Autonomous driving in five new cities(waymo.com)
waymo.com
Autonomous driving in five new cities
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/safe-routine-ready-autonomous-driving-in-new-cities
18 comments
This is great. Especially for people with disabilities that prevents them driving a car. Hopefully, coverage area will increase exponentially over time..
Great if you can afford it. Terrible if you rely on bussing that might see cuts in response to rideshare capturing ridership.
A few autonomous taxis in each of the 1000 most sparsely populated counties would dramatically improve the quality of life for those people, particularly for the elderly. No bus line in the world can do that - not in places like Idaho or Western Kansas. I think they should be government funded as soon as it's feasible.
I see the reverse.
Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...
Same for small towns - they just don't have the population or the density to run large busses with drivers on fixed routes at a reasonable frequency. I've seen smaller city busses with routes that only run every 90 minutes. But smaller self-driving vehicles can collect a few people and run them around. See https://www.chandleraz.gov/residents/transportation/transit/... or https://ridewithvia.com/news/waymo-and-via-announce-strategi...
Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...
Same for small towns - they just don't have the population or the density to run large busses with drivers on fixed routes at a reasonable frequency. I've seen smaller city busses with routes that only run every 90 minutes. But smaller self-driving vehicles can collect a few people and run them around. See https://www.chandleraz.gov/residents/transportation/transit/... or https://ridewithvia.com/news/waymo-and-via-announce-strategi...
Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
Strongly agree. The future is what we used to call "share autos" in India. It's a small vehicle that can transport some 6-8 people. Currently these aren't feasible for the public because driver operational cost dominates, but once driver operational cost is near zero, we can bring much more public transit online. One of these vehicles is 4x-8x as dense as a car, and with America's relative lack of density, it's the only realistic way to have widespread public transit.
Particularly useful with dynamic dispatch and dynamic routing is that the vehicle's stopping can be much more infrequent, leading to lower total trip time and greater frequency. San Francisco is very dense but is also very old, so large 40-60 person busses stop every block forcing low throughput high latency rides. As a consequence, I prefer an e-bike over a bus everywhere in SF.
Particularly useful with dynamic dispatch and dynamic routing is that the vehicle's stopping can be much more infrequent, leading to lower total trip time and greater frequency. San Francisco is very dense but is also very old, so large 40-60 person busses stop every block forcing low throughput high latency rides. As a consequence, I prefer an e-bike over a bus everywhere in SF.
Taxi services make going carless more feasible, this isn't a net negative to public transit, rather a positive: you mostly use transit for your daily routine, and use a taxi/ride share/autonomous car for those edge cases where transit or biking makes little sense.
Except that isn't what really happens. We've been over this with uber rollout. It legitimately captures ridership from transit rather than supplementing it.
It works that way in Asia. You have taxis but really bad traffic jams drive you to subways during rush hour. On the weekend you might have a few taxi trips for shopping and going out. I can’t really comment on uber, but in Seattle they are too expensive to be considered in competition with transit, although personal safety issues on Seattle buses makes the value proposition weird.
I don't get this. I installed the tesla app and was approved to book a drive in 1 week (last week). I've been in the Waymo waiting list for at least 6 months, and still haven't gotten approval and can still only book in SF. They do move slow.
They've been scaling paid rides per week by about 5x every year for the past 5 years, that is fast in my book.
Still...no Seattle.
None of which have common snow or ice issues.
Yeah it’s not even covering all of LA despite the claim of “being in LA”. Just a mostly flat portion. It doesn’t go into the valley. It doesn’t really go into south LA. It doesn’t go east of the 5. It still doesn’t go to LAX either.
Building out depot and charging infrastructure and working with city officials are both slow processes, so I imagine you'll see them prioritize spreading out to a lot of cities first, in the most profitable areas (downtown), then expand the service area in each of them over time as they get more cars.
Yes, it's an early stage technology and the logistics of scaling is non-trivial. Yet, if you look at the numbers, they've been scaling surprisingly fast, at a sustained rate of 5x per year for 5 years in weekly paid rides.
Good, move slow and avoid breaking things
People who live in snowy/icy areas will simply never have autonomous driving. Does that settle it? Or do we have to keep pointing out obvious limitations to cutting edge technology?
They announced a Detroit launch for this winter…