https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/04/trimet-official...
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/trimets-present-crisis-...
At the same time, Portland's city council is debating whether to cap the cut of driver pay that rideshare companies take: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/13/uber-lyft-driver-pay-...
So at the same time that public transit is retreating and rideshare company labor overhead is threatening to increase, Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does
Portland car infrastructure in particular does get a little love from me just because of how damn impressive some of it is (namely the mountain passage to the west and the complex bridge interchanges on the east side) but it's still car infrastructure.
For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.
Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.
The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.
For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.
And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.
I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.
1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.
Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.
> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking
Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).
We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.
The car is mostly not.
> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,
Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?
It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”
well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake
Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
Tax revenue was $555mm
https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding)
So about $4.53 per ride.
The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr.
Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet.
Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.
https://info.oregon.aaa.com/how-much-does-it-really-cost-to-...
When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
I’ve become quite radicalized on trains after visiting Japan and Switzerland myself.
UK spent $100M just to deal with bats in a single train tunnel, which is representative of the issue https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
China just doesn't have to worry about environmentalists or anyone else locally trying to stand in the way, they just bulldoze them and build.
China also has much lower labor costs, and even Japan is a good bit cheaper (than the US, at the least)
The metro area density of Tokyo is 3,000 / km^2
The metro area density of Beijing is 1,747 / km^2
Greater Los Angeles: 208 / km^2
A perhaps more interesting use case is the utsunomiya light rail. Utsunomiya has a density of around 1200/km^2.
What they ended up doing was building a new tram with exactly one line. The main thing they did was make sure the tram comes frequently, including off peak.
End result is people rely on the tram line and the tram is making good money, being operationally profitable (still gotta pay back construction costs of course).
Utsunomiya is obviously not exactly greater LA, but Utsunomiya has on average 2.25 cars per household[0]. It has traffic issues and people feel the need to own a car. And yet the tram line is finding success because transportation is a local issue, not a global one!
You can solve for transportation issues in crowded areas. Few reasonable people are lamenting that you don't have a train between madison, WI and Chicago every 15 minutes. Many are simply lamenting that even at a local level PT in many places is leaving a lot on the table despite there being chances of success!
Smaller focused PT has proven itself to work time and time again, and compounds on other PT projects in the area.
[0]: https://www.pref.tochigi.lg.jp/english/intro/overview.html
It has to be said: even in Japan train projects are multi decade projects.
Is Cali HSR stopped? I can imagine it being slow but I wonder if it's 10x slower or "merely" 3x slower.
Which American cities have notable modern train systems? Not Portland, or NYC, or Washington DC.
I've lived and travelled in a ton of places. Trains in low density cities are simply not working well enough. I now prefer to live in exurb and drive everywhere. It's so good.
That's buses. Even more with electric buses. They are insanely subsidized by public. Robot taxis are vastly cheaper for everyone.
Similar to alcohol prohibition and methanol poisoning.
Sorry to nitpick, but why is the next month's ballot (and in general the issues that have not been voted on yet) affecting current service?
from the Oregonian article I linked
The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.
> “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote.
from the Mercury article I linked
I think a more plausible reason is, "withdraw the services now to get people who want that spending and that service irritated, and therefore more likely to get out and vote for it". Keeping service in place till the vote might supress the vote through complacency.
I'm not passing a value judgement on this top-down pressure on the electorate, governments should in theory be neutral and uphold current law, but governments are populated by politicians, and politicians who advocated this still want to advocate it and give it its best electoral chance. In a like "up is down" sense, people who favor cutting this government expenditure should favor the early cuts, they save money... of course, they don't, just sayin.
No it didn’t. Bus rides cost $2.80 in Portland.
I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.
An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators.
https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...
People here keep asking why do tax payer needs to pay for incompetent politicians' mistakes. Then when Oregonians did something, the same people blamed them. Are you people high?
> A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding.
> They are voting to give themselves a pay raise
A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.
I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.
That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable?
But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.
That's absurd. Waymo exacerbates the problem. It doesn't provide public transport.
You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. You think Waymo is going to cost anything close to that?
Only because the government is subsidizing 90% of TriMet's operating costs.
It might be interesting to see what sort of system Waymo could build with a similar subsidy... but that's never going to happen.
