Waymo in Portland

Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.

> you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those

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.

> 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.

Employers and employees split payroll taxes 50/50 by law. You definitely pay payroll taxes as an employee in the US.

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.

> A scheduled increase to Oregon’s transportation taxes, including those that help fund TriMet, is on hold after an effort to repeal the hike secured enough signatures to send the issue to the ballot next month.

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

And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether.

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.

By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here?

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.

I looked at taking the train from my town to Glacier National Park along with my bike. The route goes from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, and has a stop at south glacier.

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.

You are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. I like trains but they can't and don't address the issue the OP is raising. Even if the US already had public trains it still isn't a "last mile" problem. Especially in the western US, it is a "last hundred miles" problem.

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.

> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.

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.

I’m 99-100% a car user now after living in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Here’s why - I gave up my car for a bike when I lived in Portland, however when people openly smoked fentanyl on the trains the train operators had to stop the train during my morning/afternoon commute for ~15 minutes (this happened often). Also the last straw for me was getting my place broken into and having my bike stolen. Therefore I moved to cars because I didn’t have to inhale secondhand fentanyl smoke or deal with unscheduled delays. As a man in Los Angeles I had to deal with a drunk man on a bus touching my thigh and hitting on me and people trying to sell me drugs/solicit me for money/phone calls/etc. As a regular hiker I’m also not sure public transit would service trailheads in the Cascades or the Sierra Nevadas. As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy, so I think this problem will likely go away. I welcome Waymo in Portland, I’m just concerned for the well being of the vehicles!

I am a huge proponent of increased public transit (I'm of the opinion that every city should have a massive congestion tax with large swaths only accessible on foot or by public transit), but trains and buses would be wildly inconvenient for what op is describing.

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.

I appreciate what you're saying and am a big fan of long distance train and bus journeys myself and have done a lot of both, sleeping and not.

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.

I agree with you, however in the US the “last mile” is often the “last 50 miles” when goal is outdoor recreation.

People just do not understand how big and spread out the US is compared to other countries. "Last mile" dramatically underestimates how much heavy lifting the personal transportation part would need to do. More like "last 50 miles".

Enough with this public transport bullshit. We live in very spread out suburbs where you need to drive to everything and everyone has big backyards because we like it that way. Having a train line is borderline not feasible the way the vast majority of the US lives. I also don’t want to get into public transport with a whole bunch of other people no matter how nice it is. It’s not going to be able to compete with a self driving EV of my own that I charge with my solar panels for free.

there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods

You're right, but in the US a government providing any sort of public service is an immediate target for the right (and an unfortunately significant portion of the "left"). We insist on paying more for less rather than ever allowing a poor person to benefit in a way they don't "deserve". So public transit hardly exists or is woefully inadequate in most places.

Its the ultra independence mindset. I don't think trains work for the commenter you talked to.

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.

Public transit only works if you live in the densest of the dense part of a city. If you live out in Beaverton or Gresham these bus lines lose money hand over fist, not to mention farther-flung places.

The European mind does not comprehend how big and sparsely populated the American West is. You can't even pitch a tent in most places in the Alps, and why would you, when you just stop at a hut that has a staff and you can get fed and sleep in bunks with 20 other people? Meanwhile I can drive to numerous places where there isn't a structure or even another person in a 20km radius. No one is going to run a train to a place like that.

Connecting two Waymo geos with a train would be an interesting company idea. You could lease freight track the way Amtrak already does it in the American West but try to negotiate a contact more favorable than Amtrak's. You could try to work with Waymo to work on bundles.

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.

> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.

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.

Unfortunately, until something big happens in the US, autonomous vehicles will be more accessible to working class americans than good and reliable mass transit, especially outside of major population centers.

In the US it's often not the last mile, but the last 10 or 100 miles. I'm saying this as someone enjoying fantastic public transport in Budapest.

It's a train or bus that is exclusively yours, goes exactly where you want it to go, when you want to go. Sounds objectively better than a train to me.

In my experience, night trains with private cabins are fan service for rail fans, environmentalists and/or masochists, not real transport options.

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...

It would also be satisfied by magic flying carpets. Between flying carpets, functional public transport, and self-driving cars, only one of these three things is not utter fantasy in the near-ish future in the United States.

Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.

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

I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day.

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.

The entire city shuts down and loses their mind with just a millimeter or two of snow here. Last time we got 0.25 of an inch there were ~9 accidents within a 2-mile span on the highway in the morning, and we just ended up shutting the highway down for the day.

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.

After skiing in Utah, I wonder why the driving conditions around Tahoe get so bad. In comparison, for most places around Salt Lake/Park City, you never need chains or 4-wheel drive.

In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on.

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.

I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber.

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.

reminds me of an old joke:

"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"

It will be amazing if they get self-driving working. Currently, you can't even sit in the back seat.

