Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.
People seem so used to it now. I love them, I think they're probably one of the most exciting tech I've used in the last ten years. They're also like magical little rescue pods when socially overwhelmed in a busy city.
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
I totally agree with you. Here in DC they use a public charger that's on one of my running routes, so I interact with them more often than the average Washingtonian. I feel more comfortable around them than I do around human drivers.
Easiest to understand their value as a pedestrian in a place that doesn't care about pedestrian and looks at their deaths as irrelevant.
We know a lot about how to improve road safety for pedestrians, but its just not valued in some places.
Replacing 100s of millions of cars with smart robot is not safety solution. Actually improving road safety with cheap well proven methods is the solution.
I agree if the money was given to organizations which would actually effectively use the money to make road safety changes. But with this form of claim I always come back to the idea this was originally funded by corporations. I don't think the opportunity cost of corporate funding is public infrastructure unless it's profit motivated. So if it makes safety improvements at low safety per $ I still support it because its opportunity cost is more likely ads or other corporate investments.
I feel like you have an overall rant about transportation you want to make so just make it instead of adding tangential comments to everything
If you can't go down any street in any country and find people staring at their phones while driving, speeding through stop signs, and making routinely dangerous decisions then you are less aware of your surroundings than the people texting while driving. You are the person this technology is meant for. People who don't pay attention.
You prevent speeding by structuring the road environment so to make speeding less. Comfortable, you narrow roads, you impact the visual field, you have speed bumps, raised cross walks, automatic cameras that hand out tickets when you speed, you change the road surface to create noise, you curve streets make it so cars can't go straight.
Same of stop signs, if stop signs aren't overused people respect them more. Stop signs are an anti-pattern that should only very rarely be used. You constantly see people running stop signs because stop signs are badly placed. Where I live, its very rare that people run stop signs because there are far fewer of them. It still happens, but usually not when traffic is high, because most people do value their live.
The US is well known for building roads that are great for driving fast on, then just slapping a bunch of stop signs down and a bunch of maximum speed limits (that are barely enforced) and then complain when people don't follow the law. People look at their phone because the roads are straight and wide and they think they can look at their phones.
People react to intensives and to enforcement. Give them the right intensives and most people will follow them. And best thing is, these changes even work on Waymos too.
I do that with my bike or scooter right now. Actually, throw a ferry in there as well and I'm doing an inter-state trip next weekend doing exactly that. So no, quite unlikely.
I'm about to do an ebike train ebike journey (UK) and have to say it works rather well as a form of transport. You can work on the train and the ebike is fun, easy and has no parking problems.
Why would I do that when I already have a car which I need to use for every other trip. Once I'm there maybe, last time I did this I rented a car - which given the prices I've heard is likely the only affordable option. (my final destination was several hundred miles from the nearest train station)
I live in Switzerland and it actually saves money for your society. Its universally considered a fantastic investment for the country and many people are happy to pay it, both in taxes and in ticket cost.
You are simply applying two different standards for road cost and rail costs. Roads are fully tax funded and all land use decisions are made to support them. And then there is insanely huge subsidy in how parking lots work, not to mention tons of other regulation that forces the creation of parking, zoning and so on.
Your statement only makes sense, because what your 'normal' is actually an insanely pro car, anti train normal.
Done. I grew up in suburban Michigan. I moved to Washington DC for college 20 years ago and I'm still here. When looking to buy a house, we only looked at options with public transit access.
I know it's not for everyone, but if you really do value being able to go out without driving, it's a great lifestyle.
Realistically it's "too much 'environmental' review", aka NIMBYs killing any project that will actually implement good public transit because it will ruin the view from their kitchen
Capex for car infrastructure seemingly is uncapped (and I don’t talk only about USA either).
But when it’s non-car transit suddenly it’s too much money, not profitable, nimby, etc.
When cars enjoy fuel subsidies , (mostly) free roads and endless expansion.
Update: some car brains over the world decided that even bike lanes are an issue. When bike lanes have bigger throughput, costs don’t even make a dent compared to roads, maintenance is negligible, etc.
Because 99% of Americans use cars. There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using, you’ll still have to spend just as much on roads.
I wouldn't want to be a kid, elderly, sick, blind, disabled in USA.
> There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using
Induced demand.
Though seriously you had everything: trains, trams/streetcars, great towns - now say it's impossible (after 80-100 years of lobbying and crazy subsidies).
I bet if "right" startup popped up that by accident would be public transport adjacent - atitude would shift on a dime. I saw a bunch of articles about pedestrian accessibility improvements, due to delivery bots[0]. Apparently it may be easier to improve things for businesses instead of people.
Capex for countries isn't really that big of a problem. You can raise lots of capital for long term, a proper investment should increase land values (or property values).
Generally societies that invest a lot of capex in high capacity transit do quite well.
