Waymo Premier(waymo.com) |
Waymo Premier(waymo.com) |
> 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.
Can't even imagine what women go through.
I'd feel like I'm losing something by giving up that human interaction, such that it is.
"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-...
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.
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.
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.
Interacting with the general public absolutely sucks.
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
- Doordash wants you to subscribe
- AMC movies want you to subscribe
- Now Waymo wants you to subscribe
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.
And you're asking someone to consider this because I presume you think this is a likely enough scenario to consider?
> “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.
-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.
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
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.
My conclusion is that Doordash actually cares more about their non-subscribed users than their subscribers: that's where they see growth.
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.
For most things though totally agreed
I mean, duh? It isnt a gotcha. Do you expend resources in your life maintaining relationships / friendships with people that dont matter to you? Are you in touch with your high school best friend?
Poeple prioritize their limited resources, similarly companies prioritize their customers.
Your high school friend shouldnt say "baggazhipz has enshittified their relationship with me".
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.
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.
It's less convenient, doesn't work nationally and isn't as fun?
Nationally != cross country. A Waymo account would be useful to me in the Bay Area, LA, Phoenix and Miami. A bus pass is only useful in one place.
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.
Agree or disagree with it, my point is that that xkcd doesn't take into account political motivations
Like most regular cars have the option to.
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?
And accept liability for obvious and potentially devistating problems? I wouldn't hold my breath.
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.
Same model as airlines.
The proper thing to so is stop those managers who travel too much.
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.
“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.
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?
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?
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.
That may be causing other cities some caution.
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...
> 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...
https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/25/gig-will-shut-down-its-ca...
If it slick enough (not too much friction) I'd be willing to sign up
Thanks, but no thanks!
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
Depends on which city you're in. When I visited Nashville, it was a 15-20 minute wait to be assigned a Waymo in what had to be off-peak hours (at least, I'm presuming a lot of the market is getting drunk people from Broadway to somewhere else). If it made it go to 5 minutes wait and I still lived there, that might be something I could write off if I used it every day.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
It's a class marker to be driven around in an autonomous 6000lbs tank rather than move your legs a bit.
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
You send Americans over to visit Tokyo and they have zero problems taking the train. The problems isn't with individual Americans.
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.
If that makes me some kind of class supremacist in your silly world, then guilty as charged.
The first two are what I experienced today on a bus in SF, and the guy smoking meth was about 6 days ago
- 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.
> autonomous 6000lbs tank
Hmmm. The meta here made me chuckle. Calling cars tanks is certainly a class marker.
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 part:
> If you need to go to Brisbane from Powell, the 2 mile car ride is worth the effect.
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.
https://help.uber.com/en/riders/article/women-preferences-fa...
https://help.lyft.com/hc/en-us/all/articles/9030680293-Women...
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'd certainly consider a Waymo if I was flying to an airport they serviced though.
$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."
If I include the walks of 30+ minutes and bus rides, it’s probably pushing $2k/mo in rideshare costs.
> I live 3h walk from central London - I know because I've walked it, for fun
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!
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.
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.
(does that satisfy you sir?)
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.
Wherever I tell this to people here in Germany, they are good at pointing out why their car is the exception.
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.
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
Seems like a niche case
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
I have some terrible news for you about the human drivers already on the road
I hope it expands quickly to the rest of the US.
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.
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
> Most people [in NYC] feel embarrassed to admit they took an Uber somewhere!
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.
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.
(I was once legally blind, still not a fan of cars myself. Though I understand the appeal when externalities are out of the picture.)
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.
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.
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.
Much of the world requires a car. Maybe someday it won't, but today it absolutely does.
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 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)
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.
> 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.
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).
Two other local car shares, City Car Share and AAA Gig, went out of business here.
> uncomfortably hot temperatures
I think they're trying to convey that this kind of gender ignorance is equally tiresome.
Assuming normal costs, you are looking $21-$22k not including taxes.
There is no way you are finding a car for $28k for just $400. Trust me.
His doors were unlocked the whole time...
San Francisco’s Case Against Pro-Palestinian Activists Who Blocked Bridge Heads to Jury | KQED https://share.google/4RstsRSYbqY2lEdhn
> Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.
> Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.
https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/29/gaza-protesters-gold...
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Driving is very dangerous compared than transit. It is not very dangerous compared to knife fights or getting cancer.
> Bart seems much more cleaner and safer now than in years past.
I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.
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.
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.
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.
I say this as someone who has lived in China, the system is just too closed and dumb.
However when destruction is targeted toward specific brands or toward infrastructure being used for specific purposes such takes can no longer be true.
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.
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.
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.
It's inconceivable to most people that it could be a choice.
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.
That attitude and class marker disappears in big cities in much of Asia and Europe
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. 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.
Poor, relative to whom?
> Wealthy people in NYC have no problem with 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.
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.
> The overwhelming number of people in SF would never dream of choosing where to live based off public transit access.