Off-roading aspirations and 3rd row legroom (S1) seem to be major differentiators from Rivian.

As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.

I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.

I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making

> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.

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).

> your voice, "private" conversations.

Waymo microphones are only activated when you contact support.

> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.

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.."

> 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?

Pick-up, drop off, and routing remain a challenge for Waymo. I hate having to walk a few minutes to get to the Waymo. Not that big a deal usually, but it became a problem when I was on crutches after spraining my ankle. Same for drop-offs, with the caveat that a human driver is going to see that I'm being dropped off in a bad neighborhood and not have me walk a couple blocks and is going to drop me off right outside my destination. Finally, routing. Waymo's take the weirdest routes sometimes. There was one trip I'd swear the Waymo Driver was the digital equivalent of drunk, the route it took was so convoluted. Which is kind of interesting. It means the system can reroute on the fly based on traffic conditions elsewhere and avoid getting jammed up. It's like when Google maps has you take a weird route to somewhere you're familiar, and then you look at traffic and there's an accident it's taking you around. Still a bad experience when a 10 minute ride turns into a 20 minute ride because the Waymo decides to go a weird way.

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.

Yes exactly. I loved that when i opened up the app to go some where the first thing I saw before I even put in where I'm going, was how long until ill be picked up. the cars don't care about the trips, not trying to tip/ride max.

Waymo inflates their prices to be above that of Uber/Lyft because they don't have enough vehicles to meet demand. But their operating costs / mile are lower than that of Uber/Lyft. I'd estimate their internal cost per mile is approx. half that of Uber/Lyft. They pocket the rest because they need to recoup decades of expensive R&D.

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.

IIRC, in SF they're slightly more expensive before tip, but having ridden in them in SF, LA, and AZ I've always felt they were cheaper. Over the long run, they will probably end up being cheaper from the wholesale perspective since eventually the parts and technology cost will come down with time and scale while human wages will continue to rise.

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 a waymo costs $200k (car+sensors+install labor) and drives 200k miles, then amortizing up-front costs alone are about $1/mile. We don't really know what the TCO of a waymo is, and it's possible it could go down with economies of scale. Rideshare drivers can get paid $1-2/mile although it varies a lot.

During peak hours Waymo is more expensive than standard uber/lyft - I don't pay attention to black/premium pricing. Off-peak the price can be comparable. I mainly check because my wife prefers it.

Depends on the region, I think. Lyft and Uber partner with them in certain cities, so you transparently are charged the same as a similar ride with a human driver. It's only a better experience than a human driver, though, in my view. No chance of yapping, more privacy, no chance of your driver being a psycho, cars are better maintained.

Sometimes cheaper, [nearly] always better.

It's hard to measure "cheaper" as an end user consumer, the price you pay for the service, because it's very likely they're operating at a loss to gain market share and growth.

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.

once we've refactored humans out of driving, the speed limits can go way up

Is that supposed to be good?

The DC rollout is mired in regulatory red tape and is most likely dead until the mayoral election goes through, and if the new mayor is anti-Waymo unlikely to go through in the near future.

Waymo is a sort of public transit. It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit, but an order of magnitude more efficient than private passenger cars.

Wouldn't Baltimore be the first Waymo market that actually gets snow? I don't think they've cracked driving in a real Midwest/northeast winter.

They’re being tested in Philly right now too

Those are separate problems

The solution is to get MORE people onto the trains, not fewer.

How would you know what diseases the previous passenger had?

Are you sure you're not thinking of the Portland streetcar? Max does not have nearly the same issues.

This is a false blanket statement. Portland has very short (walkable) blocks, many one way streets, and it is true that most often than not cars actively stop for pedestrians to cross the street

One of my friends talks about this skate park on Stevenson st, which is a cobblestone road in San Francisco. It's ostensibly a two way road, but with street parking, it isn't really. Or rather, in order for two full sized cars to fit, one of the cars has to go up on the curb. Waymo's don't seem capable of doing this (yet, on that street), and jam up that road whenever there's traffic on it. Waymo's has problems with that narrow SF street and any amount of traffic on it.

I've personally reported a taxi driver for parking in a bike lane, and I hope he lost his cab license for it because it was really egregious. PBOT actually asked me for official testimony.

Same here, as someone who doesn't drive much, and is generally a "vulnerable road user". I've seen Waymos drive. When they screw up, it's by stopping dead under an abundance of caution. They never speed. They can spot a ped or cyclist from blocks away. Every time I take an Uber home, the driver is guaranteed to drive 40+ on the 20mph road in front of my house while blasting through crosswalks with people waiting to cross. The data is not really in yet (still not enough miles to really say if they are safer), but they pass the eye test.

The rain will be a real test though!

The amount of trips I would suddenly be interested in taking would skyrocket.