That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it.
There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted.
Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.
Everyone uses roads, and everyone pays for roads. If you buy a potato from a grocery store, part of the money paid for fuel for the delivery truck. The tax on that fuel paid for part of the road.
just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers.
Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all.
"payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.
In Oregon, TriMet is funded by a payroll tax: https://www.oregon.gov/dor/programs/businesses/pages/trimet-...
> The Oregon Department of Revenue administers tax programs for the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (TriMet). Nearly every employer who pays wages for services performed in this district must pay transit payroll tax.
> The transit tax is imposed directly on the employer. The tax is figured only on the amount of gross payroll for services performed within the TriMet Transit District. This includes traveling sales representatives and employees working from home.
If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.
yes, I took a lot of micro (and macro too for that matter) but if what you say were true, neither political party nor activists would go on and on about taxing "corporations". You should direct your comments toward the parties that do that. But of course, you would get downvoted because the parties that do that don't want to hear otherwise. That's what I was doing, trying to explain ecomonics in ways they'd be receptive to, because telling people how things work is always a good thing even if they are not ready to go all the way.
also, in terms of pure micro, indirectly taxing things is never as efficient as directly taxing them, which you are not accounting for. The inefficiency tax in the form of "lower overall employment" is not easily measured even though we know it's quite significant and as impactful as "well this tax averages out the same" when it's not the same.
If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from.
A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.
the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.
the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.
I seriously don't mind living in America and paying taxes here but, but when better and more efficient tax regimes are available, or when socialist tax proposals derail local economies, I seriously want to educate people about them.
Like others, my biggest objection with it was their approach to scaling. Tesla aimed for the vision-only general solution with FSD, while Waymo held strong to its LIDAR-first geofence strategy. I held this opinion before using Waymo, as it wasn't available in my city (Houston, TX).
I've used it several times after being invited into their Early Access earlier this month...and, wow, I couldn't have been more wrong.
Waymo drives incredibly well. Like, INCREDIBLY well. Tesla FSD v14 drives well too, but Waymo feels more confident in edge case situations (of which there are many in the city driving space) and, well, I can be on my laptop or whatever during the trip.
Ironically, Waymo pushed me towards using public transit in Houston, so it's incredibly sad to read that this expansion is happening as Portland's public transit system is getting defunded. The time and mental sanity I've gotten back from not driving has been immense and undeniable. (It's weird how "bus-pilled" I became after my first few Waymo trips given that I grew up in NYC taking the bus and subway all of the time.)
All that said, based on how slowly Tesla is scaling their (inexcusably much more nascent) Robotaxi offering, I don't think ANY of our cars are going to get "unsupervised" FSD with the hardware they were shipped with.
For anobody observing it from the sidelines, it was obvious for the past 3 years at least, that Tesla will not achieve real unsupervised FSD with HW3, and now it's also obvious it will not be wiht HW4. It's also obvious they are very well aware of those facts, despite lying to investors and customers for the past 10 years.
Maybe that's why they pivoted so hard into Optimus (at the cost of their auto division).
I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.
Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars.
So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my bike, the box, and some tools to break it down to our local amtrak station. Then partially dissasemble the bike, and box it. (of course, our train station has room in it for 5-10 people, and most sit outside, uncovered, which is fun in spring.)
Then, get to the main Portland Train station, with my bike box, and backpack with my stuff and tools. Wait up to 9 hours for the hawaitha train. (its often many hours late, and only leaves once per day).
Load Bike in cargo car, and then board train late at night.
Wake up around 5am, (or later, if train is behind schedule) and disembark at Glacier, re-assemble my bike. Figure out how to get it, and the box (i'll need it for the return trip) to a hotel or AirBnB.
For the return trip, its about the same, 1 daily westbound train, that is usually hours late, then hope you get to portland before the last train for the day leaves for my town, or else find a place to stay with a bike, backpack, and bike box in the sketchy area around the trainstation...
Or, hop in a car with a bike rack, and drive 10 hours. Which is easier, and MUCH cheaper if I split the cost of gas with someone else. So 2 extra travel days back for vacation, and much less stress.