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.
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.
The point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with "class".
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.
Perhaps other parts of the world have privately operated roads, but I’m not aware of them.
So, the ones in states that can't afford to build or maintain them are often private roads or PPP.
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
The drug addicts are also much less of an issue than a lot of media makes them seem. I'm not sure what would happen if I tried to shove my way through the crowd at 12th and Jackson, but mostly those "zombies" aren't paying much attention to passersby.
I do disagree with you vehemently about Seattle’s light rail being inferior to Portland’s. That may have been true 10 years ago, but it for sure is not true today, especially after the East link opened earlier this year.
That said, Your parent is wildly off the mark (and honestly quite reactionary) in describing harassment from fentanyl addicts. Such harassment is extremely rare, and in the few cases where it does happen it is a failure of public health policy, not transit and accessibility policy.
As long as you weren't hoping to take a train to Ballard in your lifespan.
> Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.
Offering Waymo and taxis as "commuter" benefits (meaning, to/from the employee's home) to the employee is considered taxable income to the employee unless it's used so rarely that it is considered a nontaxable fringe benefit.
As this creates payroll headaches, most companies outside of perhaps a few in the Bay Area do not offer Waymo or taxis or black car services or Uber/Lyft as "benefits" to the employee.
This is different from the kind of travel costs that can be expensed by employees (i.e., for business trips, client meetings, etc.).
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.
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...
They cost pennies to tax and insure. They're a bit expensive to run, but they do stuff I can't easily do with something cheap to run like pull 3500kg trailers up mountains.
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.
It'll probably make it another decade. Or two.
If the streets are very busy, the pollution bad, the tunnels smell like piss etc, then that is the problem.
Small amounts of moderate exercise every day are a lot better than going to the gym (by car, usually) for a hard workout.
I’d rather read a book on the sofa, but you can’t walk while sitting on the sofa.
But these are all things that can (and should) be fixed.
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.
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.
How do you manage to discover Hacker News and not know Waymos are real? I'm truly fascinated by this new level of ignorance.
Go ask and minorities like Indian slave workers how safe and secure they feel in Singapore...
I wish people would also care about human rights like sanitation, clean clothes, accomodation. But hey, people wearing shit-and-piss-stained rags shitting on the sidewalk?
Ask them that vs in the UAE.
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
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
It's called incarceration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/technology/trapped-inside...
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
If only there were a widely available technology to conceal ones face...
> Clients can also upgrade to the Excelsior package, which includes the standard service package plus complete health coverage, active passenger medical scanning, combat mode, and free corpse disposal in the event of the client's death.
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.
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.
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.
Good deal, but not available to most.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I have a friend that often parks in 30 minutes zone, for her hour-long yoga, sometimes she gets a ticket, but that's a gamble she is willing to make. You don't magically get tickets in big city, you get tickets because you ignored the rules willingly. Couldn't find parking because you were in a rush? Who decided to not account for "time to find parking time"?
"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.
Try telling the bus driver to make a stop at a particular restaurant along the way.
Glad it works for you but it’s not unreasonable to consider it a partial cost of living in a city. It’s easy to pick out the folks that have not owned cars in dense cities.
In $job-2 we had a small fleet of Toyota pickups that were leased brand new, returned to the leasing company at three years old just before they were due their first MOT. They were picked up from our workshop, and driven straight to the scrapyard and crushed. There wasn't a hope in hell of them passing even their first MOT.
It sounds like you pay much more. Any idea why?
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.
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.
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.
So, we towed it up to my house with my mate's Suzuki Jeep, and I set about removing the head. Sure enough, belt snapped, wrapped round the cam pulley, all eight valves bent.
It turns out, my mum's neighbour used to use K10s as her driving school cars, and when one had been written off in an accident her husband had pulled the engine. But, now he wanted his shed cleared to get his boat in, and would I mind giving him a hand? Yes of course I'd give him a hand, and he gave me the engine.
So 25 quid or so of my hard-earned dole money and I bought a Haynes manual for the Micra (which I still have, the manual not the car), a head gasket set, a timing belt set, and six tins of beer, and set about reassembling the engine with the good head off the engine from the shed. It took a few hours of a nice Sunday afternoon and by early evening it was back together and would start and run, come up to temperature, no bubbles in the coolant, no funny noises, smooth as silk.
I put another 85,000 miles on that in the next four years before it eventually got to the point where it was just too rotten to consider welding any more.
I kind of wish I'd just chucked it into a nice dry shed and left it until I could properly strip the shell and weld it up. It would be tax and MOT exempt by now, a historic vehicle! Can you imagine, a historic D-reg Micra?
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.
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.
Anyway, I am not saying it never happens.
College kids are allowed to get drunk and act stupid.
You are still not allowed to hit them.
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)
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.
Source: https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
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.
>for the EV plan
Alright, I have to know what in the cali hell is going on here.