$200 per month - Unlimited priority rides
Build enough trust in that and people might even get rid of their cars.
But in my opinion the problem is the feeling of spending money. People want to avoid that feeling at all costs, or at least want to feel like they’re getting a good deal. Everyone else is just driving around for free so it’s gonna take a lot to feel like you’re getting a good deal paying for a Waymo.
People who take cabs are forced to take cabs. That market is pretty finite. What if you can tap the market of people who need to get places but would rather do other things in the back seat?
$100 per month is way, way too cheap for unlimited rides. That's about 10x cheaper than the amortized monthly cost for owning an average car, without the headache of doing maintenance. They'd be losing a ton of money on each subscriber.
I used Waymo about 10 times in Austin - it was great. I wish they'd accelerate the rollout to other cities. I wonder what the major technical hurdles are for launching in a new city?
there have been a lot more issues than just that incident
they apparently like driving into floodwaters [1]
one vehicle got confused by construction barriers, entered opposing traffic, and halted [2]
in Dallas, a gas leak caused an explosion that leveled an apartment building, a Waymo unit blocked the scene, and first responders had to first reach into the car and try grasping the wheel, before the remote support agent agreed to kill the car and put it in neutral so they could push it out of their way [3]
I have a moderate fear for the safety of my children with these things on the road
Tipping is not required and I don't do it, especially in areas with laws about guaranteed minimum wages for workers.
I wrote about this before but I've been using Empower app recently as an Uber competitor, it acts as a subscription for drivers where they pay 50 bucks a month to get on the platform and then keep any and all fees from riders, so it keeps the prices very low for riders while drivers make more money. Essentially Empower cuts out their middleman profit margin to act more like Costco making money on subscriptions alone rather than the price of goods.
Since when is tipping on Uber required? I've been using Uber basically since it was created (long before they even had the tipping popup) and I've never considered tipping.
I don't know if it's "nicer". I've had some great conversations with Uber/Lyft drivers. Hilarious fun conversations. Not all of them, but enough to make me question if a riding in a clanker car is actually "nicer". I guess if someone is socially awkward, it might be nicer for them.
Just wait till Google spins it off to private equity; it'll be barley running bits of vehicles patched together by the cheapest mechanics they can find.
Enjoy it while you can; I'd love to give it a go myself, but even though I live in a city where they are supposedly in commercial operation, I can't get one to either of the two houses on either side of town that I currently split my time between. I have a buddy who lives a few blocks from one of their zones who walked over just so he could try it out. As of now, our sub-standard, minimally-invested-in-this-century bus system is actually much better suited to my needs.
Textbook strawman. Build up an alternate fact, and then attack it mercilessly.
> A straw man argument is a common logical fallacy where someone distorts or exaggerates an opposing position to make it easier to attack. Instead of addressing the actual point, they refute a weaker, fabricated version of the argument (the "straw man") to create the illusion of having won the debate.
There's nothing AFAICT that says Google is considering any such thing.
On a recent trip to SF I found Waymo to be cheaper than Uber about half the time. I wondered if I was seeing artificially discounted prices as a new rider.
> Priority Pickups: Skip the line with prioritized matching
> Early Access: Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand.
> Waymo Premier costs $29.99 per month and will be initially offered to select riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
It sounds like when Waymo expands to a new city for the first time, the new potential customers would have a worse experience if there were a high enough volume of riders from other cities who participate in this program? I guess the assumption is that there won't be enough people subscribing who are traveling in other cities at a given time, but I'd also imagine that rolling out to a new city would start with smaller numbers of cars and scaling up, and it seems a bit odd to potentially set things up in a way that might result in people considering trying it but then seeing long wait times and deciding it's not worth it.
When Waymo launches in a new city, they have a waitlist of ~months before you can request your first ride. It's not that a new user would see a long wait time to get a ride, it's that they would not be invited to try waymo for another month.
Why are all these things always called, "Premier" or "elevated experiences".. Do people really build their sense of self worth/satisfaction form imagining they are special for spending money?
There is no question Waymo is a better consumer product for most trips around places like San Francisco proper.
So if you have a better product, why waste calories with membership cash grabs vs scaling your core mechanic? If there was a larger fleet, wait times wouldn’t be long— so line skipping wouldn’t be a problem.
Only conclusions I can come to: (1) Their core money mechanic (charging for rides) isn’t that attractive
(2) they cannot scale fast enough, or
(3) both
I saw a Waymo with safety driver driving around Boston a few weeks back. The concerning thing was just how much it backed up traffic getting off the freeway because they're not allowed to go any faster than the posted speed limit.
Presumably Tesla will not make this decision, it will be interesting to see how much consumers value faster ride times if Tesla FSD ever get their shit together
I think the important thing here is that driving faster hardly makes your trip shorter, especially for trips within a city. You're likely talking about a <1-2 minute difference even if the Tesla is driving recklessly.
> Waymo Premier costs $29.99 per month and will be initially offered to select riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
> Waymo Premier is a new invite-only membership program built for those who rely on us most. For a monthly fee, members gain access to a suite of exclusive benefits designed to make their journey more seamless and rewarding:
Priority Pickups: Skip the line with prioritized matching
Ride Savings: Earn 10% Waymo Cash back on every trip, and even more during busy times.
Early Access: Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand.
Flexible Cancellations: Peace of mind with up to five free cancellations per month.
---
ok so just amazon prime for waymo. its alright but i feel like they had the chance to go REALLY high end with like a $300/month plan that people will still pay for because supply is so limited. instead they went mass consumer with a name like "Premier". eh.
(sorry waymo person reading this i know what its like to name a thing and regret it)
>Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand
How is this useful in any way? by definition it's a subscription for people already using the service in the (few) supported cities. If I use it in Denver, why would I care to have early access in Washington?
I imagine they'll try to get new users to sign up for a month of Premier to try Waymo early once it becomes available in their city. Basically juice a few thousand early adopters for 30 bucks each, which also lets them judge demand and gives them some extra revenue to build out their vehicle/parking network before the full launch.
Or it for frequent travellers - if they did smaller "beta" testing in a ton of new cities at once it could be great to suddenly have access to a semi exclusive fleet of Waymos
It's a minor perk for sure. From their perspective, it probably costs essentially nothing, so why not.
But I can see it being useful if they're expanding to a nearby city. Waymo is in Los Angeles already and will expand into San Diego this year. If you live in LA, you might have friends, family, or business in San Diego and visit fairly often. Or maybe a group of people want to ride in one car for a weekend trip there but don't want to spend every moment together.
Introducing more tiers is a key step in enshitification process because it enables neat sleight of hand tricks. You're not making the old tier slower, you're just giving the new tier priority....which has the effect of...yes
I forgot about ZipCar. The downside in a place like SF is having to deal with parking it. I seem to recall dedicated ZipCar spots in the distant past ....
That's actually a really cool idea. I like it. The best part is, it doesn't even need to find nearby parking or anything. You can just tell it in advance that you'll be leaving the grocery store in eight minutes.
This is the best combo possible. It feels like the ideal trade-off between the autonomy of car ownership and the flexibility of ride-sharing. I've been hearing about this concept for literally over a decade now.
"Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to. Adding cash back and priority pickups on top of that makes Premier a no-brainer for someone like me."
How does one "get privacy" via a Google spyware car exactly?
Does Waymo make a profit yet? This looks like them giving up on being the main robotaxi choice, Teslas will win on scale and cost per mile so they are going for the premium market. Not sure thats big enough to turn into profit.
Hmm, so for $30 a month you basically get 10% cash back. There's some break even point here if you use Waymo enough. I think in SF, this would make a lot of sense, especially since there are so many Waymos up there to begin with. In South Bay though, if you don't have a car you're pretty much cooked.
> I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to
I’m wondering what we lose as a society if people never have to be in even a mildly uncomfortable situation. There’s a book called The Comfort Crisis about this topic.
EDIT: The full quote is “I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to.”
In her quote she chose to separate safety and having a conversation with a stranger as two separate issues.
As a gay dude I experienced my fair share of "uncomfortable" Uber rides from or to various places. No thanks. I don't need to stimulate those kinds of social skills or whatever.
Gay here, but I've only experienced a concerning conversation once, and that was a longer trip where sometimes you find out too much. I took an exit ramp away from that topic of conversation and it was fine. Otherwise everyone has been decent to downright pleasant.
I'd feel like I'm losing something by giving up that human interaction, such that it is.
I'm a man, and I've been using Uber since it launched. Most rides are fine, but there are enough weirdos on the platform that 220 incidents per day that are serious enough to report seems reasonable to me, even if you don't consider that they operate internationally.
I once had a driver pick me up in downtown Seattle, and it turned out to be that he was driving for Uber as a tactic for his entrepreneurial venture developing antimicrobial and hydrophobic coating. He claimed to have applied it to the fishing boat from Deadliest Catch. He was specifically circling downtown to try to pick up someone who could get the ear of someone in Amazon's grocery division that he could pitch to (which I was not). At a red light in a nightmarish seven-way intersection, he took out a square of cheesecloth that had apparently had the coating applied, and attempted to demonstrate its effectiveness by pouring water onto it. It worked, and the water got all over his passenger seat and center console instead while the light turned green and cars behind us honked.
A few months later, Uber tried to match me with that same driver, and I cancelled it and walked instead. I have to imagine that if a guy with that level of high-preparation social ineptitude can stick around in their system, that the number of people making offhand inappropriate moves or remarks must be reasonably high.
One time I hopped in an Uber and got a missionary-like lecture on Islam and an invite to go to a mosque.
More typical of Christians so it kind of threw me off.
But anyway, a paid service shouldn't be starting that kind of conversation unless for some reason I started it and even then that'd make it just as uncomfortable for the driver.
I think "people should just deal with uncomfortable situations" (while in a vehicle that they have no control over!) is not a winning argument, but the continuing march toward tech-enabled isolation is absolutely bad.
It can be annoying to have to deal with irrational humans who make mistakes, but that really is just part of life! I'll take some cumbersome conversations over conducting my entire life via corporate app interfaces.
There are uncomfortable situations that you can walk away from like a checkout counter, and then there are uncomfortable situations where you are in a car in an unfamiliar location driven by the person making you uncomfortable.
I don't know, what am I gaining from listening to the 100th anti immigrant/POC/trans/gay/poor-person rant? For some reason people feel comfortable telling me this sort of shit. Maybe I look like a bigot.
Interacting with the general public absolutely sucks.
I’m dying to take a Waymo. Glad to see them trying to build sustainable revenue models.
I hate the state of the car-dependent American urban fabric and would love to see public transport everywhere (trains > AVs). But Waymo/AVs can meet people where they are (personal vehicles) and deliver a halfway decent solution (distributed, on demand, cheap transport without human labor).
Thus the enshittification begins. Charge a fee for "premium" features -> features degrade over time -> drop features for non-subscribers -> subscription required for access at all, plus you get to pay the fee to go somewhere.
I dont think you're using the term correctly. Charging money for product/service is not enshittification. If you insist on that, you're living in fantasy land.
How did you go from "charge a fee for premium features" -> features degrade over time?
Apple has been charging a ton of money for their products and AFAICT their products have been pretty good
You're right, I skipped a step/was unclear. Features will degrade over time for _non-subscribers_. They'll eventually wall it off so that you have to have a subscription. Then they'll start degrading the features for everyone (who has to be subscribed). Then they'll have a new tier and the process begins anew.
Start with a subsidized product and delight users -> step 1.
Prioritize the business by charging extra -> step 2.
Degrade what people get for their price and extract revenue at the expense of the users -> step 3.
The term "Lyft Pink" does not seem to occur in this thread yet, so I will simply point out that a car service with a recurring subscription cost is not unprecedented.
That's the only place I see them, in Berkeley, but they've been walking out of major markets like the UK and they packed up their global headquarters and moved into the basement of their parent company, so it can't be that great of a business.
Two other local car shares, City Car Share and AAA Gig, went out of business here.
i had a bunch of good rides and then one highly baffling route where it got off the road it was on to a parallel road, only to get back in the same road a few blocks later. this is literally within a few hundred feet of Waymo HQ so i don’t understand how this could go unnoticed.
i haven’t used it since.
the 25 minute pickup times don’t help.
edit: i just checked the route. 27 minutes for pickup and it diverts 20 minutes out of the way. wtf?
I think having highways turned off has really hurt pickup times and availability in South Bay right now. It pays to always book as far ahead in advance as you can.
There are places with construction where Waymo just seems to turn off the road and makes the car go around. But then taking away freeway access has made it more likely for vehicles to have to navigate these.
Are you talking about El Camino Real? There are two areas of construction happening: One at Page Mill and one in the San Antonio area. Most of the lane-blocks are happening only between rush hours, so it's easy to miss, but I'm guessing that it's someone at Waymo has put full-time blocks in those areas.
I'm SO tired of subscription services that only offer the opportunity to buy more stuff.
- Doordash wants you to subscribe
- AMC movies want you to subscribe
- Now Waymo wants you to subscribe
You can't buy anything now without being hassled for a subscription. I don't see any value here except for when they degrade the service for non-subscribers to make the priority pickups seem worth it.
This type of subscription model is a little less annoying, most "normal" people will sign up for the non-subscription rate, and frequent users are already frequent users, so they will be more OK with a subscription.
Speaking personally, I don't see enough movies or do enough ride shares to want to subscribe to AMC or Waymo, but Doordash would make sense. Maybe it's OK for me to pay a higher price for the ~1 time per year I use those other services.
