Why should a tax payer in Dallas pay for your [affordable] transportation from the outskirts of Houston or OK to commute to Dallas?

tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.

Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.

yes it is. it's still a cost.

but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.

Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.

100%. Most bus routes are terribly expensive to run, multiple drivers, benefits and then the physical equipment. It would be interesting if you could work out a subsidy program for low income riders.

This is already the case. A lot of transit agencies have a vanpools, rideshares, and ridehales for their low frequency areas. I used one recently in Tacoma because my ferry was late and the bus from the ferry arrives only ones an hour.

I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.

So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.

I actually hate the term affordable housing because you're right, its not affordable. The wood, concrete, roof, and mechanical system costs about the same all things considered whether you're renting for $5k/mo or $500/mo. I make the same point it should be called subsidized housing too.

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.

People don't car share in the US, and don't want to.

Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.

Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.

For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.

Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers

> ... in the US

Dallas in the United States.

It's important to understand the history, wherein:

There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.

Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.

And now, it is stuck this way.

i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.

I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

Solves one of the big problems with public transportation.

If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely and advantage over government run transportation

> Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.

Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?

I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.

"huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Most affordable housing is owned and operated by non-profit organizations or entities, most of which are very small.

plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.

the easiest way to understand their value is to be a pedestrian. it is insane how quickly you realize how safe and careful they are vs. humans. the "bugs" with getting stuck in intersections and stuff like that means very little to me if I can bike or cross a crosswalk with confidence

Too much capex

Stop spreading FUD. The police do not in any meaningful way "have access" to Waymo cameras.

They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.

Would we apply this same logic to Tesla Autopilot?

As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.

> Edgewood Georgia,

I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.

To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.

There was a story here about it hitting a child (I think) but it was determined to be much less serious than if a human driver was involved

In chaotic environment it was probably human driving, or rather directing the car remotely.

YMMV. I tried to order one from a bar. It got confused when it got there, did a 3 point turn in front of me then left without me.

If the train goes exactly where you want to go, I would always say take the train. It's spacious and clean.

But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.

I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to novel situations" is probably the biggest blocker for people to trust them enough for widespread deployment. I'd love to see one of these things drive on a poorly mapped dirt road up in the mountains, for instance (I'm not saying it can't -- I just mean I would personally love to see how it can adapt to that kind of situation)

> a self-driving car will never … use the car as a weapon

You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.

> meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.

Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.

Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.

When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.

> or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets

On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.

Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.

When a human driver messes up, there's a person to hold responsible. When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible? If the human messes up to the point they are no longer allowed to drive, that person is no longer on the streets to cause more mistakes. When a robot car messes up, are all of the other cars pulled off the streets as well until the glitch is fixed? Every robot car is essentially the same driver.

If a human makes a mistake, we give them the liability to own up to their mistakes, and carry the costs.

Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.

This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.

> we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans

This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.

> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.

I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.

Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.

> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.

It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.

When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?

Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.

We don’t tolerate machine incidents because who is liable if an accident occurs? A company with a $4.6 trillion market cap? They’re not a legal opponent any of us really want to take on.

> a magnitude of order

unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"

Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.

> Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?

That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.

I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.

* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.

Are you running your replies through a LLM, or is the LLM producing them entirely?

These companies are taking a very long view (and are funded accordingly). The future vision is one in which cars with drivers just aren't a thing in cities anymore. Nobody owns a car to use in day-to-day intra-city journeys; instead, you just take a drive in an autonomous vehicle on demand.

Back of the envelope, three car costs $200k, charge $20/ride, say that ride costs $5 to operate, $200k/$15 gets you 14,000 rides (rounded). Say 10 rides a day... shy of 4 years to break even.

Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.

I thought about this as well. The dsytopian world I think will exist in the future where the Waymo is priced higher and people will want to take it more, over a cheaper Uber. Precisely because the human driver is removed from the equation.

So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.

This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.

Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…

I doubt the geofence exclusion is because of the demographics of those areas and not the demand for autonomous vehicles in those areas, although I don't doubt the latter is a result of the former.

Tesla has fewer miles than I have driven in my lifetime. It’s currently still a half baked product. This might be a story in a few years but today you’re comparing an F150 to a Delorean.

What about criminal implications?

PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.

That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.

I have still not gotten a Waymo even once. I am in the service area. I don't use the service frequently, just enough to be disappointed.

Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"

But then you lose extra important information from words like "masshole."

Dalwegians?

Dallazens

Dallamites, Dallsatians

Dallonians

Seattleite is fine, it is close to satellite

I live here and use Dallasian myself

In all fairness, I've noticed people here in Dallas/TX are indeed more racist than the East and West coast cities, esp. towards brown people.

Understandable, I'd also hate to live in Dallas /s

Urbanist youtubers inevitably come to mix in some advocacy in their videos. You'd be hard-pressed to find one that isn't critical of car-centric design. That being said, NJB is a well-respected educational youtuber and all their videos are built on a lot of research

Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it

I was in one stopped as the first car at a red light. The next section of road was full of cars waiting on another red light.

Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

everyone != everywhere

Freeways are back as of just 6 days ago: https://x.com/Waymo/status/2082501792001056984

our group sees them all the time while skating the katy trail and through downtown dallas

Thanks

Superbs?

The cybercab would be almost perfect if it weren't for it's low height. It's easier for the elder to get into and out of taller vehicles.

I have one of the most inefficient EVs and it's only 2.4x hungrier than the cybercab. It can comfortably carry 6 adults. I've been in Tesla 3s as Ubers before. They only need 31% more energy than the cybercab.

If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.

> Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles

I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.

Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?

A C1 with more security, meaning more material and air between you and a potential high-speed obstacle, is called a car and is sized like one.

Blocked even from testing in NYC. Blocked from DC and Boston. Unfortunately this does have more to do with bad government than bad weather.

They tried to roll out in New York City, but the city did not approve.

https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...

NYC has Mamdani, who is a very progressive populist mayor, and a longtime (active) supporter of the taxi drivers union.

There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.

Definitely true, but snow affecting driving conditions is becoming pretty rare in cities like Chicago.

Uber is at least 1000x better than traditionally taxi, without any rating system.

There are tons of automated systems which take cash. I do agree it would add some complexity to the equipment in the car, but its not like it would be that difficult to do it. These cars have to go back to the depot eventually, emptying the cash bins would just be one more cleaning step. I do agree though they don't bother because it probably would cost more to manage in the end than the amount of rides they're losing not accepting cash.

Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.

Uber app only requires an email address

Credit cards are not free money lmao