But this fellah seemed to have that part figured out: Bike to the train station, and take the bike on the train. That part seems straight-forward. The train stations were near-enough to where they wanted to start, and near-enough to where they wanted to be.
The problems they lament seem to revolve chiefly around the specifics of taking the bike on a train, and the limited schedule of the train, and the lack of adhesion to that schedule.
Those problems wouldn't be improved if the vastness of the US were reduced, would they?
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
And will probably go bankrupt this year: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't work, like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it.
Whatever those reasons were, they are are behind us. So it may seem superficially easy to just put it all back... but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail. In many other cases, we let our central stations decay and rot or demolished them to make space for things like convention centers.
So what's left is what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
> As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment
That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.
> but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy
Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.
Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient because it allows people to have the ability to have a garden that they water, you don't inherently use more household-internal water if you live in a suburban house compared to an apartment. Most of the energy efficiency issues are also directly related to low-density residential zoning allowing for more physical space for a dwelling than an equivalently-expensive dwelling would cost in an expensive, dense urban area. In short, the things about low-density residential neighborhoods that are less energy efficiently mostly don't have to do with cars and mostly do have to do with goods that people actively want and can only afford outside of dense urban areas.
Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.
Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.
Which is more or less a non-issue east of the Missouri river
Trying to take something like a windsurf board on a train, and then having to navigate multiple train changes along with whatever other baggage you have makes it a non-starter.
The "last mile problem" you mention is unresolved when it comes to getting from the closest public transit stop to the actual destination (frequently in a park or even off road).
And finally, the final cost to the rider would be significantly higher, as sleeper trains are not cheap.
I think America could do quite well if it focused on public transit in and between densely populated areas. Fewer cars in cities could make for denser cities, which in turn could allow for even more public transit. But outside of population centers, America is much more spread out than Europe, meaning that trains are less economical, and often wouldn't get the ridership that would allow them to make sense.
But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.
I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.
But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.
The majority consensus is to desire a peaceful environment but do nothing when it is violated.
That is why it breaks down — once it is discarded in a melting pot the cultural expectations are unclear and it seems you’re at least initially dependent on the state or mob dynamics.
I think you have to go further upstream socially - there are people that should not be free, but are. Public transit has not just loud talking or music on phones, but the mentally deranged, babbling, even actively drug using population walking a knife's edge between erratic and aggressive behavior. From my POV it's so far past a stern stare on the US west coast that the suggestion comes across comical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war
Extremely popular and objectively reduced crime and drug usage. In portlands case, you keep weed, steroids, psychedelics, and party drugs legal and come down like hell on the society destroying stuff like fenty
China needed to do similar drastic things to get out of the slump caused by the opium wars. They call that period the “century of humiliation “ for a reason.
There's immense social capital and NGO patronage at work surrounding 'homeless' - and I parse that as mentally ill now, as it's an insult (IMO) to the homeless who are perfectly capable of respecting others and participating in the social contract.
Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".
No public transport system that remotely makes any kind of economic sense, either in terms of infrastructure or operational cost, can replace the established network topology that exists for cars in the US. The connectivity is much more like a mesh than a hub-and-spoke model. Even though the US has a strong regional jet system that connects arbitrary nodes in that graph it still doesn't entirely avoid the "last hundred miles" problem.
A lot of American long-distance travel is not between two big cities. Even in Europe, similar kinds of routes have no train service and limited bus service.
1. https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2025-Q4-Ride...
Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving.
> This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both
I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.
That sounds like hell. Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats, and unlike trains there isn't even an option to pay exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment.
> Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats
IME bus seats are first class in padding and support, a bit wider than coach, and with more leg room (though I'd need to measure to confirm). Much more comfortable than airplane coach - and without the air pressure, vibration / noise, and humidity problems.
> exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment
It just depends on the train, how far ahead you pay, etc.
I love the confidence with which you give your answer though! Europeans famously underestimate the American West, which is why they often get into serious trouble (or die[1]) at alarming rates out here.
I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.
And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
Amtrak could do the same thing but because of how Amtrak is organized in not sure that it would be possible. Most of the current Waymo geos are not connected by Amtrak directly and require transfers.
So, let's say you take public transport from SF to Yosemite/Los Angeles. Now, how do I cover the last mile (or even multiple points)? Take more public transport? Hitchhike?