I was recently offered a sale price by a restaurant on Doordash, when I was logged out. I logged in as a subscriber and the sale deal went away, which meant that the delivery actually cost slightly more. I've noticed this pattern a lot: the subscription supposedly offers savings, but when you A/B test the same meal against a subscribed/logged in account and a non-subscribed account, the amounts are usually very similar.
My conclusion is that Doordash actually cares more about their non-subscribed users than their subscribers: that's where they see growth.
The problem is that they'll keep advertising it to you. I'm already giving them money, but they'll still push me to subscribe while I'm in the middle of trying to give them my money, because that's not enough for them.
The existence of loyalty clubs are fine. If you use the service a lot, then it is a better deal, and the company gets the benefit that you are more likely to consolidate your spending with them rather than shop around. Win-win.
It is the fact that you can't do anything without them being pushed down your throat that is infuriating. Every interaction with a company these days is an attempt to up-sell. When a small number of retail stores started that, I stopped doing business with them. Now they all do it.
I wonder if these services would be instead be like micropayments (charged by $0.01 per minute) instead of a costly $20/mo subscription it would make more sense.
> “I never got my driver's license, and I rely on Waymo to commute to an office every day," said Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to."
I recognize that this is a luxury product but I kind of laughed out loud at this testimonial. The amount of privilege you need to have to grow up and live in *Arizona* without ever learning how to drive is insane.
So what you're saying is this hypothetically disabled person who is physically incapable of driving chose NOT to mention that, but instead chose to provide "I never got my drivers license" as their reason?
And you're asking someone to consider this because I presume you think this is a likely enough scenario to consider?
I appreciate this comment immensely - too many people seem to mindlessly assume that every other person shares their own situations, and it could not be less true.
Premier? How outdated. Should have named it "Waymo Supreme" for that extra generational cringe.
What’s up with the fake review?
> I get privacy, time back, …
Yea you get "privacy" in a car kitted with the most advanced 360 degree camera system in the interior and exterior of the vehicle. Waymo PR team unhinged
Waymo will never be a serious option until they fix the insane surge pricing. And yes, they're working on it.
> “I never got my driver's license, and I rely on Waymo to commute to an office every day," said Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to. Adding cash back and priority pickups on top of that makes Premier a no-brainer for someone like me."
I get what they're trying to say, but their pitch boils down to: "use waymo if youre too stupid to get a DL and too antisocial to talk to people". Bit rough. They really could have done a lot better with this PR piece lol.
> use waymo if youre too stupid to get a DL and too antisocial to talk to people".
-or- use Waymo if you don’t want to spend resources on owning and maintaining a car, and if you are part of the population that has or may feel too intimidated or unsafe to navigate a potentially adversarial conversation with someone more powerful than you, such as women.
Their coverage area in Orlando is so limited I functionally can't use the service. Would be nice if they could expand it to at least include the airport and tourist areas.
If Waymo Premier includes an [EVASIVE MANEUVERS] button on the infotainment screen I'm in.
I had a Uber driver block my Waymo at an intersection in SF some months ago just to be an asshole. Apparently some other people have been attacked and robbed while in a Waymo.
Waymo should treat it like a security flaw that anyone can stop your car and there's nothing you can do about it.
I've had a few similar cases, often teenagers on bikes coming dangerously close (e.g. forcing waymo to sudden break) and last one one bicyclist just blocking me for 5-10 minutes in SF (also just to be an asshole), with a street full of cars behind all blocked. I called the "connect to support" button and they could not anything. This is the only negative experience I had with Waymo; and I am hope something is done to be able to swiftly respond to such cases (e.g. remote driver take over, or at least capture their video and work with police to punish them later) in order to deter them in the long term.
You've got to be kidding. SF police and prosecutors barely do anything about real crimes, never mind blocking a road for a few minutes.
People will reply to you calling you crazy, but SF/bay is the only place I have ever experienced where many people will literally leave their cars unlocked because a broken window isn't worth the hassle. Yes, locking your parked car is a hazard here... and the reason is obvious.
I couldn’t believe this the first time I heard it. This isn’t new, it goes back to the 90s. Perhaps longer.
In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.
His doors were unlocked the whole time...
When I read this kind of stuff I am always happy I live in a normal country/place - Singapore. Absolutely insane lmao. Must be fun sitting in your Waymo hitting some panic button and it gets blocked LMAO
Singapore is a highly authoritarian place where caning is legal punishment. I would not call this normal, but rather "absolutely insane lmao".
As a Brit who has spend time in both Singapore and SF, I'd say Singapore seems more normal currently. The tents of homeless people shitting in the street and dying of overdoses is weird, like something from Dickensian London.
I live in SF and I absolutely love so much about it, but here and especially in Oakland where I also lived for years, I'd welcome bringing back caning if it meant we could live as safely and securely as in Singapore
Caning is absolutely against basic human rights, so no. It won't make Oakland and SF safer, it will only make society more divided and worse off.
Go ask and minorities like Indian slave workers how safe and secure they feel in Singapore...
Actually blocking a road in SF can get you a felony conspiracy count with this DA, especially if they don't like your message
San Francisco’s Case Against Pro-Palestinian Activists Who Blocked Bridge Heads to Jury | KQED https://share.google/4RstsRSYbqY2lEdhn
They blocked the Golden Gate Bridge which included ambulances, other emergency vehicles and thousands of people trying to get to work. I'm happy that the DA is throwing the book at them, I hope they bankrupt themselves trying to defend themselves and then spend a lot of time in jail.
Except the defense has shown that the police blocked opening an additional lane even after the protestors specifically requested it for emergency traffic, and in fact blocked more lanes unnecessarily.
> Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.
> Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.
https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/29/gaza-protesters-gold...
While politically i'm on the opposite side of those guys, i do think that such severe prosecution is unwarranted and politically motivated (and may be intended to create chilling effect on all future protests no matter the cause) - blocking a road is a well established traditional form of protest which traditionally is expected to end with (if the judge is in a bad mood) something like disorderly conduct citation/fine, not anywhere close to felony.
Absolutely not.
At the VERY least, the road blockers should be fined the cost they caused to society.
Block Golden gate bridge for 1h30min for 10,000 people (Avg salary $50/h)? That will be 1.5 * 10,000 * 50 = $750,000 damage.
Well, if they caused you any specific loss nothing prevents you from suing them in civil court like in any other situation when somebody causes you a specific loss. That though is a completely different thing from criminal prosecution.
And if someone died in ambulance that couldn’t get to a hospital in time?
you're talking hypotheticals while in real life for example:
"A Waymo self-driving car blocked a road near a deadly fire, hindering first responders. " https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6uhcVYhmULU
"Waymos blocked roads and caused chaos during San Francisco power outage" https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/waymo-san-francisco-po...
Waymo and specific people there responsible for that programming/bugs could probably be charged with criminal negligence by an enthusiastic prosecutor, yet haven't been. Why? Probably common sense. Like recognizing that there weren't criminal intent. And such situations is a price of progress. The same with protests. They weren't conspiring to block ambulances. And such situations is a price of freedom of protests and speech. Though if somebody dies that way, i think they would have a civil case against the protesters. The same way like affected people can have a civil case against Waymo in the situations mentioned above.
Neither of those are acceptable. Why would you think Waymo not following the law is somehow a justification for it to continue to put people’s lives at risk to enable protesters to do the same?
can't you get your head out of the window and yell at him ? serious question, not sure if you can even open the window on thes cars
This is an US problem, not a Waymo problem.
As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1958/
We do have people with real incentive to not allow self-driving cars to succeed.
I hope they succeed, for the sake of my mom who's legally blind and has dreamed about them for decades. but I'd be significantly more excited about self-driving if you could buy level-4 AVs that you can actually own.
Are cars really the best option? Could other public transit serve the same purpose?
(I was once legally blind, still not a fan of cars myself. Though I understand the appeal when externalities are out of the picture.)
Cars aren't the best option, but you can drop self-driving cars into an existing car-centric society one car at a time, with the car buyers paying for themselves.
Making a car-centric society meaningfully less car-centric requires the enthusiastic support of that society, along with competent political leadership, and probably a fair chunk of taxpayer cash too. Suburbs with huge lots make for long walks to the transit stop - but densifying those suburbs is not easy.
I don't own a car; I travel everywhere by bicycle and public transport - but the public transport I use was all built in the 1850s. Some time between then and now my society reorganised into a form that has a lot of difficulty delivering public transport projects.
This is a false alternative, because robocars do not exist, while public transit does exist but simply hasn’t been adequately implemented everywhere.
Politicians (and grifters alike) like to point to a future technology to solve an existing problem only to delay existing solutions which they don’t want to implement, most often for political reasons.
Robocars most certainly exist. They’re probably about 5% of car traffic in San Francisco. I’ve not taken one yet (taxis/ubers/Waymos are mostly impractical with a young kid in the US as you must use a car seat unlike in most European countries) but as a pedestrian they seem mostly a safer than other drivers. As a driver I expect they will eventually induce gridlock but the city can always create more bus lanes.
Portable booster seats are pretty small. I can’t see it working if you have a kid younger than the booster seat min though. Only a few states have strict rules here, Washington and California being a couple, although I think California has a taxi exemption.
Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe.
My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster with you unless you plan to hire a car the other end. When I travel back to see my family in Europe I take the train from the airport. So we bus and Bart to the airport even though it would be much easier with luggage to take a taxi.
How old is your kid? In which European countries do you think the law does not mandate child seats ?
My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat.
This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the US I know. As most such trips are low speed around town (e.g. getting to and from a train station or airport) it seems a reasonable trade off.
You of course need a car seat in a private car.
Oh, ok, in taxis you are right.
Robotaxis ≠ robocars.
The robotaxis that do exist only do so in very limited places using very expensive technology (including off-shored service center for intervention) that is not available for the public consumer markets.
> robocars do not exist
How do you manage to discover Hacker News and not know Waymos are real? I'm truly fascinated by this new level of ignorance.
They mean consumer robocars as opposed to robotaxis. The latter exist, the former don't. And the latter are remotely controlled by operators when hard situations arise, but a blind consumer would presumably be on their own or would have to pay an additional subscription for that service.
In the USA where transit in most cities sucks? Seattle is supposedly one of the best but you can’t get to work downtown most days without being harassed by a fent zombie.
I really don’t know who told you that Seattle has one of the best transit infrastructures in the country, lol. It’s not even close to New York or Chicago, nor any of the forward thrust cities (DC, Atlanta). Hell, the light rail isn’t even as good as Portland.
> Could other public transit serve the same purpose?
Population density plays a big part. People think of Europe as a public transportation paradise, but a car makes your life easier outside Berlin, Paris, and other major cities. I live on the edge of Copenhagen and public transportation sucks the further you go from the downtown since the major city turn into a giant suburb really fast. Yes, people bike, but many do drive a car.
Surely, not until public transit networks covering literally everywhere regular roads can get you.
Public transit is better, but building it outside of dense metro areas to the extent it becomes competitive is probably even more difficult than building a self-driving car.
Paul Ryan Rogers, You are still clearly blind to reality.
Much of the world requires a car. Maybe someday it won't, but today it absolutely does.
Do you think personal attacks will convince others of your argument?
Does the Subway arrive at my door?
Probably not. If you need to walk a mile, that’s a feature, not a bug. Of course, if you need to walk multiple miles, that’s a different story.
Walking to the station isn't even the bad part. The bad part is then walking 3min in tunnels smelling like piss to get to the platform, then waiting 7min more for the train to arrive, then walk 3min more to get out of another piss-filled station. That's 10-15 of absolutely-not-enjoyable subway station.
In America the public transport is used by "youths" so normal people are forced to use cars.
Me too but this feels like a step in a progression to being able to rent/share them.
Can I ask why you prefer that some future technology will solve her problem when actual solutions (such as access vans; public transit; etc.) already exist?
And before anyone points this out, if your local government does not offer these solutions that is a political choice of your local politicians. Plenty of local governments all over the world (even in dictatorships) are able to provide these, and changing the policy of your local government should in theory be easier then to roll out technology that does not exist.
I'm blind. I wish to hop in a robocar and drive from Denver to go visit my folks back home in Florida. Is the Denver Access-A-Ride going to take me? Which public transit is available?
I preemptively addressed this. Not providing access is a political choice. The airports/train stations/bus stations in both Denver and Florida should have assistants ready to guide you to your flight/train/bus and the Colorado government could have an agreement with Florida to share services with residents of either state. If they don‘t, there was a political choice not to, which can be changed. If there is no public transit available... well... neither are robocars, but only the former is a political choice.
Flight?
I want to drive. I want to bring my cat and bring some stuff back from my dad's house. My parents just drove up here to visit me, I would like to do the same. Not take a train. Not take a plane. I want to hop in a robocar and drive to Florida. The same thing that every other person with a car can do whenever they want to. Freedom.
I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not. In my mind a car is a liability in ways the bus is not. You have to insure your car, find parking, get a license, you cannot drive drunk, your license plate is tracked, etc. etc. vs. a bus which you can just hop in (as drunk as you want) fall a sleep or whatever and when you arrive the bus just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life. For me that is true freedom.
now imagine a bus, but its smaller and private only for you. for me that is true freedom! not only can you hop in as drunk as you want, and fall asleep, but you can also control the climate and the music and spread out. and when you arrive the waymo just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life
Like I said earlier, this technology does not exist. And even if it did, the infrastructure required for everyone to own and operate such a car would be orders of magnitude more expensive and much much much politically harder choice to approve then to build out public transit and to provide access services.
>I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not.
Try telling the bus driver to make a stop at a particular restaurant along the way.
