[HN Gopher] Autonomous driving in five new cities
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Autonomous driving in five new cities
Author : ra7
Score : 24 points
Date : 2025-11-18 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| tradertef wrote:
| This is great. Especially for people with disabilities that
| prevents them driving a car. Hopefully, coverage area will
| increase exponentially over time..
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Great if you can afford it. Terrible if you rely on bussing
| that might see cuts in response to rideshare capturing
| ridership.
| michael1999 wrote:
| I see the reverse.
|
| Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit
| into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to
| useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people
| out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry
| away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with
| 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-
| driverless...
|
| Same for small towns - they just don't have the population or
| the density to run large busses with drivers on fixed routes
| at a reasonable frequency. I've seen smaller city busses with
| routes that only run every 90 minutes. But smaller self-
| driving vehicles can collect a few people and run them
| around. See https://www.chandleraz.gov/residents/transportati
| on/transit/... or https://ridewithvia.com/news/waymo-and-via-
| announce-strategi...
|
| Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station.
| I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway
| as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple
| of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-
| clear-benefits-wa...
| arjie wrote:
| Strongly agree. The future is what we used to call "share
| autos" in India. It's a small vehicle that can transport
| some 6-8 people. Currently these aren't feasible for the
| public because driver operational cost dominates, but once
| driver operational cost is near zero, we can bring much
| more public transit online. One of these vehicles is 4x-8x
| as dense as a car, and with America's relative lack of
| density, it's the only realistic way to have widespread
| public transit.
|
| Particularly useful with dynamic dispatch and dynamic
| routing is that the vehicle's stopping can be much more
| infrequent, leading to lower total trip time and greater
| frequency. San Francisco is very dense but is also very
| old, so large 40-60 person busses stop every block forcing
| low throughput high latency rides. As a consequence, I
| prefer an e-bike over a bus everywhere in SF.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Taxi services make going carless more feasible, this isn't a
| net negative to public transit, rather a positive: you mostly
| use transit for your daily routine, and use a taxi/ride
| share/autonomous car for those edge cases where transit or
| biking makes little sense.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Except that isn't what really happens. We've been over this
| with uber rollout. It legitimately captures ridership from
| transit rather than supplementing it.
| ninininino wrote:
| None of which have common snow or ice issues.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Yeah it's not even covering all of LA despite the claim of
| "being in LA". Just a mostly flat portion. It doesn't go into
| the valley. It doesn't really go into south LA. It doesn't go
| east of the 5. It still doesn't go to LAX either.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Yes, it's an early stage technology and the logistics of
| scaling is non-trivial. Yet, if you look at the numbers,
| they've been scaling surprisingly fast, at a sustained rate
| of 5x per year for 5 years in weekly paid rides.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Building out depot and charging infrastructure and working
| with city officials are both slow processes, so I imagine
| you'll see them prioritize spreading out to a lot of cities
| first, in the most profitable areas (downtown), then expand
| the service area in each of them over time as they get more
| cars.
| robot wrote:
| I don't get this. I installed the tesla app and was approved to
| book a drive in 1 week (last week). I've been in the Waymo
| waiting list for at least 6 months, and still haven't gotten
| approval and can still only book in SF. They do move slow.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| They've been scaling paid rides per week by about 5x every year
| for the past 5 years, that is fast in my book.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Still...no Seattle.
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