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Posted
27 minutes ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Ha. Of course the usual suspects are here stanning for Waymo. Such predictable little fanbois living in a bubble called Austin.

 

 

17 minutes ago, Mittens said:

Fuck Waymo and all this autonomous bullshit.  Y'all can't run towards the light fast enough.

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"Fanbois?"  I couldn't care less.  Just sharing what I've observed, on a daily basis, for several months.  And the objective truth that I'm safer with Waymos around me than I am with typical Austin drivers (like the drivers at two consecutive intersections who turned right in front of me from the middle lane the other night going home).

I'm no early adopter or preacher for autonomous driving.  I'm just observing that it works, at least situationally.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Ha. Of course the usual suspects are here stanning for Waymo. Such predictable little fanbois living in a bubble called Austin.

 

This post is VERY weird. What is wrong with you lately?

Posted
On 11/13/2025 at 4:11 PM, aggie08 said:

I don't know if I can trust a company whose CEO isn't constantly sending out cringy AI erotica for incels on the social media platform that he also owns.

Is said erotica available in waymo cars?

Posted
4 hours ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Ha. Of course the usual suspects are here stanning for Waymo. Such predictable little fanbois living in a bubble called Austin.

 

This is an embarrassingly sad few sentences. I'm sorry for you.

Posted
5 hours ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Ha. Of course the usual suspects are here stanning for Waymo. Such predictable little fanbois living in a bubble called Austin.

I wouldn't call us "fanbois" but we actually see the Waymos every single day. I see them in the morning and in the evening.  Every single day.

 

Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, irishtexan said:

This post is VERY weird. What is wrong with you lately?

He became extremely unhinged the same day that Kirk's neck did. He also lives in a town where 40% of the traffic is drunk magats in golf carts and 11yo's on e-bikes - both of which are legal here. 

Edited by NorthLoop
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Posted
6 hours ago, Larry T. Spider said:

In a reggaeton uber right now. Guy is an unstable maniac. Would’ve paid double for a Waymo.

Yeah, man, Taxis and Ride Sharing can be very unstable. I once took a taxi from the airport to my hotel in DFW, and the driver was speeding and driving recklessly while screaming in Arabic on his phone. At one point he pointed his phone at me where I saw that he was on FaceTime and some women in a burka giving me the look of death. I don't speak Arabic, but I assume the wife was accusing her husband of fucking around, and he had to show me panicking in the backseat of his taxi as some kind of proof of life. 

I would take a Waymo over that. 

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Posted
6 minutes ago, F250 said:

Yeah, man, Taxis and Ride Sharing can be very unstable. I once took a taxi from the airport to my hotel in DFW, and the driver was speeding and driving recklessly while screaming in Arabic on his phone. At one point he pointed his phone at me where I saw that he was on FaceTime and some women in a burka giving me the look of death. I don't speak Arabic, but I assume the wife was accusing her husband of fucking around, and he had to show me panicking in the backseat of his taxi as some kind of proof of life. 

I would take a Waymo over that. 

If you had flashed your dick, things might have turned out wayyyy different.

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Posted
On 11/13/2025 at 1:01 PM, ClubWhatever said:

Waymo can’t possibly be worse or more dangerous than the worst 10% of human drivers.  Also, the sooner semi trucks are driverless the better.  Over the 40 years of my driving life semis have gone from a nuisance to an existential threat.

1. that point is absolute fact.  I'm counting on the driverless cars to actually improve conditions.

2. The trucks are the way they are mostly because 4-wheelers give not one single solitary fuck, playing into your point #1.

Posted
8 hours ago, F250 said:

Yeah, man, Taxis and Ride Sharing can be very unstable. I once took a taxi from the airport to my hotel in DFW, and the driver was speeding and driving recklessly while screaming in Arabic on his phone. At one point he pointed his phone at me where I saw that he was on FaceTime and some women in a burka giving me the look of death. I don't speak Arabic, but I assume the wife was accusing her husband of fucking around, and he had to show me panicking in the backseat of his taxi as some kind of proof of life. 

I would take a Waymo over that. 

I took an Uber last week where the driver had her 16 week old puppy in the front seat.  I plop down in the back seat, after a bitch of a week, can't wait to get home, and there's four legged tailwagging happiness looking at me.  We just had to put our pup of 13 years down about 4 months ago.  It just hit right, but that was fucking awesome.  I loved on that doggy all the way home.

Not sure I'd be cool with cats or dogs in the car all the time, in fact, i know I'd prefer none; but at that moment, it was fantastic!!!