Also roads have high capex along with operation cost, along with high private cost. Not even mention the additional cost for health and other hidden costs.
If you go by total lift-time cost by capacity then its a fantastic deal.
> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.
I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.
But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)
Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.
I’m not “only counting the first 6 years”. I’m saying you can get to 6 years on $1.2 m if you can do it at a thousandth the cost. I’m sure if you have some success by then, the $30 m over the next decade won’t be too hard.
To be honest, if you have a good path to this the $30 m won’t be hard to raise. If I had the skill to do this at 1/1000 cost I would not hesitate to start the company tomorrow.
I think autonomous buses would be terrific. But for a different reason: it removes labor as a cost centre and scheduling constraint, allowing demand responsiveness. Thought so last year too so it’s not like I’m arguing here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-15/Fully_Autono...
Honestly I think this is the only real advantage of a self-driving bus. Driving a bus is hard work and it doesn't pay well. Getting drivers to cover all the routes every day is an ongoing challenge.
I would honestly be nervous to ride a self-driving bus much of the time. Drivers limit the level of shenanigans that can happen. The subway has emergency intercoms and staff at every single station, but a bus could take you miles away from the nearest transit cop.
Bus drivers don't make much money, at least not here in the United States. I was shocked when I learned how low the average salary is, considering you might be tasked with navigating a massive vehicle carrying dozens of people through narrow streets during rush hour. And I'm not even considering the customer service aspects and public safety aspects of what they do.
All that to say, we are far from the point where a self-driving bus is cheaper than buying a regular bus and paying a driver.
You're probably right about comparative costs. But the problem of getting to an autonomous bus will remain a significant barrier to public transportation use.
My neighborhood is close to the city center. Even so, bus service is very sparse, recently reduced to just twice a day. In addition walking to bus stops is long and difficult, or even impossible, for many elderly or disabled residents.
I envision a Waymo-like car service transporting people to/from destinations or if it's more practical, a transit center. I concur car services wouldn't be the cheapest option but may well be the most effective.
Nope. Fixed routes have chaos. You would have the same problem, converging on fsd. It’s the same reason Waymo isn’t deployed everywhere now. Not to mention buses are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than a car and would be slower for any given median occupant compared to a car.
They're also covered in cameras the police have access to, which have been used to track down legal protestors in the past. That's why there was a spate of people setting them on fire a few months ago. Basically, every Waymo car is a Flock camera.
Yup, every time I'm on a city bus they have a screen that cycles through the different cameras. They really have every angle covered. And some of our buses even have traffic enforcement cameras that issue tickets to cars.
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.
> Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.
That is the opposite of reassuring, because here are the stats for those processes as a whole (just ‘requests for user information’, not broken down by data type or Google product). Currently at 84% accepance rate i.e. the ‘process’ is a formality lol: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
I don't know what to tell you. The subpoena system has been around for a VERY long time before Google even existed. You seem to be unfamiliar with it so I'd encourage you to read up before you call it a "formality."
This is not some newfangled shiny thing. If you hold records that are important to a court case you can be forced to give them up by court order. This is true regardless of who "you" happens to be. If police "have access" to a Waymo, it's only because they also "have access" to your phone, your medical records, your car rental history, etc., etc.
> Why are you conflating “valid legal request” with subpoena? If they meant ”in response to subpoena” then they would say subpoena lol
Because they also comply with warrants and court orders, and it's easier to say "valid legal request" than that. Probably the vast majority of data requests are subpoenas.
I suppose that a FISA court could try to get footage from Waymo, but it would be difficult to do so because FISA requires a reasonable suspicion that the target is outside the United States. The (terrible) decision to allow dragnet surveillance with PRISM was allowed because the government claimed that it would be targeted mostly at people outside the borders of the US.
Needless to say, data from a Waymo operating entirely inside the United States is not covered by this. Secret courts are a bad idea in general IMO, but according to the rules this should not be allowed.
So they do have access after all—just have to ask nicely.
That process is fine, the best we have.
The problem is having roving surveillance vehicles driving around everywhere. I see a couple of them every day on my walk in a mostly residential area.
The addition of facial recognition is trivial if not already implemented. Can be done after the fact. The tradeoff is catching an occasional criminal while enabling all sorts of abuse from the powers that be.
More like: When an entity (including a corp like Waymo and you as a random person alike) has information (such as camera footage), then that information can be subpoenaed.
Even when you've got your own camera on your own front porch making recordings on your own hard drive using your own isolated network: There is are long-established legal processes by which you can be ordered to hand over [a subset of] those recordings.
Neither Waymo nor you, yourself, are exceptional to these processes.
Who said anything about subpoenas? Waymo says "valid legal request". When other companies say "valid legal request" it means "a police department emailed us"
More broadly, do you believe that Google is not, in some way, adding Waymo data to the surveillance or intelligence product catalog the US government already purchases from them?