The reason long-distance public transport works well in Europe is that there is good local public transport in both the source and the destination cities. When that does not exist, you are better off driving.
That's a $41/month subscription every citizen's paying no matter what. When we're pulling cash on that volume from everyone's pockets to build lavish infrastructure literally up to people's doors (vastly more road square footage than housing+school square footage combined), of course folks are going to say "nothing compares" -- because nothing does compare. Which stinks (imagine if we'd focused a century of spending on rail at rates like that; damn), but it is what we have at the moment.
One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].
The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.
Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.
Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/espresso/f...
That being said I’m in full support of metros for large cities and high speed rail between major cities but it’s hard to beat a domestic airline you can show up for an hour before it leaves at an airport and gets you there 10x faster for anything other than the shortest trips.
"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"
Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.
My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down
The main limitation is still sensors in the snow, but it seems to not be that big of a deal to build sensor packages that are better at seeing in the snow than a human is.
Being able to plot a series of inputs that can more efficiently use available traction than a human doesn't prevent you from blundering your way into a dumb situation where the laws of physics dictate that the only possible outcomes are various flavors of bad ones.
It's not clear how often the software will chose poorly and need to brute force its way out with traction/handling. The fact that they seem to be hedging against this by putting the hardware on particularly performant cars indicates it must happen enough to matter or be rare but bad enough to matter when it does happen.
Waymo will probably also rack up a ton of technically not at fault accidents by being obtuse in traffic since there's when there's snow there's a lot less margin for the "two people trying to pass each other in a hallway" type missteps that behavior tends to create.
You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.
I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
I love Waymo in other cities, but it'd be especially helpful here during the 1 day every other year that we actually get any snow ... if we ever get snow here again.
Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".
Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car.
All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares.
The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go.
The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
Love this concept.
As self-driving vehicles become a larger share of road use, roads can be more efficiently designed just for them: no speed limit, just 2 strips of pavement for the tires, no signage or striping, etc.
We'll just build the cars with parts that seldom fail. And we'll make them very strong, so that the only risk from hitting a deer or even a cow is a splash of gore.
That should help eliminate the need to turn. A loud horn and flashing lights will do pretty well for any errant humans that cross the path.
We can even reduce rolling resistance by using steel wheels instead of rubber, and we can make the road a surface of continuous steel for durability.
We can even hitch the cars together so they can't collide with eachother and they can collectively share the propulsion load. (Maybe even with automatic micro payments, so a car with low battery can pay the others to help it along.)
What would we call this thing?
> You might even call such an arrangement a "train"
Joking aside, though, the big issue with trains is last-mile. The road network covers a lot more land than the rail network does, and can reach places that trains can't. And this seems to be inherent to the physics of it, driven (hah) by cars ability to turn where trains cannot.
Mass transit enthusiasts love to gloss over the very real convenience issues that mass transit has, saying "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that. Hence why I think a hybrid system of dockable autonomous vehicles that can be linked up into a train in high-throughput thoroughfares gives you the best of all worlds.
So a Tesla?
$10K for full autopilot on Tesla in 2018 was essentially a fraud. I have since then learned not to trust anything Elon says.
As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.
I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.
Always feels a little weird to read a comment that is plausibly going to end up being referenced in a future news article.
So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world
The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.
[1] https://www.azfamily.com/2026/01/08/waymo-passenger-flees-af...
I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around crossing barrier arms, vs 100,000 hours of automated driving. I would bet the automated driver does a lot better.
I recently saw a video from (I think not Phoenix) of 3 waymos that were next to each other blocking traffic in an intersection, refusing to move, because they were facing a traffic signal intersection where the signals had reverted to blinking red mode. Humans who paid attention when learning to drive will understand this means the intersection has reverted to a 4-way-stop due to the traffic signal failure.
The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?
It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.
Waymo. Slightly better than an irresponsible alcoholic. As long as the maps are up to date.
That is already a huge jump from two cities a year.
You can drive, on the highway, from San Francisco to San Jose, two cities that are about 50 miles apart.
I suppose you mean something more "road trip-y"? Interstate, not intercity?