Funny enough, my local bus line does that. Admittedly it is unique among my local bus system (due to the rural nature of my local area relative to the rest of the system; and the relative length between bus stops). However the same bus system (King County Metro) also operates the access van, so if you are mobility impaired you do have the option to hail a ride which gets you door to door.
Because technological freedom has, historically, vastly outperformed political choice?
I can buy a robotic car, once they're available. I am nowhere near rich enough to afford even one politician, much less enough to get public transit to happen in California.
Political choices also take time. You have to get people to vote on a budget, you have to actually build the infrastructure, etc. - even busses require bus stops and drivers and maintenance facilities.
Given that robotic cars already exist today, and are planning to expand, basically every reasonable expectation says that robotic cars will happen before politicians change tack on public transit (especially in the USA, where Trump is currently our president - he does not seem gung-ho on public transit)
Like I said, dictatorships manage to do this. Claiming that America is different is just another form of American exceptionalism.
And no, robotic cars do not exist. A very limited version of robotaxis do, but they are nowhere near ready for public rollout on all public roads for the consumer market.
The policy of my local government is subject to a number of constraints beyond my personal desire for transit between points that are relevant to me and my lifestyle. I live in a place with pretty good public transit, but I still routinely drive to a place 3 miles away from me, because all the bus routes that take me there are indirect and would add an hour to my round trip.
At the cost of a traffic violation though?
that xkcd is always funny - but there's a white lie in it e.g on motorcycles in areas where you are allowed to ride median. there's instances of drivers actively tryin' to kill you by swerving onto the median when they see you comin'.
Numerous times now, using Tesla FSD, I've found the car seemingly drifting from the center of the lane, only to have motorcycles buzz by at high speed on the opposite side. It's very polite toward motorcyclists.
It surprises me that any municipality would make that legal, seems dangerous.
I started riding in AZ, which does not allow splitting.
I now live in CA, which does.
The actual justification for it is valid, but mostly outdated:
Older and less powerful motorcycles often have air-cooled engines, and if you sit idling in them in e.g. a traffic jam, they will absolutely overheat and die (at best).
Newer and more powerful bikes are liquid-cooled, and do not have this issue (though the driver overheating is another very real issue).
My personal take is that most riders who use bikes to commute are too reckless, and lane split at speed rather than doing so more safely.
25 mph or below, in fully-stopped traffic, is relatively safe. Ditto for <=35 in a 10-20 mph flow. Each of those gives you a relative stopping distance of about 50 feet, which is 3 or fewer car lengths, which is easy to account for.
60 in a 25mph flow OTOH isn't lane splitting, it's just weaving through traffic recklessly, hoping to God that no one in the next 20 cars lengths merges or drifts at all.
The good rule that most of Europe uses is that motorcycles can "lane filter" (i.e. go in between lanes but only for cars that are basically stopped and only at low speed). Going between lanes is suicidal at high speed, but if cars are <5mph and the motorcycle is ~10mph it's actually safer for the motorcycle because it removes the chance of them being rear-ended. (It also makes motorcycles faster than cars which is helpful for discouraging cars in cities)
Officially allowed in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and UK, from what I can tell. Interesting though, I'd have assumed it's permitted nowhere in the EU.
It's actually safer-ish. First: terms. Filtering is good, involves moving slowly through stopped traffic between the cars, usually under 20mph differential.
Splitting is less good, that involves weaving between cars at speed and is actually dangerous.
Some of the worst accidents are rear endings where drivers (not paying attention) just run you over while stopped in traffic.
This is offset by accidents where people do the stuff you're worried about but when it's practiced correctly that's not as big of a risk and generally leads to less catastrophic accidents than rear endings.
It's also just kinda dumb to force a class of vehicle that can get out of traffic jams to instead sit in them
Waymo was a target during the anti-ICE protests because of Google's collaboration with ICE. In addition, Waymo is seen as a symbol of the gentrification problem.
Agree or disagree with it, my point is that that xkcd doesn't take into account political motivations
Protesters block human cars as well as the only difference is that the Waymo driver doesn’t get frustrated and are pretty patient. So protesters need to physically damage the car to make their point, which is a tricky proposition with all the cameras it has (but face masks are common on both sides these days).
Except in this case, damaging cars belonging to Google—a collaborator with ICE—is the point. It's more comparable to people who were damaging Tesla vehicles or the Tyre Extinguishers in the UK than the very common tactic of halting traffic/economic activity to threaten "business as usual"
Property damage is just hooliganism, thugs make an excuse for it no matter if that’s what they feel like doing.
The eventual result of America falling into chaos will be countries like China having nice stuff like self driving cars (because they don’t tolerate thugs) while the us doesnt.
A riot is the voice of the unheard
Perhaps sometimes a simplistic take like this is true - people destroying just for the sake of destruction and indifferent to the target.
However when destruction is targeted toward specific brands or toward infrastructure being used for specific purposes such takes can no longer be true.
Boycotting Waymo? Sure, it sends a message. Bashing in a car so someone else can’t ride it? It just makes the other side look like the good guys and their side look like the bad guys. Is that what they intended? No, obviously not, they just wanted an excuse to do property destruction.
This is why protests are hard. You have to somehow keep it peaceful by dissuading hooliganism who are ultimately attracted by the chaos to do carnage. Those hooligcans aren’t on your side and don’t care about your cause, they just want to bash things in and do some looting. They might as well be working for ICE with the bad rep they are giving to the anti-ICE protestors.
>Bashing in a car so someone else can’t ride it? It just makes the other side look like the good guys and their side look like the bad guys
Not really. If your definition of "good" and "bad" (always a sign of a simplistic mind btw) is "good for Waymo's bottom line" and "bad for Waymo's bottom line" then sure. But if your community's people are suffering and looking to rideshare gigs for a lifeline, and then a company threatens them, then destroying their assets is easy to justify as "good" from a humanistic perspective, even categorically.
The US could avoid this by making sure that the social contract here is still in place. People destroy and protest self driving cars because they aren't liberatory automation; they're just another taxi billing us except that they also put humans driving rideshares out of a job. Does China have a problem with their people being forced to do rideshare gigs to get enough food to eat and competing with self driving cars?
If I had to choose I rather take free internet where I don't have to play with some VPN every time I want to do something or play a game in steam. Self driving cars are nice toys though but I don't mind having a driver.
I say this as someone who has lived in China, the system is just too closed and dumb.
I kind of assumed the car would be locked (from the outside)?
Like most regular cars have the option to.
The Waymo I saw the other day, one guy stopped the car, the other broke the window and snatched all the goodies from the occupants.
I find it somehow like a dystopia that things like these happen. This isn't about kids dying in some foreign country on some distant continent and we're investing in fancy robot taxis. This is actually that some people have the privilege of living in a bubble and using this technology that these huge corporations put money in (for the profit of their shareholders) while in the same time ignoring the core issues of the society that lead to such acts happening (stealing in broad daylight stuff from a car while people are inside it). I know people will say that this isn't for Google to fix (yeah, they only fix and lobby for laws that help them make more money) or for the tech people working for these companies and browsing these forums to fix, but I do find it a bit disgusting.
Do you think sitting inside you will be protected if someone has a gun?
So you're implying that someone in a locked Waymo was assaulted at gunpoint from outside the vehicle? These are rolling surveillance machines (in a good way?) and virtually every aspect of this would be caught on probably a dozen cameras. I'd be surprised if this hypothetical scenario has ever happened, and if it has, I'd love to see the evidence.
I think people vastly overestimate the extent to which would be criminals think ahead to the likelihood of being caught and the severity of the punishment.
They might not, but there is a further defence against their lack of consideration about consequences.
It's called incarceration.
Not really related to my reply
You mean like this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/technology/trapped-inside...
Cameras aren't going to stop a crime in progress.
But they might stop it from happening again if the perpetrators are imprisoned as a result of the footage.
> virtually every aspect of this would be caught on probably a dozen cameras
If only there were a widely available technology to conceal ones face...
You're laying on enough qualifiers that even a recent robbery of a Waymo is precluded, because (if we really want to victim blame) their window was down which is asking for it.
But overall, not sure why the tone of these replies: then Venn diagram of "wants to rob people" and "cares Google's AV will record it" doesn't include as much overlap as you're implying.
A Waymo has even been used as a getaway vehicle a few times now, once even successfully
Obviously the Waymo Premier service should also include a nice handgun with the car.
Why should I have to wield a gun myself? A self-driving car should be able to shoot at threats autonomously!
Something classy like a Beretta 92 series?
https://www.beretta.com/en-us/product/92x-performance-defens...
...or something more retro-futuristic like an FN-90 to match the vibe of a self-driving EV?
https://fnamerica.com/products/rifles/fn-ps90-standard/
...plus you get the advantages of a carbine.
When under attack, Waymo responds by stopping the car.
> Waymo should treat it like a security flaw that anyone can stop your car and there's nothing you can do about it.
And accept liability for obvious and potentially devistating problems? I wouldn't hold my breath.
Waymo should treat it like a security flaw that anyone can stop your car and there's nothing you can do about it.
What are they supposed to do? Go full Mad Max? That doesn't go over well on Reddit.
Seriously, what can they do besides stop the car?
$30/mo is slightly mind boggling for this.
I’ve enjoyed the ~70 or so Waymo rides I have taken but to me Waymo, Uber, and Lyft are methods of last resort.
My feet, BART, and SFMuni are my primary methods of transportation and for $104/mo I can take an unlimited number of trips, usually very conveniently.
The biggest advantage with public transit is that your mind is not engaged driving. But at some point, the speed advantage is overwhelming. And eventually the price advantage dominates. Taking my family and grandparents to the airport is $40 by car^W rideshare and $45 by BART and twice the amount of time for me: I live upstairs from a T-train / Caltrain stop. I'd invite anyone to price out the difference themselves.
Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.
I spent over a decade on a bicycle plus Muni/BART Fastpass and it's pretty good for the price if you're single and stay inside the city. As such a person I could crack open a book and a 15 min from Glen Park to Montgomery St. was the same as a 1 h from Montgomery to El Cerrito (the latter even preferable).
But the various policy choices popular in San Francisco (intentionally high labour usage, ill and violent people in public spaces, low cleaning capacity) do act against transit being a good choice. By comparison, I have family in Vancouver, BC where the politics are similar but the policy is different and the trains run very often and are fast (these are the most important things - made possible by removing labor from the equation) and are relatively clean. People will offer you a seat when you hop on with your stroller, elevators are functional and relatively clean, and it's overall a lot more usable as a family.
> Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.
Buses are fairly fast where bus lanes exist. With the kid I now take the bus far more often rather than walking 15 minutes to the Bart station and spending an extra 5 minutes each end navigating Bart’s incredibly poorly located lifts at each end.
I bought an e-bike once the kid was 2 and it has been pretty great. It would be absolutely wonderful if San Francisco created a network of real separated bike lanes or slow streets.
Bart seems much more cleaner and safer now than in years past. I don't know if free mental space is the main benefit of transit. During rush hour, you can't do much outside of listen to something, which you can do while driving too.
Not having to deal with parking and the fact that driving is actually very dangerous seem like stronger points in transits favor.
Fwiw, driving also has some negative je ne sais quoi for me that goes beyond the functional advantages. Maybe it's the aesthetic onslaught of ugly concrete, noise, heat and smell of sitting in traffic for an hour on the highway. Maybe there's something about getting around on your feet that makes me feel viscerally connected to the city. Maybe it's just the exercise that compounds over time. But I hate driving.
Driving is actually not "very dangerous" if you're sober, not distracted, and driving a properly maintained modern car. Like most any activity the risk isn't zero but you can cut it down a lot.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Drunk people hit sober people, most people get distracted sometimes, and oil changes don't make your car safer.
Driving is very dangerous compared than transit. It is not very dangerous compared to knife fights or getting cancer.
I do stuff for fun that's more dangerous than driving so I guess perspectives vary.
Driving is very safe at city speeds for those inside the big metal box. Less so for the pedestrians and cyclists on the outside.
I know this goes against the HN groupthink, but a lot of those accidents are not the car or the drivers fault. I live in a small college town. We have huge problems with students just walking right off the curb, especially when drunk.
The pedestrian is not the one driving the weapon. It is your fault if you hit a pedestrian, even if they walk right off the curb, even if they’re drunk.
Unless they intentionally jump in front of your car in an attempt to commit suicide, it is always on you to ensure you can stop and respond to an emergency, and a pedestrian is such a thing, imho.
I think this is more a design problem with US road infrastructure. City streets are much wider than in other countries which encourages drivers to drive more quickly and allows them to pay less attention. We'd have far fewer pedestrian and cyclist fatalities if we didn't require streets to be so wide.
I agree.
No, if the pedestrian walks out in the known-dangerour street without so much as a glance, not a crosswalk, that is categorically not the cars fault. Idiots are gonna idiots. Just like all the cyclists that get hit around here for not obeying stop signs.
ALL users of the road are responsible for following the rules. Not being in a car isn't a "I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, whyever I want" pass.
If you walk around yielding a knife, and you accidentally walk into someone who wasn’t paying attention, it is definitely your fault.
If you drive a car and accidentally drive into someone who isn’t paying attention, that is also on you.
You are holding the bigger weapon. That means you have the higher requirement for safety, imho.
I track cars and race, fwiw, so it’s not like I don’t like cars.
My point is Bart feels safe now and that it seems to be trending up not down. I am talking about the trend I have observed living in the bay area for the past 15 years. Why would not including the 70s in my window of comparison invalidate my point?
Can you explain your math behind "$40 by car"?
I assume that is the typical Uber/Lyft prices. It would likely be a lot cheaper if another family member does drop off/pickup.
if you are parking in SF, make that $60 total.
