8/21/2026 at 7:34:40 PM
Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory.They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.
by xnx
8/21/2026 at 10:24:11 PM
I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant traffic.So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.
by lanstin
8/22/2026 at 3:55:06 AM
Fwiw the accessibility options have a setting to avoid across the street dropoffsby Rebelgecko
8/22/2026 at 7:26:59 PM
I'd settle for "on the same block" pick up/drop off. For some reason, Waymo has decided my street is a busy street in the middle of the night when it isn't, so even if I override it to stop down the street where there's plenty of space for traffic to go around the Waymo, it only gives me a short 2 minutes or else it'll drive off. Which would be less of a problem if it didn't decide to also change the location of the pickup last minute as well. It's enough of a problem that I've switched back to Uber/Lyft if I'm not feeling like dealing with it.by fragmede
8/22/2026 at 12:27:43 AM
That seems like something not hard to fix, I am surprised they haven't already addressed it. Uber, as a comparison, absolutely narrows down the drop-off & pickup to the side of the road you want. I would demand the same of Waymo.by rootusrootus
8/22/2026 at 12:32:55 AM
Waymo also lets you pick, but only from a predetermined list of pickup/dropoff locations. Sometimes there's not a spot on the side of the street you'd want, other times it will default to a spot on the other side of the street but you can override.by tfehring
8/22/2026 at 3:36:48 AM
Your market may vary, but I can assure you that in Phoenix, you can drop the pin practically anywhere that's safe and legal.The app has changed the method a few times. It used to show green or blue segments for valid spots, but today as it is, I just pick up the pin, drop it, hope for the best. It also demonstrates which way the car will be facing.
Dropping a precise pin on the map is no guarantee that it will actually stop right there, depending on the situation on the ground when it arrives. But, you can still adjust the pin while the car waits, or you can hit the "Pull Forward" button to try and improve it.
The app has also been updated to disallow adjustment of multiple dropoffs beyond the initial stop. So if you want a precise pin-drop in a multi-stop trip, you need to intervene along the way, instead of during your initial setup.
There was a recent case reported in the news, where people were trying to Waymo to the San Bruno airport, but their pin got dropped off in a residential neighborhood. This was apparently because Waymo doesn't directly serve the airport's lanes yet, so the pin dropped as close as possible, but the residents of that street were nonplussed about the results. So were the airline passengers who were lugging luggage!
by ButlerianJihad
8/22/2026 at 8:23:28 PM
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/waymo-receives-permit-oper...Waymo does have a permit too go to SFO now, so it's only a matter of time.
by fragmede
8/21/2026 at 8:35:41 PM
Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place?Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.
by liliumregale
8/21/2026 at 8:54:24 PM
Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.by xnx
8/21/2026 at 10:24:51 PM
Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop.The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
by egypturnash
8/21/2026 at 10:47:24 PM
I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.by pnw
8/21/2026 at 11:54:24 PM
I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)by egypturnash
8/22/2026 at 11:40:14 AM
Yeah but the plan of "ban them because the taxi drivers union said so" is ludicrous. Why not have a partial integration with re-training programs for existing taxi drivers, and work with the city council to establish laws that effectively strip Waymo of its profits for operating in the city, making them only barely break even, and siphoning the rest of the funds into the aforementioned retraining programs and transport infrastructure more broadly. Even a 3% profit margin in one of the largest markets in the world is better than none at all, Waymo is effectively forced to comply with any measures NYC imposes. This doesn't have to be the case nationally either: many areas are relatively underserved by even Uber and Lyft, and there is plenty of room for Waymo in those markets, and I imagine those "empty" parts of the US, in total, eclipse the size of NYC. There, it will be nothing but a boon. But in established cities like NYC, it is almost certainly best practice to keep as much profit in the local economy as possible, since Waymo is not, in the end, drastically multiplying economic productivity in those cities.by DiscourseFan
8/22/2026 at 8:12:57 PM
Then again, the areas underserved by Uber/Lyft are underserved because they're bad neighborhoods so drivers won't go there. How many Waymos need to be torched or their passengers carjacked before Waymo decides to stop going there? Fun fact, if you throw a traffic cone at the Waymo, it panics and stops moving, meaning your can now break the rear windows and assault the passengers for their valuables. If you wear a mask and leave your phone at home, there's no recourse for the passengers.by fragmede
8/22/2026 at 10:55:27 PM
I was thinking of rural areas, not dangerous neighbourhoods, which are already served by uber/lyftby DiscourseFan
8/22/2026 at 12:42:29 AM
Allow Waymo and leave the choice up to residents. If they want to pay a driver they can.by xnx
8/22/2026 at 1:53:53 AM
Nobody is keeping money in anybody's pockets. What you are advocating for is a tax on NYC people to force them to use human drivers instead of new technology. Just like the toll booth operators of the 90s.It is so disappointing to see the tech class advocate for laws that keep jobs that are unhealthy and lead to nowhere (cabbies) instead of moving the country forward (and those people getting other, hopefully better, jobs). But again, that type of short-sighted, zero-sum/socialist thinking is becoming more common, sadly.
