Waymo Premier

When under attack, Waymo responds by stopping the car.

Don't tell me... you are a man? I guess so. How many middle class women and above want to ride SFMuni after dark? Few.

The future of self-driving taxis is women (customers) who want to live in a big city, but don't want to ride mass transit, nor ride in a ride-hailing services (Uber, etc.) with a human driver... because most drivers are men.

The biggest advantage with public transit is that your mind is not engaged driving. But at some point, the speed advantage is overwhelming. And eventually the price advantage dominates. Taking my family and grandparents to the airport is $40 by car and $45 by BART and twice the amount of time for me: I live upstairs from a T-train / Caltrain stop. I'd invite anyone to price out the difference themselves.

Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.

I spent over a decade on a bicycle plus Muni/BART Fastpass and it's pretty good for the price if you're single and stay inside the city. As such a person I could crack open a book and a 15 min from Glen Park to Montgomery St. was the same as a 1 h from Montgomery to El Cerrito (the latter even preferable).

But the various policy choices popular in San Francisco (intentionally high labour usage, ill and violent people in public spaces, low cleaning capacity) do act against transit being a good choice. By comparison, I have family in Vancouver, BC where the politics are similar but the policy is different and the trains run very often and are fast (these are the most important things - made possible by removing labor from the equation) and are relatively clean. People will offer you a seat when you hop on with your stroller, elevators are functional and relatively clean, and it's overall a lot more usable as a family.

It seems to me a lot of people just really don't like to be associated with public transit or anything associated with anything remotely underclass.

It's a class marker to be driven around in an autonomous 6000lbs tank rather than move your legs a bit.

> me Waymo, Uber, and Lyft are methods of last resort.

Most of my Waymo rides were from or to a BART station - the real utility of these services is to pull a last mile when I don't have a car.

There's no better way of getting out of Powell out of the traffic deadlock at 5 PM than BART.

But once you get south of Daly City, there's no timed connections for the surface streets.

If you need to go to Brisbane from Powell, the 2 mile car ride is worth the effect.

All hail the exemplary citizen!

(does that satisfy you sir?)

I would gladly pay this much for Waymo, Waymos are so much nicer than taxis and public transit.

Yeah, but imagine you live in Phoenix, AZ, and you can't/won't drive for whatever reason, you've got to get to work every day. Phoenix has buses, but they're not going to be convenient for lots of possible daily commutes. Daily taxi/Uber/Waymo rides are probably a pretty good choice.

Or imagine that you work a professional travel job and you're flying to/from the airport on a weekly basis. Your employer will pay for your ride to the airport, so why would you take public transit? Now you're doing at least 3-4 taxi/uber/waymo rides a week.

Can someone help me put this into context?

$30/month is way cheaper than $104/month.

How would you compare the base metrics?

Time to start traveling, average walk amount per trip, total trip duration, coverage parity, etc.

I suspect you can get into a waymo quicker and with less walking than a subway, unless you live very close. I imagine total trip time is pretty variable. Coverage parity is hard to guess about - in theory a waymo can go anywhere but I suspect public transport has longer "tendrils."

I take public transport a lot and walk a lot (I live 3h walk from central London - I know because I've walked it, for fun), but I still also use Uber regularly because sometimes I simply don't have time. If I lived in the centre I probably would have very little use for it, but for people even slightly outside the core of cities well served by public transport, it's usually nice to have options.

It'll depend on your use cases, probably.

If 15 rides a month averaging $30 a ride can remove your need to own a car, that's $450. In that range the subscription would pay for itself.

Compare that to a car payment, insurance, maintenance, and gas. Pretty favorable!

For many people this makes sense, but once you reach a level of money where your basic needs are met, most people trade their money for time, and things like this are one of the most obvious ways.

Not long ago I walked from downtown SF up to the Golden Gate and walked across and back. My feet were tired and I didn't want to walk back downtown. It took me long enough to figure out where buses pick up that I missed one; at that point my decision was something like "70 minutes to wait for bus, take bus, transfer or walk to my hotel" or "23 minutes + $20 to get a Waymo" and I consider that a great value for my money.

I am a huge fan of public transit and try to avoid driving whenever I can. When the public transit goes approximately from where you are to where you want to be, or when it comes frequently enough that transfers don't cost you half an hour if you miss a connection, it's great, but there are so many edge cases.

I've never needed to call a taxi/Waymo in London, and in NYC the only time I did was getting from the airport to Manhattan the first time I went (every other time I know how to take AirTrain to public transit). In nearly every other city I've taken a Lyft/Waymo/Taxi at least once because the system isn't good enough to be universal.

"Mind boggling"? I don't see that at all. You still have to pay for each trip, this is a separate cost on top.

A Waymo ride once quoted me close to $100 for a couple miles. The same Uber ride ended up being like $21. Surge pricing is real but c’mon.