It seems to me a lot of people just really don't like to be associated with public transit or anything associated with anything remotely underclass.
It's a class marker to be driven around in an autonomous 6000lbs tank rather than move your legs a bit.
Be serious. Its not a class marker, its a nessesity. Even the poor have cars
People clearly chooses the convenience and predictability of cars, and pay significantly to do so
In places where there is greater convenience/predictability from pubilc transit, they choose it. See london/ny
It is also a class marker. I intentionally lived without a car in West Coast city as a younger man, and I learned to be very selective about whom I told. The vast majority of people would assume that the only reason for not having a car is not being able to afford one, and would judge me accordingly.
I have the same situation here. We live intentionally without a car, and our quality of life is fantastic. People assume poverty, given the lack of car, as opposed to I just don't see the value, and value controlling my time (the walks are force exercise, a win for me). I learned along time ago to not play other peoples games.
I only recent got my driver's license again, at 40, after it expired a decade ago. Having a car just didn't make financial sense to me (and still doesn't, I just want the option to be able to drive one sometimes).
I had to learn pretty quick that, if this trivia topic came up, I'd need to mention "I lived in NYC so long that I just never used it and didn't realize it expired" because otherwise people would assume that I lost it because of too many DUIs.
I chose not to drive as a teenager (public transit even in my smallish city seemed fine, I wanted to spend my money on a computer not a car) and it was interesting to watch the assumptions go from "you are incapable / afraid" to "you must be too poor or have a DUI" over the last 30 years.
It's inconceivable to most people that it could be a choice.
West Coast cities (or pretty much all cities in the USA except maybe NYC and Chicago and sometimes SF) suck without car. Yes, you can do it. It will be a chore.
That attitude and class marker disappears in big cities in much of Asia and Europe
Because living in west coast cities without a car sucks. They see a decision you made, question why you made it, and can only conclude it's because you cant afford the other one. People in areas where public transit is good dont come to the same conclussion.
We judge a lot of our friends who dont have cars, or worse licenses. It can be annoying to drive a 30 or 40 something adult around like a toddler.
Increasingly, we just stopped inviting them to select activities. It is like inviting the gluten free vegan to dinner parties.
If I am hosting an event, I'm not interested is spending a disproportionate ammount of time or effort to accommodate one person.
Are cars convenient? Drivers are constantly complaining about inconveniences. Parking, storage, maintenance, repairs, citations, congestion, construction, registration, insurance, the toil of driving itself, negative interactions with other drivers, etc.
Are cars predictable? According to google maps, my route to downtown Los Angeles could be 30 to 150 minutes depending on the time of day, the train is always 50.
It seems you would have to be unaware of alternatives to make those claims.
This is very much location dependant. Cars are convenient, predictable, and affordable in most of the USA. People just drive to their destination and park in one of the abundant free spaces without worrying about it. There are only a handful of dense cities where traffic and parking are a huge hassle. Public transit can sometimes be a great option and we should build more of it, but realistically most people will continue to rely on cars (possibly autonomous) in our lifetimes.
> Cars are convenient, predictable, and affordable in most of the USA. People just drive to their destination and park in one of the abundant free spaces without worrying about it.
This. I don't know what places people have in mind when they say that driving is inconvenient. Even in NYC driving isn't as bad as people claim, except perhaps in Lower Manhattan where there just aren't any parking spots. In most other places, a car takes you from door to door cheaper and faster than any alternative.
> Even the poor have cars
Poor, relative to whom?
This is a huge difference between NYC and SF. There are certainly some in NYC who would prefer Waymo (direct route, no driver chitchat), but I don't think many New Yorkers would be proud of taking Waymo's. Most people feel embarrassed to admit they took an Uber somewhere!
in nyc any car based transportation is slower than subways often, but everyones so narrow minded they just think about their own life. if you're old in nyc cabs/ubers/waymo are a big deal, without them you're stuck walking to a bus stop or subway and that gets hard in your 70s and 80s.
Public transit in the US just mostly sucks. It tends to be sparse, slow, unreliable, and yeah sometimes there are crazies who make the environment feel dangerous.
You send Americans over to visit Tokyo and they have zero problems taking the train. The problems isn't with individual Americans.
Americans don't want to live in dense neighborhoods, so public transit is not viable (the operating costs would be too high). Foreigners are often amazed by the quality of life in American suburbs relative to what they experience at home for this reason. Our homes, cars, stores, cafes, are a lot more spacious for example.
Americans actually like decent, walkable neighborhoods. But there's no cultural momentum behind actually zoning for such; quite the opposite, really.
If you are talking about a city where this makes sense like Phoenix, the public transportation is very poor. It can take 90 minutes to cover the distance you could drive in 20.
They have a light rail, but it only goes between downtown and a few suburbs. Your other option is several bus transfers.
If you’re thinking of cities like New York or London, public transport is more practical in many cases.
Not to mention how hostile Phoenix can be to walking.
The HN commentariat skews young and male so opinions seen here are often disconnected from average people in the real world. Many women feel unsafe riding on US public transit because other riders act out in antisocial ways. We can argue about whether this perception is rational based on crime statistics or whatever but you're not going to convince them to ride until the police and transit system operators start enforcing basic rules of behavior and cleanliness.
Can confirm. My partner has had far too many bad encounters on bart. I had a female coworker say she saw a guy get murder with a hammer on bart.
Obviously everyone’s experience is different but public transit had a bad rep for a reason and it had nothing to do with class/status and almost all to do with safety. Uber/lyft is getting a bad rep too due to safety.
Not saying you're 100% wrong, but there are tons of markets where Uber is robust enough to rely on and get you where you need to go, and public transit absolutely is not. (I'm half an hour outside of Pittsburgh.)
Yes, and this is a policy failure.
...that's a totally different argument right?
More like want to avoid being in an enclosed space with mentally ill, people smoking meth, people that smell of petrified urine, with uncomfortably hot temperatures and crowding.
Are people really "smoking meth" on SF Muni buses or trains? I doubt it. On a bus/train, the driver would stop and call the police.
The SF Muni trains and diesel-powered buses have air conditioning. What am I missing here?I have been in an SF muni car with someone actively smoking something that was not marijuana or a cigarette. I think it was fentanyl but I’m not sure. This was about two years ago. I hope this is tolerated less now than it has been.
Idk about SF but in LA I've definitely seen people with pipes doing the fent lean at train stations
San Francisco public transportation is neither reliable or safe enough for my family. The only thing that’s remotely decent is Caltrain, but that has the last mile problem.
I am on the fence about this comment. Without doxxing yourself too much, what neighborhood do you live and where do your children and (I assume) wife work? I would disagree for about 50% of the city in the "western zones". Sure, it is slow, but it is reliable and safe (both trains and buses).
The L-Taraval, at least historically, was not reliable between downtown and the outer sunset (past Sunset Blvd).
I use public transit but it comes with a lot of inconvenience. You need to stand on a moving vehicle more often than not, it takes more time, there are panhandlers, you might not feel safe, transfers don't generally seem to time well, going up and down multiple flights of stairs is a fair bit of exercise, some people don't shower as often as you'd hope, etc. People generally pay for convenience. I certainly would if I could budget for it. I couldn't care less about status or class.
I'm much less likely to get randomly harassed or robbed or stabbed or catch COVID in a car where I am the sole occupant. I'm happy to pay extra to drop the chances of those things down to 0.00%.
If that makes me some kind of class supremacist in your silly world, then guilty as charged.
How often do you think that happens to transit riders? Your concerns seem overblown. And by driving, your odds of getting hurt or dying in a car accident go way up. You’re trading one set of risks for another, not eliminating risk entirely.
This response is part of the problem.
People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
Both things can be true. People can have exaggerated fears about the dangers of transit (especially compared to driving, which people seem to pretend is relatively risk-free), and the crazy / shady folks on transit can still be a problem and still need to be addressed.
I can only speak from my own experience riding transit in Seattle for 9 years. I've never had any issues. Sure, there are sketchy characters, but I've never been bothered, and never had anyone bother me. I definitely see news stories about bad shit happening on transit, but when you look at the number of people riding transit vs the amount of bad things that happen, and you look at the number of people driving and how many people die or get seriously injured in the city daily from car-related accidents, it's a no brainer. You don't see people dying on transit every day, but car-related fatalities are a daily occurrence.
Yes I am trading one set of risks for another based on my judgement of which risks I prefer to bear, as it is my right to do. Simply leaving my house entails a set of risks. I get to choose how I want to handle and prioritize those.
The point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with "class".
I have been puked on when riding the bart and know several people who have seen a person die or get murdered. This dismissal of the very real problems of public transport is why public transport has the reputation it does.
You are much more likely to be killed or seriously injured in a car than you are in a transit vehicle.
Try living in Phoenix without a car...
Wealthy people in NYC have no problem with the subway. When the service is better than alternatives people use it.
What I do believe: People that earn 200K to 400K in NYC/Manhattan still frequently ride the subway to work. Why? They rent/buy an apartment on an extremely convenient subway line to their office. They are not quite rich enough to have a car and driver.
> People that earn 200K to 400K in NYC/Manhattan still frequently ride the subway to work. Why? They rent/buy an apartment on an extremely convenient subway line to their office.
Sure, this is mostly what I was referring to. The overwhelming number of people in SF would never dream of choosing where to live based off public transit access. I cant speak to billionaires, but the upper middle class of NYC(imo these people are all wealthy but we can change that word if you like) are mostly happy or at least open to public transit. Its not a class thing until you get to billionaire level. Therefore the reason people don't use public transit isn't because it's associated with the underclass, it's because almost all of it in the US is objectively worse than other transportation options.
I don’t think this is entirely wrong, in that there is a ‘class thing’ about riding the bus, but it’s more practicality than a class marker for a lot of people.
- In SF you can either walk 1-10 minutes to the bus, wait 0-15 minutes for the bus, tap on (while watching most other passengers evade the fare), get dropped off, and then walk 1-10 minutes to your destination… or spend an additional $5-10 to get Ubered door to door at a third of the time. First and last mile are real costs.
- In SF I Uber, unless Muni/BART is a straight shot. In NYC I take the subway. It’s not really a class thing. In NYC it takes longer to Uber much of the time and it costs several more times than the subway. You still have a 1-5 minute first and last mile problem, but headways on trains is decent and above ground taxis are incredibly inconsistent with traffic.
That about matches up with the experience with social groups in similar classes in these areas too. Most of my SF friends Uber. Most of my NYC friends take the subway.
This comment is legit! So many of these comments here are wildly biased to people's own personal experiences (usually the male/female Karens are the most noisy). You make many good points here.
My question(s): Why do you think Uber works so well in SF? Why don't they get trapped on Market Street with crawling speeds?
I lived in NYC (Manhattan) many years ago and I always felt that when I needed a taxi (cold/snow/rain), they were hard to get. As a result, I almost never took a classic yellow cab in NYC/Manhattan.
When it's as bad as SF's then yes, trams/trains/busses can often suck. I used them but it was rarely plesant. Other cities (Europe, Asia) are much better.
> It's a class marker
> autonomous 6000lbs tank
Hmmm. The meta here made me chuckle. Calling cars tanks is certainly a class marker.
Do you think people avoid the underclass because it depletes their aura, or because they like avoiding clearly mentally ill people, or people with no ability for personal hygiene, or people who need to smoke meth on the bus?
The first two are what I experienced today on a bus in SF, and the guy smoking meth was about 6 days ago
Nonsense. This is just the "last mile problem"
> me Waymo, Uber, and Lyft are methods of last resort.
Most of my Waymo rides were from or to a BART station - the real utility of these services is to pull a last mile when I don't have a car.
There's no better way of getting out of Powell out of the traffic deadlock at 5 PM than BART.
But once you get south of Daly City, there's no timed connections for the surface streets.
If you need to go to Brisbane from Powell, the 2 mile car ride is worth the effect.
This is a great post. Very practical.
This part:
I checked Google Maps. I don't see any BART stations that are only 2 miles (3 km) from downtown Brisbane (California). What I am missing? Or are you taking Caltrain, then getting an Uber from 4th and King Caltrain terminal to Powell?Don't tell me... you are a man? I guess so. How many middle class women and above want to ride SFMuni after dark? Few.
The future of self-driving taxis is women (customers) who want to live in a big city, but don't want to ride mass transit, nor ride in a ride-hailing services (Uber, etc.) with a human driver... because most drivers are men.
This kind of gender politics is tiresome. You could easily point out that for women public transit is untenable after dark instead of bringing the OP’s identity into it.
> This kind of gender politics is tiresome.
I think they're trying to convey that this kind of gender ignorance is equally tiresome.
You hit the nail on the head.
I imagine that Uber can also be somewhat sketchy but with a different risk profile (getting into the car with a stranger, often a man, and needing to trust that they'll drive you to the right location), which means that self-driving taxis would be a potential safety upgrade over that as well.
1000%. Ask any women who uses ride-hailing services: Have you ever had a situation where the driver made you uncomfortable or fear for your safety? I would conservatively estimate 100% of women. I think men just do not understand how much women are willing to pay to guarantee they can avoid this situation.
I definitely was not aware of this when I was younger, but after years of learning to be a better listener and learn about experiences outside my own, my perception is that there are unfortunately quite a lot of situations that most men would consider quite mundane but pretty much all women will have had to fear for their safety in. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that when others have trouble conceiving of this phenomenon given how long I went without picking up on it, but now that I'm aware of it it's impossible not to see it everywhere.
