Transit rewards (Waymo pays you to take the train)

rraybb about 3 hours ago 51 commentsRead Article on waymo.com

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Discussion (51 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

HaloZero•7 minutes ago

It seems odd that they want you to pay for transit with your visa. That excludes a lot of travelers who might have passes on their transit cards. Less common in the Bay since all our transit providers are different but I used to pay monthly for the Muni + Local BART pass all the time when I lived in SF.

novia•about 2 hours ago

Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train

(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)

I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.

aix1•about 1 hour ago

> They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.

Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).

evmar•about 1 hour ago

A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.

novia•about 1 hour ago

Yeah but then you're on a bus...

lern_too_spel•about 1 hour ago

It's a double decker.

nonethewiser•about 1 hour ago

I never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.

novia•about 1 hour ago

Make traffic for everyone else worse with this one simple trick

dcrazy•about 2 hours ago

Meanwhile, the 47 Muni bus that connects the Van Ness transit corridor to Caltrain has been “suspended” since 2020, and the extension of Caltrain to the transit center is still unfunded.

I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.

8f2ab37a-ed6c•about 2 hours ago

In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.

repeekad•40 minutes ago

Computers are easier to program than drug addicts, with fewer rights.

shrubby•37 minutes ago

Drug addicts,when treated properly, are alright manageable. Without treatment or support these creations of a dog eat dog world become unpredictable.

tristanj•about 1 hour ago

The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:

  Cost per passenger trip:
    BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
    SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
    Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73

  Passenger Fare collected per trip:
    BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
    SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
    Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45

  Subsidy per trip:
    BART: $12.57
    SF Muni: $6.37
    Caltrain: $18.27

  Cost per passenger mile:
    BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
    SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
    Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile

Every single ride requires a $6 to $18 subsidy, paid for by tax dollars.

For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.

jcranmer•about 1 hour ago

> The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible.

The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.

Wait, that's not how it works.

[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...

milesskorpen•about 1 hour ago

Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?

If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.

tristanj•about 1 hour ago

Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.

For BART, that number is:

$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile.

anewhnaccount2•about 1 hour ago

Infrastructure for cars is massively subsidised too. Since tansport is infrastructure it it interacts with everything else (eg less cars in the city => less spending on car infra) and has a lot of positive externalities. The investment pays back in positive outcomes which can also be quantified in terms of money of you like. It's like you've got a balance sheet but you're filtering it to only look at two items.

skew-aberration•about 1 hour ago

Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.

BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.

Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.

Barbing•about 1 hour ago

Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.

You know subsidy per train passenger mile?

dcrazy•about 1 hour ago

But the Bay Area’s highway networks are at saturation during peak hours. 101 and 280 are at least as bad as before the pandemic.

We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.

tyzoid•about 1 hour ago

Are you factoring in fixed costs to that estimate? That may be partially misleading if so.

tristanj•about 1 hour ago

Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and look at marginal costs, they're profitable.

But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.

what•about 1 hour ago

How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.

I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.

raz32dust•32 minutes ago

Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.

I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.

rob74•11 minutes ago

Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Über etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.

kelnos•about 1 hour ago

Ugh, looks like this only works if you pay for the Waymo with a Visa card, and also use that same Visa card to pay for transit. I don't use a credit card for transit in SF; I use my Clipper transit card.

I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.

lokar•about 1 hour ago

I would really like a full door to door with one payment. Put in the destination, one price and get a Waymo on each end. React as best as possible to delays, etc.

Lammy•42 minutes ago

> Public transit networks and shared autonomous vehicles are part of a complementary mobility ecosystem. As transit agencies modernize their payment systems to accept tap-to-pay debit and credit cards, multimodal trips are becoming more convenient than ever.

What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.

Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.

And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:

> “San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”

Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.

Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.

> When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.

Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.