This is for the people who uber to work every day. Yes, they somehow exist. It blew my mind to meet one — he was spending something like $40/day on transport, as a new grad SWE!

And hotels.com

That sounds more expensive than just owning a car.

Is 20 minutes of extra time a major impediment? I don't think I would get a refund on an Uber if they were a little late to pick me up and drove slowly so I lost 20 minutes in total. Although if that does happen maybe I'm just naive about refunds

Can't you just walk a block away from the construction ?

Seems like a niche case

When you consider the required tipping, the cost is quite close. And the Waymo is nicer.

Mapping, legislation and licensing, marketing, existing taxi lobbies, consumer trust...

Well, recently in Austin Waymo cars blocked emergency services during a mass shooting event.

That may be causing other cities some caution.

>Be among the first to experience Waymo in new cities, as we expand

How is this useful in any way? by definition it's a subscription for people already using the service in the (few) supported cities. If I use it in Denver, why would I care to have early access in Washington?

Agreed! If you're a 20+ company in SF you're required to offer commuter benefits (up to $340 / month).

That's usually things like caltrain / muni. But I would definitely sponsor a $300/mo waymo subscription if it was like 20 rides a month.

Because it works.

I saw a Waymo with safety driver driving around Boston a few weeks back. The concerning thing was just how much it backed up traffic getting off the freeway because they're not allowed to go any faster than the posted speed limit.

AAA had car-sharing as a service nine years ago, but it and many of its competitors have closed:

https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/25/gig-will-shut-down-its-ca...

I think you're looking at $60 an hour which is not horrible (estimating Waymo avg is 3 rides / hour x $20 per ride)

I assume you mean a self-driving vehicle but if not: https://www.zipcar.com/cities

Like Waymo meets Zipcar?

This type of subscription model is a little less annoying, most "normal" people will sign up for the non-subscription rate, and frequent users are already frequent users, so they will be more OK with a subscription.

Speaking personally, I don't see enough movies or do enough ride shares to want to subscribe to AMC or Waymo, but Doordash would make sense. Maybe it's OK for me to pay a higher price for the ~1 time per year I use those other services.

AMC one isn't bad if you actually like going to the theaters. Depending on if you have good imax or Dolby ones around you

For most things though totally agreed

AMC doesn't fit here, once you subscribe to a list there's basically no additional cost. And the lower tiers skip fees etc

The existence of loyalty clubs are fine. If you use the service a lot, then it is a better deal, and the company gets the benefit that you are more likely to consolidate your spending with them rather than shop around. Win-win.

It is the fact that you can't do anything without them being pushed down your throat that is infuriating. Every interaction with a company these days is an attempt to up-sell. When a small number of retail stores started that, I stopped doing business with them. Now they all do it.

What's worse... subscription hassle or a tip hassle?

If done right, this is more like a monthly bus pass

I wonder if these services would be instead be like micropayments (charged by $0.01 per minute) instead of a costly $20/mo subscription it would make more sense.

As a gay dude I experienced my fair share of "uncomfortable" Uber rides from or to various places. No thanks. I don't need to stimulate those kinds of social skills or whatever.

Can't even imagine what women go through.

One time I hopped in an Uber and got a missionary-like lecture on Islam and an invite to go to a mosque.

More typical of Christians so it kind of threw me off.

But anyway, a paid service shouldn't be starting that kind of conversation unless for some reason I started it and even then that'd make it just as uncomfortable for the driver.

This is the real issue:

"Uber received over 400,000 sexual assault and misconduct reports between 2017 and 2022"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/uber-liable-pay-8-5-million-...

I think "people should just deal with uncomfortable situations" (while in a vehicle that they have no control over!) is not a winning argument, but the continuing march toward tech-enabled isolation is absolutely bad.

It can be annoying to have to deal with irrational humans who make mistakes, but that really is just part of life! I'll take some cumbersome conversations over conducting my entire life via corporate app interfaces.

This is a male perspective.

My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.

This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.

There are uncomfortable situations that you can walk away from like a checkout counter, and then there are uncomfortable situations where you are in a car in an unfamiliar location driven by the person making you uncomfortable.

Yes, some people apparently can't figure out that if you sit in the back of the cab, the driver doesn't talk and probably also prefers it that way.

They need a technical solution for issues that a 10 year old can figure out.

Alternatively, consider the person is disabled and is physically incapable of driving.

And then spend at least $800/month commuting.

For a lot of people, privacy can simply mean not having to share a space with someone else.

> use waymo if youre too stupid to get a DL and too antisocial to talk to people".

-or- use Waymo if you don’t want to spend resources on owning and maintaining a car, and if you are part of the population that has or may feel too intimidated or unsafe to navigate a potentially adversarial conversation with someone more powerful than you, such as women.