Not a single woman has even asked or cared if I felt uncomfortable at a gas station at night, or ATM, or walking down the street. Yet data shows men are more likely to be physically assaulted and/or killed by strangers.
This framing ignores the fact that most people who commit crimes like the ones you mention are men. A man encountered in one of those situations alone is a lot more likely to be a threat, so I'm not sure why you'd expect that a woman would try to initiate conversation with him.
? I'm not saying women are supposed to chat up random men. I'm saying of the women I know well, not one has ever cared about the danger non criminal men face in the world. All they talk about is the danger women face.
Uber and Lyft both provide an option for women to request female drivers. In both cases, they say they can't guarantee it and that they may end up matched with a male driver. (In Lyft's case, they group "nonbinary" with women.) I suppose you could cancel if you see it's a man, and if that's rare enough, maybe that's workable. (Though, it seems, that would happen only if there aren't any female drivers available, and thus you'd have to fall back to other transportation.)
https://help.uber.com/en/riders/article/women-preferences-fa...
https://help.lyft.com/hc/en-us/all/articles/9030680293-Women...
Yeah, but imagine you live in Phoenix, AZ, and you can't/won't drive for whatever reason, you've got to get to work every day. Phoenix has buses, but they're not going to be convenient for lots of possible daily commutes. Daily taxi/Uber/Waymo rides are probably a pretty good choice.
Or imagine that you work a professional travel job and you're flying to/from the airport on a weekly basis. Your employer will pay for your ride to the airport, so why would you take public transit? Now you're doing at least 3-4 taxi/uber/waymo rides a week.
I have a job where I fly frequently, my employer pays my way to/from the airport, and I take transit whenever possible because uber/lyft/taxi services seem to select horrible drivers.
I'd certainly consider a Waymo if I was flying to an airport they serviced though.
Or LA
I would gladly pay this much for Waymo, Waymos are so much nicer than taxis and public transit.
Can someone help me put this into context?
$30/month is way cheaper than $104/month.
How would you compare the base metrics?
Time to start traveling, average walk amount per trip, total trip duration, coverage parity, etc.
I suspect you can get into a waymo quicker and with less walking than a subway, unless you live very close. I imagine total trip time is pretty variable. Coverage parity is hard to guess about - in theory a waymo can go anywhere but I suspect public transport has longer "tendrils."
For just the two daily BART trips that I do within SF, it would be $1200+/mo for Waymo/Uber/Lyft. So from that perspective perhaps the extra $30/mo for the small convenience of getting priority and being able to cancel a few rides could be seen as “cheap” by comparison.
If I include the walks of 30+ minutes and bus rides, it’s probably pushing $2k/mo in rideshare costs.
It's $30/month for these extras. You're still paying per trip, just with a de facto 10% off.
10% off is practically nothing and also irrelevant because it is the total cost of the trip that matters and they can easily increase that over time behind the scenes in a way that makes up for that 10% and then some once they determine the price elasticity of these premium customers which I imagine is quite higher.
Oh I missed that. Thanks for clarifying.
If you spend $300 on waymo per month, which is easy if you take it to work 3x a week, it's free after the 10% cash back. I don't see how its mind boggling, it's clearly not for anyone who takes Waymo as a last resort.
I take public transport a lot and walk a lot (I live 3h walk from central London - I know because I've walked it, for fun), but I still also use Uber regularly because sometimes I simply don't have time. If I lived in the centre I probably would have very little use for it, but for people even slightly outside the core of cities well served by public transport, it's usually nice to have options.
It wasn't that interesting. I had a healthcare appointment near Victoria and had a half day off and decided to walk home. I regularly do 2h walks, so it wasn't a big stretch... It wasn't a particularly exciting walk - mostly very similar stretches of semi-urban areas after the first 30m or so.
It'll depend on your use cases, probably.
If 15 rides a month averaging $30 a ride can remove your need to own a car, that's $450. In that range the subscription would pay for itself.
Compare that to a car payment, insurance, maintenance, and gas. Pretty favorable!
For many people this makes sense, but once you reach a level of money where your basic needs are met, most people trade their money for time, and things like this are one of the most obvious ways.
Not long ago I walked from downtown SF up to the Golden Gate and walked across and back. My feet were tired and I didn't want to walk back downtown. It took me long enough to figure out where buses pick up that I missed one; at that point my decision was something like "70 minutes to wait for bus, take bus, transfer or walk to my hotel" or "23 minutes + $20 to get a Waymo" and I consider that a great value for my money.
I am a huge fan of public transit and try to avoid driving whenever I can. When the public transit goes approximately from where you are to where you want to be, or when it comes frequently enough that transfers don't cost you half an hour if you miss a connection, it's great, but there are so many edge cases.
I've never needed to call a taxi/Waymo in London, and in NYC the only time I did was getting from the airport to Manhattan the first time I went (every other time I know how to take AirTrain to public transit). In nearly every other city I've taken a Lyft/Waymo/Taxi at least once because the system isn't good enough to be universal.
> most people trade their money for time, and things like this are one of the most obvious ways.
Non-sequitur but that reminds me I lived in Tokyo where the trains stop around 12am to 5am. It is (was?) a commitment to decide to stay out late because I knew I'd have to say out until morning. Eventually though, 4-5 years after living there, I realized $50-$75, 2 or 3 times a month to cab it home at 2am or 3am was better than not going out because I didn't want to stay out until 5am. And even then, my total transportation expenses were below a car.
My current car, owned for 5 years, not including electricity, but including replacing the tires once, and paying car ins, effectively costs $1350 a month, $337 a week. In other words, a train/bus pass + a few cabs/uber/waymo rides is generally less than $337 a week. At 10yrs, assuming no repairs, and no change in car ins, the car would be $216 a week. Remember, that's not including fuel/electricity.
If I used it to commit my fuel bill would be $75 a month currently (short commute) so add that in.
It would be nice if they had Bart first class with fast wifi and premium interior. The green vinyl seats are better than the old cloth ones but it’s still pretty gross.
Works in SF if you are near one. Does not work in Los Angeles (and probably other Waymo cities)
All hail the exemplary citizen!
(does that satisfy you sir?)
"Mind boggling"? I don't see that at all. You still have to pay for each trip, this is a separate cost on top.
This is for the people who uber to work every day. Yes, they somehow exist. It blew my mind to meet one — he was spending something like $40/day on transport, as a new grad SWE!
A Waymo ride once quoted me close to $100 for a couple miles. The same Uber ride ended up being like $21. Surge pricing is real but c’mon.
Cash back is huge for people expensing rides. “Spend company money on us, and take your personal rides every once in a while for free.”
Same model as airlines.
I see this constantly in my industry. Mid-level managers (and above) are always trying to max travel miles on company expense. If I ran my own company (dream!), I would never allow employees to reap "travel miles" from travel paid for by the company. It is ridiculous.
The company isn’t using the travel miles. You’re basically saying, “I’ll take away a small perk from people who are forced to travel.” It’s not like they’re stealing from the company, the company sent them somewhere else and they just got a tiny bonus for it.
The proper thing to so is stop those managers who travel too much.
The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.
I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.
Every travel system I have worked with at [big corps] required the cost of my flight to be within a specific range of the average for that route. I wouldn’t have been able to take a $1k if a $400 was available without an override by the person whose budget it was coming from.
Most of them we couldn’t pay on our own card either, so no points from that, but I’m not aware of any way to block someone from adding their frequent flyer number to a booked ticket.
I travel quite a bit for work, e.g. the last 30 days I've been home for 4 while travelling to 6 cities spread over 4 countries and 5 time zones, and that's not how I understood what they are saying at all. If you want a perk for travelling, these points based systems are the most Kafkaesque way imaginable to give so little for it.
And often it is like they are stealing from the company. I remember seeing on LinkedIn a ${seniorExec} of a place I worked at posting how they are a million miler first class traveler on airline X but they'll be switching to airline Y exclusively from now on because X's point system isn't as good anymore. The moral of the post was supposed to be something about treating your customers right for loyalty or something, what I took away from it is this person is throwing away my entire trip travel budget on individual flights because they are selecting how to get the best kickback. Meanwhile I'm trying to get approval to chop 4 hours off what should be an 8 hour door to door flight by spending $120 more than the recommended flight to avoid an extra hop and layover because that just makes no $ sense from a hours perspective.
The best perk I ever got for travel was an actual pay increase for it, many times larger than any hotel or flights points program has ever been worth to me. If you want to give your travelling employees a perk then that is a real way to do it, not a few brand specific dollars for each part of the trip you have to sign up for.
I've always understood it as a perk the company knowingly allows its employees who need to travel.
Why would you want to ruin morale for no reason?
Are you going to ask your employees for their 2% cashback if you reimburse them for a purchase they made with their credit card too?
At the end of the day, it seems more practical to focus on ensuring that they picked the appropriate value product/service. If they picked appropriately, does it matter if the company gives them employee a kickback? Sure, the employee will then be incentivized to get the most expensive thing they can, but this was already the case because it's not their money and they want the best thing they can get away with.
It is surprising that business travel still exists. I would've thought that due to improvements in video calling tech during covid, the need for travel to customer site would decline precipitously.
A lot of business travel is kickbacks/bribes for signing contracts.
So customer travels to vendor's site?
And hotels.com
If you’re wondering what a “K-shaped economy” looks like, this is exactly it. A moderately expensive subscription service that simply provides priority access to something you’re otherwise already paying good money for.
“I mean’s it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost, ten dollars?”
This is pretty close to how toll roads work tbh
I think toll roads is an interesting parallel.
They are public works, often in states that simply can’t afford to build or maintain their own infrastructure. But the point remains.
I’m not saying there is any wrong with the service, but I think it’s a worthwhile indicator of what life will be like as wealth inequality continues to accelerate.
they aren't public works.
The vast majority of modern American toll roads are. I grew up in Austin. We have the Mopac and 183 expansions, route 130 was mostly privately constructed, but is under TxDOT.
Perhaps other parts of the world have privately operated roads, but I’m not aware of them.
The part of route 130 you are referring to is technically owned by texas, but under a long term lease/manage situation, I believe the lease is 50 years. It's private in practice. There are many more such situations in the US than folks realize. Chicago Skyway, Indiana toll road and others. Cities/states will contort structures to be able to say "we still own it!" while economically not owning it.
So, the ones in states that can't afford to build or maintain them are often private roads or PPP.
Australia is one of the top toll roading countries. Sydney had most tolled roads world record for awhile not sure who holds it now. I don’t know whether it is the state or private companies who operate them.
Since you live in the area, and are talking about toll roads, I assume you also probably know of the name Cintra, who are Spainiards. And Cintra is, in fact, a private toll road operator who has owned roads around Austin previously
My point here is that a privately operated toll road that exists purely as a toll road, does not parallel the concept of a moderately expensive subscription for what is effectively an existing product. A more apt comparison would be a toll lane in an existing road, first class compartments, etc.
I mentioned Texas 130, which was operated by Cintra, but was still technically operating under TxDOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_130
Austin, Texas is a great example for toll lanes of existing roads! MoPac and 183 North are exactly this model
Agree that it's a more accurate metaphor than just "toll roads".
My understanding is that Cintra exited the Austin TX toll road business around a decade ago after profits from SH 130 failed to materialize
You may be surprised to learn that most toll roads in the US are public works.
Depends. For most of my childhood all of I95 in Virginia was a toll road.
It will pay for itself if you spend >300$ per month. I personally wish Waymo have a 399$ per month subscription that give 2 free ride per day so I don't need to own a car just for work.
> I personally wish Waymo have a 399$ per month subscription that give 2 free ride per day
Assuming $20 for a typical paid trip, I’m guessing $800 would be closer to what they would charge for 2 free rides a day within SF.
$400 might be were it ends up when it’s widely adopted and a mature product — probably in the “budget” category of a segmented market.
Realistic costs of owning a car are around 1.000€ per month - see https://assets.adac.de/Autodatenbank/Autokosten/autokostenue... (pdf, German, look for Gesamtkosten (total cost))
Wherever I tell this to people here in Germany, they are good at pointing out why their car is the exception.
I imagine that is where society is headed. No one owns a car and most people pay for a subscription to an autonomous taxi.
Did you mean no one who does 100% of their driving in urban cities? I could maybe see that happening some day, but 10s of millions of Americans don't fit that description and to one degree or another drive in areas that Waymo has no interest in supporting since the unit economics will never be that good.
Never. Only rich urban centers is this possible.
Never. Only rich urban centers is this possible.
Where are these "rich" urban centers?
I have been repeatedly assured by my political overlords that all cities are poverty-ridden "hellscapes."
That sounds more expensive than just owning a car.
Depends where you live. In SF, parking alone is more than $300/mo if you have to pay for a spot. Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.
Waymo?
Waymos, Uber/Lyft, and taxis don't qualify for commuter benefits in California.
You mean they don't qualify for the tax exemption. They are often still offered as benefits to the employee.
Car payment, insurance, parking, gas/electricity? Going to be over $400/mo in almost all cases in any of the cities Waymo is in.
Add tag tax, residential parking, subsidized work parking, maintenance, incurred violations, tolls.
400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.
"Incurred violations" should be effectively $0. How often are you getting a traffic ticket? I think the last time I got a ticket was a decade ago...
If you live in a city, parking tickets are fairly inevitable. I am sure some folks get away with none but at least in SF I have gotten tickets that were not even for the correct meter and it’s takes more time (at least used to) to fight it than pay the money.
I lived in LA for over a decade with a car and got zero parking tickets. I wouldn't call it inevitable.
I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.