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Posted (edited)

Human drivers tried to kill us on our trip back from Houston a few weeks ago. Coming back from Dallas this week, the repeated menace came from 18 wheelers, whose drivers include a percentage of psychopaths. I think Waymo’s success gives me reason to hope for safer highways. Adding fentanyl to meth was a terrible idea.

Edited by Willfully Horn
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Posted
21 hours ago, irishtexan said:

This post is VERY weird. What is wrong with you lately?

he's quickly moving up the list of worst posters on this board. he's an absolute beating in football threads.

Posted

Waymo on the highways has the potential to kill rush hour traffic jams.

Carpooling used to be a thing.  Now not so much.  Look around the next time you are stuck in traffic.  You will see mostly one driver per car.  Carpools are hard to arrange and people might get stuck at work during the day if they need to suddenly get home, or decide to stay late.

Waymo charges the same per ride for one person per car or four people per car.  It's easy math.  If two people are sharing a ride, the cost is cut in half.  If four people are in the car, the cost is one fourth.  There is a huge economic incentive to find a buddy.

Waymo has the chance to bring back carpooling, probably between people that live close to each other and work in the same office.  Make multiple pickups in the morning and one drop-off and repeat the process after work.  If someone misses a ride or is stuck at work, no big deal.  They just take a solo Waymo for the extra ride and lose the cost savings for that day.  Nobody has to sit next to a rando on the bus.

Assume 10,000 cars take 10,000 people to work each day down a road.  If half of those cars have two people, that's now 7,500 cars taking the same number of people.  An overnight 25% reduction in traffic.  Every person that decides to share a ride and save money will take one car off the road.

The Waymos are going to be a lot better than humans at avoiding "traffic waves" by maintaining a constant speed, which will allow all of the traffic to go faster.  Waymos are not going to crash which will make the drive even more predictable, save lives, reduce insurance cost and car repairs.

It's going to change the commute ... I'm not sure when but it's coming.

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Posted
13 minutes ago, Texas Jeff said:

Waymo on the highways has the potential to kill rush hour traffic jams.

Carpooling used to be a thing.  Now not so much.  Look around the next time you are stuck in traffic.  You will see mostly one driver per car.  Carpools are hard to arrange and people might get stuck at work during the day if they need to suddenly get home, or decide to stay late.

Waymo charges the same per ride for one person per car or four people per car.  It's easy math.  If two people are sharing a ride, the cost is cut in half.  If four people are in the car, the cost is one fourth.  There is a huge economic incentive to find a buddy.

Waymo has the chance to bring back carpooling, probably between people that live close to each other and work in the same office.  Make multiple pickups in the morning and one drop-off and repeat the process after work.  If someone misses a ride or is stuck at work, no big deal.  They just take a solo Waymo for the extra ride and lose the cost savings for that day.  Nobody has to sit next to a rando on the bus.

Assume 10,000 cars take 10,000 people to work each day down a road.  If half of those cars have two people, that's now 7,500 cars taking the same number of people.  An overnight 25% reduction in traffic.  Every person that decides to share a ride and save money will take one car off the road.

The Waymos are going to be a lot better than humans at avoiding "traffic waves" by maintaining a constant speed, which will allow all of the traffic to go faster.  Waymos are not going to crash which will make the drive even more predictable, save lives, reduce insurance cost and car repairs.

It's going to change the commute ... I'm not sure when but it's coming.

This is one of those "hopeful upsides of driverless cars" that has been discussed.  I'd like it to come true.  Are there many mornings where I'd be perfectly happy to wait 5 mins for a my Waymo or what have you to swing by my house to pick me up, then maybe pick up a neighbor, and drop us all off downtown?   Yep.

Also, just the better driving on freeways matters.  Like this morning, when I got stuck behind a gal in a Kia Rio who would routinely drive slow as shit when the speed of traffic picked up, leaving 5-6 car lengths in front of her.  That makes the traffic as if there were another 5-6 cars on the road.  The optimal way to drive in traffic is to leave the minimal safe distance between you and the next car, and do NOT leave huge gaps.   Driverless cars will do that well.  So, maybe fewer cars on the road, and the ones that are on the road will drive better than many human drivers.  Again, with tech that actually performs, this could be a very good thing.  But....we'll see.

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Posted

Waymo says they drove 6.3 million driver-free vehicle miles in Austin between March and September, 2025.  Some of those miles had more than one passenger in the car, but they don't provide a passenger miles.  But for arguments sake let's assume only one passenger per Waymo.