Although I like jobs for humans, I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities. Want to find a way for offline vehicles that can go 65MPH to remain legal though. Without Flock every block either unless we (in USA) forget what the whole USA thing’s about.
Edit: @Waymo would LOVE to see an industry-leading privacy pledge so good the EFF slaps their logo on it (even caveated), also your engineers are amazing
I report these issues in the app whenever I do take a Waymo, so hopefully they'll get better.
The one to ride is Zoox though. They have limited deployment but their vehicles have no steering wheel, it's like a gondola ride to your destination.
With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.
Doesn't matter.
At this point, if the US doesn't lead, China will.
They have a massive population imbalance that they can only crawl out of with automation. Someone is going to have to drive around all those seniors. Once it's a proven model, it'll spread to the rest of the world.
There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?
The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.
Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.
I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.
What matters most are marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost for Waymo to add 1 more ride). Looking at marginal costs, Waymo takes in more money than it spends on each ride, so projecting outwards when Waymo operates a large enough fleet, Waymo will be profitable.
Uber/Lyft run enormous fleets of ~2 million vehicles in the US, and that's how they are able to maintain profitability. They can spread their engineering and management expenses over millions of rides.
---
Doing my own math, the marginal costs for Waymo are:
Revenue: Each Waymo vehicle brings in ~$50/hour
Expenses: Waymo must pay for
* Assume the cost of a vehicle is $100k
* Amortized depreciation of the car (assume vehicles need to be fully replaced after ~250,000 miles, vehicles average 25 miles / hour, vehicles need to be fully replaced after 10,000 hours, cost is $10/hour)
* Maintenance (Assume the total cost of maintenance is an additional 25% of the vehicle price, vehicle price is $100k and vehicle lasts 10,000 hours, cost is $2.5/hour). This is likely an underestimate, I didn't model the cost of a mechanic, so this could be as high as $5-7/hour.
* Support (assume 1 support agent can support 10 vehicles, Philippine support agent costs $10/hour, so amortized $1/hour per vehicle)
* Cleaning (needed daily, costs $1/hour per vehicle)
* Datacenter compute for vehicle coordination ($0.50/hour per vehicle)
* Electricity (Assume $2/hour)
10 + 2.5 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 + 2 = $17/hour to operate a Waymo.
In conclusion, the marginal costs for Waymo is very profitable.
There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.
I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.
Waymo can expand easily in markets like SF and NYC, where drivers are guaranteed a minimum pay rate of $22+ per hour, but will make less and less economic sense in cheaper labor markets.
I looked up the numbers - the estimated Uber/Lyft cost per mile in SF is ~$4.50/mi, and Waymo is trending around $1.40/mi (estimated 2025 number).
Anyway, digging into the Reddit posts which gave your lower-bound number, the reasoning seems very suspect. In particular, the biggest methodological problem is that they use retail price numbers when Waymo is almost certainly getting wholesale prices. So it assumes $110K ($70K for a Jaguar iPace + $40K for sensors and other AV equipment) for the car depreciated over 5 years, but $70K is the retail price for a Jaguar, including dealer markup, distribution, marketing, etc, and when you are buying thousands of them you are almost certainly not paying retail. Likewise, it figured 25c/kwh for electricity, which is retail off-peak PG&E rates, but Google just buys their own solar panels and pays pennies for electricity. The AV equipment figure of $40K was I recall what it cost back in ~2014; the cost of LIDAR has come down dramatically since then and now runs $500-1000/vehicle, so that number should also be suspect. And if vehicle cost is more like $50-60K/year than $110K/year, $7K/year in insurance is way too high. Hell, Google could just self-insure with their $250B in cash, they've got a stronger financial position than every insurer other than Berkshire Hathaway.
I'd bet the true cost per mile is well under $1.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1oiqerw/ho...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...
Waymo has other costs, such as engineering driverless operation.
Once there are enough trips, the fixed engineering costs are spread across more and more trips, exponentially trending towards zero, driving the cost per trip even lower.
That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.
The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).
I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.
If we're in a world where human driven Uber's are $30, you're right that Waymo probably won't charge $20 just to be nice, even if it only costs them $10. They might charge $20 though if their data shows that it would 10x the number of riders or if they're also competing with another autonomous taxi company.