Great? Too many variables such as not having to park on the street or bad/good luck. If you live somewhere that has street cleaning, street parking and meters there is a good chance of getting a ticket. Not everyone but the likelihood increases and most of LA does not really check most of those boxes at least in the areas I have been.
Spread across a city probably more than you think, especially if you include parking tickets. I've never had a driving ticket, and maybe 4 parking ones over decades, but I'm probably on the lower end of the curve. In their first 40 days of operation, Oakland's speed cameras issued 82,000 tickets according to reports. I welcome those as they make streets safer, and I think they should be low cost, but high frequency.
I would expect tickets issued during the first 40 days to be higher than later, as people haven't adjusted yet
Or lower because the system is under public scrutiny and they don't wanna tune it for revenue just yet. Hard to say because nobody who makes such decisions gets that high in government by writing down their deliberation on such matters.
Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".
You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"
They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.
I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.
maintenance, petty car body degradations.. things gets pricey real fast
I've got 200,000 miles on my Toyota and it's only ever had oil changes, brake pads, and new tires.
It'll probably make it another decade. Or two.
Did you know before hand this would be the case ? cause even when choosing a model that was deemed well made and long-lasting, we hit an unfortunate engine belt timing failure (100k cars were concerned, we got one..) and had to replace the whole thing.
Yes, if you get a Toyota and maintain it, it would be expected to make it past 200k miles. They are by far the most reliable cars. Timing belt failures are only catastrophic for interference engines, and most cars use timing chains now, which have a much lower failure rate.
How many times did you replace the timing belt (and probably water pump) before the failure ? Curious what vehicle this is
It was a nissan micra k12, and I used the wrong term, it's not a belt it's a timing chain (metallic) allegedly designed for longer longevity, but there was an industry issue (bad alloy or something) that made them stretch and lose sync with the timing chain counter circuit. The ECU would trip and rapidly the engine would just stop (quite dangerous depending on which road your on). Car mechanics had to swap the whole engine.. we sold it not long after that.
But you get two rides a day. You’re gonna be stuck in your little quadrant your whole life.
And in SF your car will be broken into at least 2x/year, unless you always have protected garage parking everywhere you go.
This stuff varies a lot by location. Sure in San Francisco and a handful of other cities parking and tolls cost a great deal, but that's not the case in most locations and presumably Waymo's goal is to expand far beyond a few locations. People in, say, Phoenix aren't paying for parking. If you don't have a car payment your monthly transport costs are going to be much lower than that.
"sounds"? How about you do the math? Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense.
Parking: $325
Insurance: $134
Car payment: $330
Charging: $50
All-in for me is around $850 a month. Though I use it far fewer times per month than GP implies, i.e. I don't commute every day via car.
EDIT: I left out that this is a lease, so of course not including any potential depreciation, wear and tear, repairs etc, just the hard costs.
Even if it is expensive, it's much more convenient
+1 for convenience. My commute is 60 minutes of train + walking. I prefer that to driving for 30 minutes where I can't read or create.
We're talking about a robot car, right? So this won't change?
You're correct. I was trying to build on the parent comment about convenience.
Worst case this is an option I don't take, best case is that this would give me more time (shorter commute) with the benefits of being able to read or create.
Approximate monthly cost of owning a car in the city:
Lease or loan: $350
Parking in city: $300
Car insurance: $180
Gas: $120
License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year)
Maintenance: $17 (~$200 per year)
If you live in the city and you can afford not driving, please put that extra $1000/month into your brokerage or HYSA
If you're tying to budgetmaxx, why are we having a car payment on our total?
Gone are the days of $500 dollar drivable shitboxes, although you can easily get cars in the US for under a few grand. Why you'd be penny pinching and taking a loan out is beyond me. You ideally don't want a loan for anything, but some may excuse a home loan...
If two Waymo rides per day is covering your driving needs, there's no way you're spending $120/month on gas. Also, car insurance in CA is a huge ripoff, but I still don't pay anywhere near $180/month for very thorough coverage on my ~$40k car. Believable enough otherwise though.
What are your policy details and who is your provider for <180$ for "thorough" coverage?
Comprehensive, collision and 500k liability through USAA, $120/month. Deductibles are as high as they will allow, which is $1k IIRC. I was recently forced to consider a move to Utah. Thankfully I didn't end up moving, but a quote for the exact same coverage in SLC was just $40/month.
> through USAA, $120/month
Good deal, but not available to most.
I shop around regularly. USAA isn't even remotely the cheapest option, and the handful of experiences I and family members have had suggest that they are just as shitty as any other insurance company when it comes to handling claims. I only stick with them because they are consistently within 20% of the cheapest option and I value having all of my banking and insurance handled in one place.
That payment gets you a $28k used car at best, assuming no other costs. It won't be anything fancy.
My brand new Chevy Bolt only cost me like 22k, after the $7500 tax rebate. It's a perfectly nice car.
> assuming no other costs.
Assuming normal costs, you are looking $21-$22k not including taxes.
There is no way you are finding a car for $28k for just $400. Trust me.
I think they are just saying something like 400 * 72 gives you an absolute hard ceiling of 28k and change. Once you add in interests, sales tax, and other fees, you end up with something like the numbers you're saying. 72 months sounds stupid, because it is, but extremely long car loans are becoming increasingly common these days https://www.marketscreener.com/news/new-experian-automotive-... and you can even sometimes go to 84 if you really want that 28k number at $400/m.
parking in my condo that i own is $200 because the parking spaces are not deeded, shit is crazy here in sf
well, you voluntarily purchased a condo without deeded parking. if you want private storage for your private vehicle, pay for it.
i have a sports car and two motorcycles, and consequently, i did not buy a condo in the mission. instead, i bought a house by 19th street bart and my commute to the city is shorter than some of my coworkers who live half as far as me (by distance).
"the total average annual cost of ownership—which includes your car payment, depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and taxes—is approximately $12,297 per year (or $1,025 monthly) over a 15-year lifetime"
that's crazy. my 2005 volvo, 1991 nissan, and 1986 toyota altogether cost me a little over $1k per year (mostly insurance) and it was less than $10k total to buy them all. goes to show average financial literacy in the US. people won't save a few grand for a used car (or take out a small loan even!) and then pay 10x the cost for new
I think you and I may be a rarity. Most people seem to value having new vehicles, and I don't say that dismissively- there's definitely something to be said for modern safety features as vehicles continue to grow bigger and heavier.
There's a difference between buying a GMC Pedestrian Destroyer and a Honda Civic.
Certainly true, but my 1989 Honda Civic would still be obliterated in a collision with a modern one- everything has grown substantially.
true, not all of these are created equal. that old volvo has side curtain airbags and other safety features that were ahead of its time. but it takes experience to know what you're shopping for. I turned down a corolla that was 10 years newer for the same price because the older volvo was actually the better vehicle inside and out
Do they run on air?
You don’t pay for gas? Oil changes? New tires? Air filters?
Oil changes cost like $35/year if you do it yourself. Decent tires last 4-5 years, so that's like $100/year (to be generous). Air filters are so cheap and need replacement so infrequently as to not even be worth counting.
I can only get 1-2 years out of tires, but I also drive 25K+ miles a year. (And its a heavy EV Van) Tires are $800ish a set for the affordable ones (also due to heavy van)
Cabin air filter is twice a year at $18 a filter (I replace them as soon as it smells weird)
Home electricity is cheap at least. (7¢/kw)
Must be nice to have dirt cheap electricity. PG&E rates are 0.26 to 0.62/kw for the EV plan.
Source: https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
Even with "expensive" electricity, and using your worst case scenario, it's still usually cheaper to charge 400 mile EV from 0-100% (another worst case scenario), than it is to fill up an equivalent gas vehicle. Even before the current gas prices spike.
But let's use your "worst case" scenario.
Worst case 300 mile EV charge (100%, during peak hours): about $50
Filling up a highly fuel efficient ICE vehicle: about $40
Of course, if you only charge the EV to 80% (as is recommended, and more efficient), and only set it to charge it off-peak (as is normal), then the numbers are much better. There are, of course, worst case scenarios, but it's actually hard to make an EV more expensive than an ICE vehicle.
I would say that to charge an EV with a 350 mile range to 300 miles would be about $25 here in California. Right now, a 300 mile range tank of gas is easily $60 or $70.
You have to lose the old mindset of a gas vehicle, ie, you "fill it up" once. EVs are much more convenient: it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when you get home and then the next day it's fully charged - and they're almost all grid pricing aware.
Like, on my BMW PHEV, if I try to fast charge during peak times, the charger actually makes me confirm i want to spend more, instead of trickle charging until 8PM.
Come move to a shitty southern state, we've got low wages but cheap power.
>for the EV plan
Alright, I have to know what in the cali hell is going on here.
The increased frequency of tire changes for EVs is not something I realized when I bought an EV. Those batteries are heavy, and put a lot of extra wear on the tires.
Another factor is that brake-regen is putting additional stress on two tires if it is a single motor car. So they get a lot of workout accel/regen if you aren't using your brakes as often and driving economically to regen as much power back as possible.
Plus how fun it is to get going in an EV leads to a lot of extra tire wear.
I've found that rotating my tires more often helps spread the wear out from having a single motor EV.
I can’t rotate my tires, because the front and back are different sizes. Luckily, I do have dual motor, at least…
If you are doing the work yourself, you have to count the value of your time, then.
yep, it's dirt cheap to maintain yourself. and only a few hours per vehicle per year tbh. lots of people on hn don't know basic real life skills so this all seems insurmountable to them, and there's the ev cope that somehow your 60+ grand car is going to save you money in gas and maintenance in the long run. I have 8 cars and motorcyles for less than the cost of that one car lmao
Oil changes are cheap. A lot of places will put your tires on for free or cheaply if you buy tires from them. Assuming the car is free, the cost of car ownership is dominated by gas, insurance, and the raw cost of materials needed to maintain it. Whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it isn't going to move the needle much.
How much liability coverage are you getting for ~ $100/month? In other words if you injure or kill someone with your vehicle how much of that cost will be covered by your insurance company? With Waymo the answer is "not my problem".
I pay ~100/month per car for full coverage on two fairly new cars and $500k in liability from the auto policy plus a $1m umbrella policy. And that's in CA which is comically expensive. I find it very believable that you can get excellent liability only coverage on 3 cars for $100/month depending on the state and drivers.
For comparison, I live in SF and am low-risk on all the dimensions you'd expect on HN, and I pay $100/month for non-owner coverage with similar limits - i.e., I don't own a car and my coverage only applies when I rent one. When I owned a car it was much higher, of course.
Hmm, for my €209/year (~$20/mo) liability insurance I get unlimited coverage for personal injuries and €5M coverage for property damage (both mandated by Finnish law).
It sounds like you pay much more. Any idea why?
One major reason is probably that most of the liability portion is going to be covering medical bills in the US. I only did a quick skim of the Wikipedia summary but it looks like Finland, like (almost?) all of Europe wouldn't have that particular liability?
Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.
All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.
Medical bills are covered (the Wikipedia summary seems accurate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance#Finland). But I'm going to guess that those medical bills, and related damages, are much lower than in the U.S.
Maybe also lower average value of cars and less accidents here plays some part. But not sure how large that difference actually is.
Could also be some difference in the insurance premium systems: The amount of accidents changes one's cost for next year based on fixed rules - the ~$20/mo is with the highest discount (no liability insurance covered accidents in many years). The maximum it can grow to (for me, with my modern car) is ~US$100/mo, by having 4 consecutive covered accidents without accident-free years. Not really sure how wildly this varies in other countries or if the systems are similar...
The optional car insurance is more expensive, my full coverage (including damage, theft, parking, glass, fire, towing, substitute car etc.) is in the ~US$100/mo range, with ~$230 deductible on most coverage, and towing, substitute, glass repair at $0.
>How much liability coverage are you getting
Who cares? Liability coverage is only there to satisfy the state and little more IMO. If you do need it the counterparty will exhaust the limits of your liability coverage and call it quits. It is not worth it for the other guy's insurance to sue you unless you're a million bucks in the red.
Most people spend more per year on gas than you claim is your total cost of ownership. Sure, cars are cheap if you never drive them.
do you buy things just to look at them? my vehicles (all 8) are for driving. fuel costs vary, and as another commenter in this thread said they were comparing $50 (max) to recharge an EV vs $40 (min) for gas. so depending on where you live, what you drive, and how you drive it you'll get wildly different ideas about fuel costs. fueling up is not maintenance either. even in the best case the difference in fuel cost is a drop in the bucket vs the difference in vehicle price
Ok, I think the situation is different when you have 8 cars which are for driving. It's not really fair to compare per vehicle costs when you're dividing your usage up among 8 vehicles whereas most people are dividing it among 1 or maybe 2
Your used cars are only so cheap because most people don't buy old used cars. If they did as you suggest, then it would no longer be such a good deal.
sure, but also that would drive new car prices down and put pressure on dealerships to stop adding ridiculous fees on top of the MSRP. and more used cars on the road means more independent mechanics means cheaper service. Japan is a great example. in addition to their strong domestic market, the driving culture there is a decent size tourist industry unto itself. there are more tracks per capita in Japan than any other country
Can you explain where this comes from? I mean, that's not even close to what the norm is in Europe. Though, to be fair, we don't normally count fuel into TCO and the reasoning is: if you want to go distances then you are always paying for them. Whether it's public transport or taxis or whatever. Is fuel the major contributor in the number?
If you want to go some distance you're always paying something to do it - you can't therefore assume all means of going a distance cost the same and that factor can be ignored, though. A plane, train, bus, car, and taxi are all going to have different cost efficiencies (some more different than others) of going on a given type of trip. From a different perspective, they all require purchase, maintenance, licensing, and registration as well - but those are still part of TCO because it's part of the total cost. If you remove them for being the same type of cost rather than the same actual cost then you wouldn't really end up with much going into TCO even though the total cost of each is wildly different.