For comparison, Cap Metro drives about 25 million vehicle miles per year.  When you multiply by the number of passengers, they transport people about 130 million passenger-miles per year.  Depending on how you read their budget, Cap Metro spends $3-6 per passenger mile.

Waymo, in year one, with service for about half the year, in a limited service area, is approching 5% of Cap Metro's yearly ridership.  They are charging you 0% sales tax and $0 property tax to do this.  The future is pretty clear...

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Posted
30 minutes ago, Texas Jeff said:

Waymo says they drove 6.3 million driver-free vehicle miles in Austin between March and September, 2025.  Some of those miles had more than one passenger in the car, but they don't provide a passenger miles.  But for arguments sake let's assume only one passenger per Waymo.

For comparison, Cap Metro drives about 25 million vehicle miles per year.  When you multiply by the number of passengers, they transport people about 130 million passenger-miles per year.  Depending on how you read their budget, Cap Metro spends $3-6 per passenger mile.

Waymo, in year one, with service for about half the year, in a limited service area, is approching 5% of Cap Metro's yearly ridership.  They are charging you 0% sales tax and $0 property tax to do this.  The future is pretty clear...

Yeah...see below.  I work downtown, I see (not kidding) 20-40 Waymos a day, in not much time on the road downtown.

10 minutes ago, pantone159 said:

A whole bunch of those miles seem like zero-passenger miles. I do see Waymo cars all over the place, but they very frequently seem to be completely empty.

 

I work downtown, I see (not kidding) 20-40 Waymos a day, in not much time on the road downtown.  I would estimate that maybe 10% of the time, there's a passenger in the car.  So, no, the case for "this is more cost-effective than bus service" is nowhere even close to being made.

If it DOES end up being made, someday, that's great.  I'm a fan of us getting to the best possible outcome in terms of actually providing transportation, and doing so in the most cost-effective way.  But I don't think that single driverless cars seem like a fix that should totally replace mass transit.

AND, understand that the public almost always subsidizes mass transit to make it affordable to lower income folks (who heavily depend on it).  So, there's that as well.  If it costs Poor Peter $25 to get to work and home each day, instead of $6, dude is gonna be fucked.  Public transportation is a public service, in part.  It is almost never intended or designed to be profitable or even break-even.  Fares help defray costs, even in most of the best-designed systems; they don't cover all the costs.

Posted
4 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Yeah...see below.  I work downtown, I see (not kidding) 20-40 Waymos a day, in not much time on the road downtown.

I work downtown, I see (not kidding) 20-40 Waymos a day, in not much time on the road downtown.  I would estimate that maybe 10% of the time, there's a passenger in the car.  So, no, the case for "this is more cost-effective than bus service" is nowhere even close to being made.

If it DOES end up being made, someday, that's great.  I'm a fan of us getting to the best possible outcome in terms of actually providing transportation, and doing so in the most cost-effective way.  But I don't think that single driverless cars seem like a fix that should totally replace mass transit.

AND, understand that the public almost always subsidizes mass transit to make it affordable to lower income folks (who heavily depend on it).  So, there's that as well.  If it costs Poor Peter $25 to get to work and home each day, instead of $6, dude is gonna be fucked.  Public transportation is a public service, in part.  It is almost never intended or designed to be profitable or even break-even.  Fares help defray costs, even in most of the best-designed systems; they don't cover all the costs.

I get that.  I too am curious about how much they are dead-heading vs carrying passengers.

But ... it is scaling fast and at some point it's going to impact bus ridership.

I think folks will eventually get an income-based Waymo subsidy to make rides cheaper, and that subsidy could come out of what we are paying today for Cap Metro.

Knowing Austin, Waymo will hit ubiquitous scale a week before we open light rail.

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Posted

Single (or even two) passenger car trips do not scale up well enough to replace public transit. Put 40 people from some rando bus in individual cars and see how quickly your road space fills up. Now do that for every person in every bus/train. Those Waymos ain't going anywhere fast in the parking lots every road would quickly become. That's in a city like Austin - it would be exponentially worse in a San Francisco or Seattle where topography limits the road space to begin with. That's one reason most of us in cities like that use transit at least on some of our trips. I drive for some things, take the train (or bus) for others simply due to traffic and/or parking issues at the other end.

Waymos are great for the "last mile" trips, for certain point-to-point trips where transit routes or schedules don't work, and for local errands/bar nights etc., and may even be useful enough in some circumstances to allow a family to have one fewer car. They definitely have a place in a city's transportation options. Just remember, though - every person in that bus or train is someone who isn't on the road making traffic even worse - even if it's in a Waymo. 