(nobody would confuse me with an economist!)
The driver cost is of course the big saving. And they need breaks as well and don't drive 24x7. A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
Mostly what Waymo is doing currently with customized vehicles is not actually super scalable. But it helps at their relatively small current scale. You wouldn't design a custom vehicle + factory for their current growth rate. That becomes more interesting when they start scaling beyond tens of thousands of new vehicles per year. They are probably in the lower thousands currently.
I think they raised close to 20-30B so far. They say they are doing 500K rides per week. At 15$ per ride that adds up to ~390M/year. That's revenue, not profit. But if they could 100x that by rolling out to more and more cities and larger and larger areas, it's going to add up to annual revenues that add up to more than what they raised. That's not going to happen overnight, obviously. But they seem on a path where they are scaling, optimizing, reducing their cost, and growing.
The risks here are mainly that they won't have the market to themselves. Others are doing robo taxi's too and if any of them starts scaling faster and cheaper, Waymo could hit some growth issues. Also, with multiple companies competing, prices per ride would eventually go down. The next five years are going to be interesting.
It's wierd to see this fantasy of machines on HN, of all places - that they have no downtime, no additional costs - it's only a savings from employing people), and (not said here) they don't make mistakes.
Lots of machines have far more downtime and cost than people. Many have more maintenance hours than operating hours.
But, a Waymo car has a huge impact compared to gig drivers. Even ones that do it 12 hours a day. The Waymo fleet is maximally available for both rush-hour busy times plus closing time at bars and nightclubs.
I don't know if they've released updated fleet statistics, but in the past I've been shocked at how small it is relative to the visibility and passenger miles. This indicates that downtime isn't a limiting factor.
Gig drivers optimize, or try to, their individual revenue and other preferences the shape their responsiveness to customer demand. In other words it's two sided market among individuals. Waymo isn't. Waymo optimizes across their whole fleet for revenue, presumably, and customer satisfaction.
Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.
Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45
Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.
Not always.
I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.
Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.
But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.
Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.
Not even that, there is one curve on I-5 south of 217, it is otherwise a straight line until you get to Wilsonville (and before then it goes up to 65 mph at the intersection with 205).
Can’t stop until cross traffic can simultaneously use intersections all at 100 miles an hour with inches to spare
Heck I'd just be happy with banked curves.
That is, of course, tremendously challenging. It's impractical to look at a job performed by millions and just saying "well fix capitalism" when eliminating the jobs. But it's still the right solution. There shouldn't be gas station attendants, there shouldn't be redundant bureaucratic figuers and managers, and, when possible, there shouldn't be millions of paid car drivers.
(Taxis/rideshares) are dangerous, drivers harass you, etc. Ours are so amazing, people love them.
The reality is that I have zero problems with rideshares (or taxis, when I'm someplace that still has them). Being a social animal like other Homo sapiens, interacting is a positive but drivers have no problem giving me peace. I'd much rather have the intelligence and flexibility of a human who can communicate, adapt, and solve problems.
> your engineers are amazing
They say the same about you!
Def interesting seeing complaints about drivers not showing since early days Uber pax (in SF) loved getting rides to outer neighborhoods without needing to lie about their destination.
Offline/human-operated/assisted vehicles could remain in the competitive mix to ensure we don’t get screwed again.
Definitely, and at no cost to taxpayers.
> It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit
Waymo is less efficient in the narrow case of transporting hundreds of people between two specific points at a specific time, but more efficient for almost every other case.
If Waymo had dedicated right-of-way in the same way trains do, it would be more efficient.
The flip side is drastically fewer parking spaces needed, most of which can be located outside of the city core. And decreased costs due to fewer accidents.
No, we have them in St. Louis and it snows a few times per year here.
https://www.botanicalinterests.com/community/blog/usda-hardi...
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/04/self-driving-car...
> Hannah Schafer, communications director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said Waymo is welcome to map out the city streets.
> “All they’re doing right now is basically taking pictures. Taking pictures in the right of way, anyone is allowed to do that. That’s not something that we regulate,” Schafer said.
> However, she said the city would regulate the testing and driving of autonomous cars.
> “No one can drive driverless vehicles in Portland without a permit,” Schafer said. “That is not allowed.”