In general, you're almost certainly no longer on the path to calculating anything that should be called TCO once you've started removing costs associated with using the item. Apart from that, you're probably not on your way to a very meaningful cost comparison either.
As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.
Registration: $600/year
Insurance: $1,500/year
Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)
Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated
Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.
And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.
That's like the cost of several used cars every year in the UK, or one decent one. Crazy!
Insurance and parking tend to be expensive in expensive cities
This is skewed horribly by the top end.
Paying for the cost of the car, gas, maintenance, insurance, parking is way above $399/mo in every market which waymo operates.
What? No
I wonder how the subscription would respond to a person's area being blocked off.
There construction happening a block down the road from me. As part of the work, the rightmost lane is often blocked during the day (in between rush hours), so that things like concrete pumping can take place. The lane block starts just before where I live.
Around the same time, I noticed that when I would try to take Waymo (which I used to get to PT), I'd be told that things are busy and rides are paused. Recently, I've noticed that if I'm at work (or the PT place) and I want to take a Waymo back home, I'm told "Can't get to that spot right now".
If I had Waymo Premier, I wonder how hard it would be to get a refund on my subscription.
The above talks about a complete block (or, a complete-enough block) to using the service, but what about a major impediment? For example, let's say I travel regularly, and use Waymo to get to/from San Jose airport. Waymo's been disabling highway routes, which for me equates to 20-minute (or more) travel-time increase from home to airport. Would that be enough to qualify for a refund on the subscription?
Can't you just walk a block away from the construction ?
Seems like a niche case
Please reference https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/07/Just-Dont, as discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518496
I checked in the Waymo app; it would be several blocks. Please reference the context "which I used to get to PT". I'm happy that, today, the extra blocks are doable. Some weeks ago, those extra blocks would not be doable.
Finally, besides the point of having to walk the distance, the main issue is the way in which the blockage is being conveyed to me: The Waymo app is not saying "We cannot get to you because of construction", the app is telling me that requests have been paused. Specifically, it's telling me "All of our cars are busy with riders right now" and "We're pausing requests in order to catch up — please check back again".
Is 20 minutes of extra time a major impediment? I don't think I would get a refund on an Uber if they were a little late to pick me up and drove slowly so I lost 20 minutes in total. Although if that does happen maybe I'm just naive about refunds
I said “20 minutes (or more)”. The 20-minute case is for a pickup at 5 AM. If I travel to the airport later in the morning, the time difference is worse.
And although 20 minutes doesn’t seem much, the variability of airline baggage check and TSA means 20 minutes doesn’t seem an lead to increased stress.
It's a pain if that isn't communicated in the app prior to committing to payment.
This lady's op-ed comes to mind:
> Why is the US so expensive? Everything comes in a ‘premium’ version, from doctors’ appointments to movies
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/24/cinema...
Unless I’m missing something the “early access” benefit is just plain evil.
They’ll expand to new cities, but not allow residents of those cities to use the service. Instead, you need to be from SF or some other place they operate, and pay a monthly fee.
Waymo Premier soon to be followed by Waymo Mythos and finally Waymo: Tokyo Drift
Which will quietly drive you in circles and ultimately to a completely different location if your target location is associated with some things like security/autonomous/etc.
Hm, don’t like the offering. It seems standoffish.
If you want to make Waymo into a SaaS and get people really using it, then it’s easy:
$100 per month - Unlimited rides
$200 per month - Unlimited priority rides
Build enough trust in that and people might even get rid of their cars.
But in my opinion the problem is the feeling of spending money. People want to avoid that feeling at all costs, or at least want to feel like they’re getting a good deal. Everyone else is just driving around for free so it’s gonna take a lot to feel like you’re getting a good deal paying for a Waymo.
People who take cabs are forced to take cabs. That market is pretty finite. What if you can tap the market of people who need to get places but would rather do other things in the back seat?
Your pricing is ridiculously cheap. Cars are expensive.
But aside from that you really can't offer unlimited usage. You would need to offer quota.
Maybe something like 30 km / day that rolls over into a limit of 300 km.
$100 per month is way, way too cheap for unlimited rides. That's about 10x cheaper than the amortized monthly cost for owning an average car, without the headache of doing maintenance. They'd be losing a ton of money on each subscriber.
Yes and most people use their car for around 2% of the time they own it. The rest of the time it’s parked up.
I used Waymo about 10 times in Austin - it was great. I wish they'd accelerate the rollout to other cities. I wonder what the major technical hurdles are for launching in a new city?
Mapping, legislation and licensing, marketing, existing taxi lobbies, consumer trust...
Well, recently in Austin Waymo cars blocked emergency services during a mass shooting event.
That may be causing other cities some caution.
America in a nutshell. We won't do anything about mass shooting events besides hold up deployment of a life saving technology.
there have been a lot more issues than just that incident
they apparently like driving into floodwaters [1]
one vehicle got confused by construction barriers, entered opposing traffic, and halted [2]
in Dallas, a gas leak caused an explosion that leveled an apartment building, a Waymo unit blocked the scene, and first responders had to first reach into the car and try grasping the wheel, before the remote support agent agreed to kill the car and put it in neutral so they could push it out of their way [3]
I have a moderate fear for the safety of my children with these things on the road
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgplyxxl75o
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1tzszpx/waymo_stuck...
[3] https://www.keranews.org/news/2026-06-04/oak-cliff-apartment...
>I have a moderate fear for the safety of my children with these things on the road
I have some terrible news for you about the human drivers already on the road
I can assure you that Austin drivers do all sorts of terrible things on a far more regular basis.
The dream of course is to replace singleton personal vehicle ownership, and to just rent a car as you need it.
If it slick enough (not too much friction) I'd be willing to sign up
I'm not sure how this is a dream, more like a nightmare where you own nothing.
“You’ll own nothing and be happy”
Thanks, but no thanks!
I'd be more interested in a $29/month surcharge if Waymo weren't already significantly more expensive than Uber/Lyft to begin with.
When you consider the required tipping, the cost is quite close. And the Waymo is nicer.
Tipping is not required and I don't do it, especially in areas with laws about guaranteed minimum wages for workers.
I wrote about this before but I've been using Empower app recently as an Uber competitor, it acts as a subscription for drivers where they pay 50 bucks a month to get on the platform and then keep any and all fees from riders, so it keeps the prices very low for riders while drivers make more money. Essentially Empower cuts out their middleman profit margin to act more like Costco making money on subscriptions alone rather than the price of goods.
What's your definition of "required". I usually don't tip ride share drivers
you should
Why?
Why? It's much better if people's salaries are predictable and not dependent on random guilt-induced tips.
No, tipping encourages wage suppression and the wealth gap. Pay your workers a sensible wage instead, stop the games.
Since when is tipping on Uber required? I've been using Uber basically since it was created (long before they even had the tipping popup) and I've never considered tipping.
I don't know if it's "nicer". I've had some great conversations with Uber/Lyft drivers. Hilarious fun conversations. Not all of them, but enough to make me question if a riding in a clanker car is actually "nicer". I guess if someone is socially awkward, it might be nicer for them.
Who tips on Uber?
sane people
> Waymo is nicer
Just wait till Google spins it off to private equity; it'll be barley running bits of vehicles patched together by the cheapest mechanics they can find.
Enjoy it while you can; I'd love to give it a go myself, but even though I live in a city where they are supposedly in commercial operation, I can't get one to either of the two houses on either side of town that I currently split my time between. I have a buddy who lives a few blocks from one of their zones who walked over just so he could try it out. As of now, our sub-standard, minimally-invested-in-this-century bus system is actually much better suited to my needs.
Textbook strawman. Build up an alternate fact, and then attack it mercilessly.
> A straw man argument is a common logical fallacy where someone distorts or exaggerates an opposing position to make it easier to attack. Instead of addressing the actual point, they refute a weaker, fabricated version of the argument (the "straw man") to create the illusion of having won the debate.
There's nothing AFAICT that says Google is considering any such thing.
On a recent trip to SF I found Waymo to be cheaper than Uber about half the time. I wondered if I was seeing artificially discounted prices as a new rider.
hmm. I have always seen it to be more expensive (10-20%).
> Priority Pickups: Skip the line with prioritized matching
> Early Access: Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand.
> Waymo Premier costs $29.99 per month and will be initially offered to select riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
It sounds like when Waymo expands to a new city for the first time, the new potential customers would have a worse experience if there were a high enough volume of riders from other cities who participate in this program? I guess the assumption is that there won't be enough people subscribing who are traveling in other cities at a given time, but I'd also imagine that rolling out to a new city would start with smaller numbers of cars and scaling up, and it seems a bit odd to potentially set things up in a way that might result in people considering trying it but then seeing long wait times and deciding it's not worth it.
When Waymo launches in a new city, they have a waitlist of ~months before you can request your first ride. It's not that a new user would see a long wait time to get a ride, it's that they would not be invited to try waymo for another month.
It's only a matter of time until Waymo Premier Ultra Plus, as described by the premier documentary of our times, Black Mirror.
Ultra Plus™ benefits includes Trauma Team Premium™ service in case of accident or civil unrest.
Why are all these things always called, "Premier" or "elevated experiences".. Do people really build their sense of self worth/satisfaction form imagining they are special for spending money?
There is no question Waymo is a better consumer product for most trips around places like San Francisco proper.
So if you have a better product, why waste calories with membership cash grabs vs scaling your core mechanic? If there was a larger fleet, wait times wouldn’t be long— so line skipping wouldn’t be a problem.
Only conclusions I can come to: (1) Their core money mechanic (charging for rides) isn’t that attractive (2) they cannot scale fast enough, or (3) both
Love to have someone steelman the argument o/w
So jealous we dont have this in the Northeast. Hurry up!
I saw a Waymo with safety driver driving around Boston a few weeks back. The concerning thing was just how much it backed up traffic getting off the freeway because they're not allowed to go any faster than the posted speed limit.
"Car obeys the speed limit, drivers lucid with rage" definitely sounds like my memories of Boston.
Going with the flow of traffic is important! Don't pretend you always drive exactly at or below the limit.
Presumably Tesla will not make this decision, it will be interesting to see how much consumers value faster ride times if Tesla FSD ever get their shit together
I think the important thing here is that driving faster hardly makes your trip shorter, especially for trips within a city. You're likely talking about a <1-2 minute difference even if the Tesla is driving recklessly.
Yeah but that's not nothing, and passengers will be annoyed by seeing cars overtake them
This and also that slowing down to drive exactly at the limit into an exit is going to cause unnecessary traffic upstream the freeway
> Waymo Premier costs $29.99 per month and will be initially offered to select riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
> Waymo Premier is a new invite-only membership program built for those who rely on us most. For a monthly fee, members gain access to a suite of exclusive benefits designed to make their journey more seamless and rewarding:
Priority Pickups: Skip the line with prioritized matching
Ride Savings: Earn 10% Waymo Cash back on every trip, and even more during busy times.
Early Access: Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand.
Flexible Cancellations: Peace of mind with up to five free cancellations per month.
---
ok so just amazon prime for waymo. its alright but i feel like they had the chance to go REALLY high end with like a $300/month plan that people will still pay for because supply is so limited. instead they went mass consumer with a name like "Premier". eh.
(sorry waymo person reading this i know what its like to name a thing and regret it)
>Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand
How is this useful in any way? by definition it's a subscription for people already using the service in the (few) supported cities. If I use it in Denver, why would I care to have early access in Washington?
I imagine they'll try to get new users to sign up for a month of Premier to try Waymo early once it becomes available in their city. Basically juice a few thousand early adopters for 30 bucks each, which also lets them judge demand and gives them some extra revenue to build out their vehicle/parking network before the full launch.
Pay $30 to be a beta tester for self driving cars in a new city. I wouldn’t sign up for that.
Or it for frequent travellers - if they did smaller "beta" testing in a ton of new cities at once it could be great to suddenly have access to a semi exclusive fleet of Waymos
It's a minor perk for sure. From their perspective, it probably costs essentially nothing, so why not.
But I can see it being useful if they're expanding to a nearby city. Waymo is in Los Angeles already and will expand into San Diego this year. If you live in LA, you might have friends, family, or business in San Diego and visit fairly often. Or maybe a group of people want to ride in one car for a weekend trip there but don't want to spend every moment together.
If you travel a lot for work and would prefer to use Waymo over Uber or renting.
I assume it’s for business travelers.
A lot of people (myself included) would pay $30 to get Waymo a month earlier in their home city.
yeah, as with so many things, sounds like enterprise users are the target. and enterprise users travel to different cities all the time!
i assumed it's for influencers who want to make a video of the new city or something
Agreed! If you're a 20+ company in SF you're required to offer commuter benefits (up to $340 / month).
That's usually things like caltrain / muni. But I would definitely sponsor a $300/mo waymo subscription if it was like 20 rides a month.
That first image there ... that does NOT strike me like the futuristic view I think their marketers thought it might.
It looks like two ugly regular cars covered in ad-hoc cameras and sensors like they're overengineering for something they don't truly understand.
Introducing more tiers is a key step in enshitification process because it enables neat sleight of hand tricks. You're not making the old tier slower, you're just giving the new tier priority....which has the effect of...yes
What I want is a way to rent a car for an hour or two, so that I can leave shopping items or child seats in the car while making stops around town.
AAA had car-sharing as a service nine years ago, but it and many of its competitors have closed:
https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/25/gig-will-shut-down-its-ca...