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Posted

I'm visiting my folks in San Antonio for Christmas. I'd never seen a Waymo in my life much less in SA. I've seen several in the last few days.  

Posted
40 minutes ago, flatdawgs said:

Single (or even two) passenger car trips do not scale up well enough to replace public transit. Put 40 people from some rando bus in individual cars and see how quickly your road space fills up. Now do that for every person in every bus/train. Those Waymos ain't going anywhere fast in the parking lots every road would quickly become. That's in a city like Austin - it would be exponentially worse in a San Francisco or Seattle where topography limits the road space to begin with. That's one reason most of us in cities like that use transit at least on some of our trips. I drive for some things, take the train (or bus) for others simply due to traffic and/or parking issues at the other end.

Waymos are great for the "last mile" trips, for certain point-to-point trips where transit routes or schedules don't work, and for local errands/bar nights etc., and may even be useful enough in some circumstances to allow a family to have one fewer car. They definitely have a place in a city's transportation options. Just remember, though - every person in that bus or train is someone who isn't on the road making traffic even worse - even if it's in a Waymo. 

The problem in Austin, as compared to cities like San Francisco and Seattle, since you mentioned them (and both of which have slightly smaller but similar populations than Austin), is that we do not have many people taking public transit in Austin now.  It's not the same equation. I agree with your thinking here, in general, but I'm not sure that it applies to cities like Austin, where public transit has been available for a long time, but hardly anyone uses it, relatively speaking.  You could put every bus rider in Austin in a car, and the difference in traffic would be negligible.  It would absolutely destroy a city like Seattle, and definitely San Francisco, were you to do the same thing.  Based on a quick and dirty comparison, just looking at bus rides since Austin doesn't really have anything else worth comparing, and it's obvious we're not talking about the same problems or the same solutions.  This is something that has frustrated the fuck out of me for years when city leadership, and the loudest voices lobbying them, try so desperately to solve Austin transportation issues based on solutions that work in cities that look nothing like Austin.  We keep getting folks who either move from cities with public transpo and have fixed notions of how it should work, or locals who have no fucking clue what to do so they look to cities the established systems for answers.  That makes sense on the surface, but I've yet to hear anyone in leadership, or even a crazy on a microphone a meeting, discuss Austin transportation solutions framed within what actually makes sense for this specific city.  I don't know if Waymos everywhere is the answer, but just because it's not the answer in Seattle or San Francisco doesn't mean it's not the answer here.

 

Austin

Population: ~1,000,000

Monthly bus rides: 2 million

Seattle

Population: ~800,000

Monthly bus rides: 63 million 

San Francisco

Population: ~820,000

Monthly bus rides: 14-15 million 

 

Ridership is still down in Seattle and San Francisco, like the rest of the country, since the pandemic. They were both about 25% higher pre-pandemic.  Again, we're not talking about the same situation, and the same solutions are not likely to work.  If we could magic a functional light rail system into exitence, and magic ourselves into a future where a populace unaccustomed to public transit starts to actually use it, then sure.  But even in the candy land scenario where Austin has light rail running to all major areas of town coupled with an integrated bus system that can handle the last mile, you're talking decades before Austinites are actually using it en masse.  Due to our addiction to cars, and our complete lack of infrastructure for other forms of public transportation, perhaps Waymos and the like are indeed a solid solution for Austin, at least in the short term.

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Posted

@Samson's Wig those are great points, and despite having visited Austin many times I admittedly don't know much about the transportation system there other than that it has a lot more space for roads (whether or not that's the best use of real estate is a different matter, but it is what it is) than SF or Seattle. I admit to being shocked that per your post there are only 2 million monthly bus rides in Austin? If that's the case, then certainly everyone moving from a bus to a Waymo isn't going to cause the issue that it would in a lot of other cities. Some issues, yes, but not at the same scale. Seattle's regional public transportation systems (various bus systems, local and commuter rail, streetcars, monorail, foot and car ferries) serve about 4.1 million people and are interconnected fare-wise. Removing that system for Waymos would indeed destroy the highway system for those who choose or need to drive except perhaps in some farther-flung suburbs and exurbs. Obviously per your post Austin is a completely different matter and a good place for the Waymo experiment to get off the ground.

I have noticed that Waymos have arrived even here, currently "mapping" the area, and once they're active I look forward to seeing for which use cases they might work for me. Having choices for what is the best way(s) to take any given trip is the optimal solution. There are many trips I take where I would never consider driving, and others where I would never consider not. It'll be interesting to see where Waymos fit in.

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