...
> Portland fought vigorously with Uber over the terms of its local arrival a decade ago and a battle is already brewing over Waymo. Portland council member Mitch Green staked out his opposition in January, telling constituents on Bluesky, “You should know I don’t support that.”
...
> Oregon legislators considered a bill earlier this year that would have set statewide rules for self-driving cars, and would have prohibited local governments from imposing blanket prohibitions on autonomous vehicles. The bill died in committee following opposition from local governments.
So one year of revenue buys ~2500 cars at those prices, which is roughly the size of their fleet (~3000 according to Wikipedia). It seems plausible that newer cars will be cheaper as designs get optimized, economies of scale hit and what used to be really expensive cutting-edge hardware becomes commoditized and goes down in cost over time.
They certainly also need support including contractors that assist cars that get need human input, maintenance etc. and the electricity for the cars isn't free either, but just based on these numbers, it sounds like they are likely close to being profitable if you ignore R&D.
If you assume $10 a ride, and a car giving 3 rides an hour for 12 hours a day, that's $360 in revenue per car per day, close to the $320 you'd get from $350M/3000/365. That means each car pays for itself in about a year (ignoring all other costs, of course).
Based on this and the assumption that cars last for more than 2 years, I'd guess that Waymo is only "unprofitable" (not sure how this works in accounting terms) due to ongoing R&D and expansions and there really isn't much more to "subsidize".
I will feel so secure and private being recorded at all angles in a car I don't own and can't sue.
"Waymo: ‘no plans’ to use in-car camera data for targeted ads"
(https://www.theverge.com/news/644770/waymo-interior-camera-a...)
OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?
Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.
This is even worse in an Uber where the drivers can put cameras anywhere and do anything with the recordings.
And the people in the Philippines who can intervene in the "self" driving can comment on your bodily features if bored.
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).
This also intertwines with the coordinated ID push for many social media networks. It builds an effective framework to target anyone. Trump casually designates people "terrorists" already.
Waymo microphones are only activated when you contact support.
Do you think Google is lying about the microphone?
Because nobody is forcing you to take a Waymo? I dont think it is as hard to understand.
Its like saying "You dont understand why people arent more upset about spicy food because your stomach cant handle it.."
These incidents haven't made me fear, because I am a relatively big and tall male, but they _definitely_ will for others. And even then, they aren't pleasant.
You simply don't run into those things often on trains/subways in Europe (I lived in Spain for a year and traveled extensively in Europe during that time, and on other europe trips prior). So fix those issues, and then I am sure people will want to ride the rails.
As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".
Streetcar is more susceptible to being stopped because someone parked over the white line, but with 20 minute headways it takes longer to cause a problem.
Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.
1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in
2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so
3. drivers end up making less than before, and
4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.
Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.
I'm not saying it's going to randomly speed up to 80mph and crash into a building and explode. Just that I'll finally have a chance to witness those hilarious videos in person
like, do you guys hear yourself? these are unrelated things, cities are always grappling with stuff like this, and at this point in history Waymo is expanding to all cities and will opportunistically prioritize some cities over another while continuing their total rollout
Public transport ridership took a massive hit with the pandemic and never fully recovered.
Waymo does not solve a public transport problem. I don't mind that it takes money from Uber, Lyft, etc., but the damage it also transfers income from human taxi drivers (what little they can salvage from Uber, Lyft) to a large corporation.
I see it as a net negative for society, not a net positive.
Good luck to Portland getting fucked by Waymo.
The rain will be a real test though!
...while high on marijuana and watching TikTok
> The rain will be a real test though!
Maybe, between the fog of San Francisco and the downpours of Miami, they Waymo Driver is very experienced.
I would rank it up there with mobile broadband and smartphones in terms of influence.
What will they tell the unemployed drivers? "Coal miners need to code" doesn't work any more. Become a data thief/labeler perhaps?
People should research the racist history of American cities before publishing broad, vapid, and likely LLM-generated statements like this.
If you're going to say a place has "always been a pioneer in urban design", you should take the time to acknowledge that Portland's early urban-design efforts were deeply racist and explicitly segregated.
https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
https://habitatportlandregion.org/the-early-history-of-portl...