I assume you mean a self-driving vehicle but if not: https://www.zipcar.com/cities
I forgot about ZipCar. The downside in a place like SF is having to deal with parking it. I seem to recall dedicated ZipCar spots in the distant past ....
That's actually a really cool idea. I like it. The best part is, it doesn't even need to find nearby parking or anything. You can just tell it in advance that you'll be leaving the grocery store in eight minutes.
I think you're looking at $60 an hour which is not horrible (estimating Waymo avg is 3 rides / hour x $20 per ride)
Like Waymo meets Zipcar?
That actually sorta? exists! Vay uses remotely teleoperated vehicles in Vegas to drop off your rental, then take it away once you're done.
https://vay.io/
This is the best combo possible. It feels like the ideal trade-off between the autonomy of car ownership and the flexibility of ride-sharing. I've been hearing about this concept for literally over a decade now.
I hope it expands quickly to the rest of the US.
You're kidding. This cannot be real. I can't wait to try it, if it is somehow real.
From the article;
"Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to. Adding cash back and priority pickups on top of that makes Premier a no-brainer for someone like me."
How does one "get privacy" via a Google spyware car exactly?
I'm pretty sure you can figure out the intended meaning, rather than the one you're trying to twist it into.
How fast is it going to expand to other markets? Asking for a friend obviously
Does Waymo make a profit yet? This looks like them giving up on being the main robotaxi choice, Teslas will win on scale and cost per mile so they are going for the premium market. Not sure thats big enough to turn into profit.
Teslas also can't drive themselves so I doubt Waymo is worried much about them.
Cant they, tell that to the ones in Austin, Dallas and Houston that are currently taxis people around
dude the waymos in phoenix are dumb asf sometimes, fsd is much smarter situationally
Hmm, so for $30 a month you basically get 10% cash back. There's some break even point here if you use Waymo enough. I think in SF, this would make a lot of sense, especially since there are so many Waymos up there to begin with. In South Bay though, if you don't have a car you're pretty much cooked.
One of two ways - subscriptions or ads. Waymo chose the former.
That's a ridiculous statement when talking about a paid service.
why would you say so?
Since when is talking to someone such a horrible thing for a human being to do
This caught my eye:
> I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to
I’m wondering what we lose as a society if people never have to be in even a mildly uncomfortable situation. There’s a book called The Comfort Crisis about this topic.
EDIT: The full quote is “I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to.”
In her quote she chose to separate safety and having a conversation with a stranger as two separate issues.
As a gay dude I experienced my fair share of "uncomfortable" Uber rides from or to various places. No thanks. I don't need to stimulate those kinds of social skills or whatever.
Can't even imagine what women go through.
Gay here, but I've only experienced a concerning conversation once, and that was a longer trip where sometimes you find out too much. I took an exit ramp away from that topic of conversation and it was fine. Otherwise everyone has been decent to downright pleasant.
I'd feel like I'm losing something by giving up that human interaction, such that it is.
This is the real issue:
"Uber received over 400,000 sexual assault and misconduct reports between 2017 and 2022"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/uber-liable-pay-8-5-million-...
That averages out at 220 reports a day, which kind of sounds like a lot to me.
I'm a man, and I've been using Uber since it launched. Most rides are fine, but there are enough weirdos on the platform that 220 incidents per day that are serious enough to report seems reasonable to me, even if you don't consider that they operate internationally.
I once had a driver pick me up in downtown Seattle, and it turned out to be that he was driving for Uber as a tactic for his entrepreneurial venture developing antimicrobial and hydrophobic coating. He claimed to have applied it to the fishing boat from Deadliest Catch. He was specifically circling downtown to try to pick up someone who could get the ear of someone in Amazon's grocery division that he could pitch to (which I was not). At a red light in a nightmarish seven-way intersection, he took out a square of cheesecloth that had apparently had the coating applied, and attempted to demonstrate its effectiveness by pouring water onto it. It worked, and the water got all over his passenger seat and center console instead while the light turned green and cars behind us honked.
A few months later, Uber tried to match me with that same driver, and I cancelled it and walked instead. I have to imagine that if a guy with that level of high-preparation social ineptitude can stick around in their system, that the number of people making offhand inappropriate moves or remarks must be reasonably high.
Keep in mind that Uber does like 30 million rides per day.
One time I hopped in an Uber and got a missionary-like lecture on Islam and an invite to go to a mosque.
More typical of Christians so it kind of threw me off.
But anyway, a paid service shouldn't be starting that kind of conversation unless for some reason I started it and even then that'd make it just as uncomfortable for the driver.
I think "people should just deal with uncomfortable situations" (while in a vehicle that they have no control over!) is not a winning argument, but the continuing march toward tech-enabled isolation is absolutely bad.
It can be annoying to have to deal with irrational humans who make mistakes, but that really is just part of life! I'll take some cumbersome conversations over conducting my entire life via corporate app interfaces.
This is a male perspective.
My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.
This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.
There are uncomfortable situations that you can walk away from like a checkout counter, and then there are uncomfortable situations where you are in a car in an unfamiliar location driven by the person making you uncomfortable.
I don't know, what am I gaining from listening to the 100th anti immigrant/POC/trans/gay/poor-person rant? For some reason people feel comfortable telling me this sort of shit. Maybe I look like a bigot.
Interacting with the general public absolutely sucks.
I’m dying to take a Waymo. Glad to see them trying to build sustainable revenue models.
I hate the state of the car-dependent American urban fabric and would love to see public transport everywhere (trains > AVs). But Waymo/AVs can meet people where they are (personal vehicles) and deliver a halfway decent solution (distributed, on demand, cheap transport without human labor).
Thus the enshittification begins. Charge a fee for "premium" features -> features degrade over time -> drop features for non-subscribers -> subscription required for access at all, plus you get to pay the fee to go somewhere.
I dont think you're using the term correctly. Charging money for product/service is not enshittification. If you insist on that, you're living in fantasy land.
How did you go from "charge a fee for premium features" -> features degrade over time?
Apple has been charging a ton of money for their products and AFAICT their products have been pretty good
You're right, I skipped a step/was unclear. Features will degrade over time for _non-subscribers_. They'll eventually wall it off so that you have to have a subscription. Then they'll start degrading the features for everyone (who has to be subscribed). Then they'll have a new tier and the process begins anew.
Start with a subsidized product and delight users -> step 1. Prioritize the business by charging extra -> step 2. Degrade what people get for their price and extract revenue at the expense of the users -> step 3.
Classic enshittification.
Why does EVERYTHING needs to be a subscription?...
Because it works.
Except for LLM services, which move away from subscriptions
The term "Lyft Pink" does not seem to occur in this thread yet, so I will simply point out that a car service with a recurring subscription cost is not unprecedented.
Or Zipcar
That system has been walking into the grave for a long time. I am surprised every time I see one.
I'm curious, when's the last time you've checked the parking garages of your nearby university campus?
That's the only place I see them, in Berkeley, but they've been walking out of major markets like the UK and they packed up their global headquarters and moved into the basement of their parent company, so it can't be that great of a business.
Two other local car shares, City Car Share and AAA Gig, went out of business here.
Zero value. I don't get it.
Priority Pickups: The only ostensible value. I've never waited more than 5 minutes for a car. $360 a year to save a couple minute?
Ride Savings: Pay to save money.
Early Access: Zero value.
Flexible Cancellations: Pay to save money.
i had a bunch of good rides and then one highly baffling route where it got off the road it was on to a parallel road, only to get back in the same road a few blocks later. this is literally within a few hundred feet of Waymo HQ so i don’t understand how this could go unnoticed.
i haven’t used it since.
the 25 minute pickup times don’t help.
edit: i just checked the route. 27 minutes for pickup and it diverts 20 minutes out of the way. wtf?
I think having highways turned off has really hurt pickup times and availability in South Bay right now. It pays to always book as far ahead in advance as you can.
There are places with construction where Waymo just seems to turn off the road and makes the car go around. But then taking away freeway access has made it more likely for vehicles to have to navigate these.
Are you talking about El Camino Real? There are two areas of construction happening: One at Page Mill and one in the San Antonio area. Most of the lane-blocks are happening only between rush hours, so it's easy to miss, but I'm guessing that it's someone at Waymo has put full-time blocks in those areas.
camino and san antonio is exactly the problem. my house and office are both off san antonio so it sends me 29 minutes out of the way.
The K-shaped economy kontinues.
Elaborate? What are the two charts in this example?
I'm SO tired of subscription services that only offer the opportunity to buy more stuff.
You can't buy anything now without being hassled for a subscription. I don't see any value here except for when they degrade the service for non-subscribers to make the priority pickups seem worth it.This type of subscription model is a little less annoying, most "normal" people will sign up for the non-subscription rate, and frequent users are already frequent users, so they will be more OK with a subscription.
Speaking personally, I don't see enough movies or do enough ride shares to want to subscribe to AMC or Waymo, but Doordash would make sense. Maybe it's OK for me to pay a higher price for the ~1 time per year I use those other services.
I was recently offered a sale price by a restaurant on Doordash, when I was logged out. I logged in as a subscriber and the sale deal went away, which meant that the delivery actually cost slightly more. I've noticed this pattern a lot: the subscription supposedly offers savings, but when you A/B test the same meal against a subscribed/logged in account and a non-subscribed account, the amounts are usually very similar.
My conclusion is that Doordash actually cares more about their non-subscribed users than their subscribers: that's where they see growth.
The problem is that they'll keep advertising it to you. I'm already giving them money, but they'll still push me to subscribe while I'm in the middle of trying to give them my money, because that's not enough for them.
> The problem is that they'll keep advertising it to you
If you don’t like it, then change providers.
If all providers do it, then you must pay to avoid advertisements.
Or, complain to your elected government representatives.
What’s that? Your Chase/Amex credit card gives you a monthly/annual credit? Ok. No more complaints then.
The existence of loyalty clubs are fine. If you use the service a lot, then it is a better deal, and the company gets the benefit that you are more likely to consolidate your spending with them rather than shop around. Win-win.
It is the fact that you can't do anything without them being pushed down your throat that is infuriating. Every interaction with a company these days is an attempt to up-sell. When a small number of retail stores started that, I stopped doing business with them. Now they all do it.
AMC one isn't bad if you actually like going to the theaters. Depending on if you have good imax or Dolby ones around you
For most things though totally agreed
AMC doesn't fit here, once you subscribe to a list there's basically no additional cost. And the lower tiers skip fees etc
What's worse... subscription hassle or a tip hassle?
If done right, this is more like a monthly bus pass
Well this is being done wrong because it doesn’t include any rides with the subscription
Why not just get a monthly bus pass?
> Why not just get a monthly bus pass?
It's less convenient, doesn't work nationally and isn't as fun?
If you're planning on taking a Waymo across country, it's going to cost more than 400 dollars.
Same thing if you want to take a SF Muni bus to New York City. You're probably looking at buying one outright and hiring a driver
The other people on the bus.
I wonder if these services would be instead be like micropayments (charged by $0.01 per minute) instead of a costly $20/mo subscription it would make more sense.
waymo slogan is pretty much "pay to be our a/b test crash test dummie" and people do pay! mind bogling.
> “I never got my driver's license, and I rely on Waymo to commute to an office every day," said Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to."
I recognize that this is a luxury product but I kind of laughed out loud at this testimonial. The amount of privilege you need to have to grow up and live in *Arizona* without ever learning how to drive is insane.
Alternatively, consider the person is disabled and is physically incapable of driving.
or maybe they grew up in NYC or London and never drove in their life. then moved to PHX.
So what you're saying is this hypothetically disabled person who is physically incapable of driving chose NOT to mention that, but instead chose to provide "I never got my drivers license" as their reason?
And you're asking someone to consider this because I presume you think this is a likely enough scenario to consider?
Yes, someone is asking you to consider the personal situation of the stranger you are critizing. My deepest condolences for your inconvenience.
I appreciate this comment immensely - too many people seem to mindlessly assume that every other person shares their own situations, and it could not be less true.
Yes, but realistically, it's not that likely.
And then spend at least $800/month commuting.
Premier? How outdated. Should have named it "Waymo Supreme" for that extra generational cringe.
What’s up with the fake review?
> I get privacy, time back, …
Yea you get "privacy" in a car kitted with the most advanced 360 degree camera system in the interior and exterior of the vehicle. Waymo PR team unhinged
Waymo Supreme comes with cheese
For a lot of people, privacy can simply mean not having to share a space with someone else.
Waymo will never be a serious option until they fix the insane surge pricing. And yes, they're working on it.
> “I never got my driver's license, and I rely on Waymo to commute to an office every day," said Sarah Paige Roland, a Waymo rider in Phoenix. "I get privacy, time back, a safe ride, and I'm not obligated to talk to someone that I don't want to talk to. Adding cash back and priority pickups on top of that makes Premier a no-brainer for someone like me."
I get what they're trying to say, but their pitch boils down to: "use waymo if youre too stupid to get a DL and too antisocial to talk to people". Bit rough. They really could have done a lot better with this PR piece lol.
> use waymo if youre too stupid to get a DL and too antisocial to talk to people".
-or- use Waymo if you don’t want to spend resources on owning and maintaining a car, and if you are part of the population that has or may feel too intimidated or unsafe to navigate a potentially adversarial conversation with someone more powerful than you, such as women.
Their coverage area in Orlando is so limited I functionally can't use the service. Would be nice if they could expand it to at least include the airport and tourist areas.
I think all of their metro areas are like this. I'm sure they did some math on the duty cycle of the cars to help draw the boundaries.