by matchbok3
8/21/2026 at 9:48:26 PM
Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".by cyberax
8/21/2026 at 9:56:44 PM
30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus?No contest.
by realo
8/21/2026 at 10:20:16 PM
No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.by xnx
8/22/2026 at 12:42:54 AM
Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long.A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long.
So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational costs for paying a driver probably make the Waymo more financially efficient in that situation.
I suspect robotaxis will become very important in suburban areas with distributed jobs where buses don’t work well. In busy cities there simply isn’t the roadspace to replace buses with robotaxis (or any other form of car) for commuting.
by laurencerowe
8/22/2026 at 8:00:50 PM
The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it? Once the technology is proven, there's no reason you can't put the Waymo or other self-driving technology in a bus. A bus designed for a dozen people instead of 30, and a fleet of them that did point to point rides instead of a fixed route, just all booked via the app so you share rides with other people. I dare say that would be the best of both worlds.by fragmede
8/23/2026 at 6:42:23 AM
> The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it?It will depend on the area. Where I am in San Francisco we have articulated buses designed for 100+ people running every few minutes above BART. (We probably need more BART stations.) There’s simply not enough road space for smaller buses (let alone cars) to carry commuter traffic downtown.
(I’ve never worked downtown though so always drove to work in desolate Silicon Valley office parks.)
Even in my smaller UK home city (250k people) you need double decker 70+ capacity buses running every 15 minutes on two routes from city centre to university to handle demand because the jobs are not so distributed.
by laurencerowe
8/22/2026 at 6:14:13 AM
Road damage scales hypercubically with axle weight, so an 11 ton 2-axle bus does ~1400 times more damage to the road than a 1.8 ton Tesla.by hackingonempty
8/22/2026 at 11:37:18 AM
This is the right way to think about it. Larger buses make sense when there are a lot of people going to and from the same places at the same time, but I think that is much more rare in my city after remote work became widespread.by xnx
8/22/2026 at 1:52:28 AM
> A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long.A more reasonable taxi for single riders is going to weigh around 1.5 tons (e.g. the prototype Tesla Robocab).
You also incorrectly assume that the efficiency depends linearly on weight. It doesn't, it depends more on aerodynamics, speed, and the number of stops. London buses (11 tons) average around 2.2 kWh/mi, Tesla Model 3 is at 0.21 kWh/mi while weighing 1.8 tons.
by cyberax
8/21/2026 at 11:51:41 PM
Maybe it's different where you live, but 95% of the buses I see driving around here are completely empty.by tjwebbnorfolk
8/22/2026 at 12:19:06 AM
Are you near the city center, or out near the suburbs? It's common for a bus to be crowded on one part of the route and nearly empty at the end.by fwip
8/22/2026 at 12:29:24 AM
And this is a fundamental issue with transit. It _has_ to travel as mostly empty on avereage to be useful.by cyberax
8/23/2026 at 12:34:32 AM
Its not a meaningful issue. The passenger density is higher on even a mostly empty bus than cars, and the pollution is lower as well.by fwip
8/22/2026 at 8:15:16 PM
...no? In the heart of downtown, with people riding in both directions, I don't see how it follows that it has to mostly empty to be useful. If it's full you can't get on so that's not useful, but anything less than totally full should still be useful.by fragmede
8/23/2026 at 9:54:26 PM
Because most of the mileage is not burned downtown, it's burned by having a bunch of empty buses drive way out of town and pick up in 0 or 1 or 2 people until it fills up right near the center.by tjwebbnorfolk
8/24/2026 at 2:04:36 PM
If you look at average ridership over time, you'll see that the times when it has 40-60 people on it give an average passenger density much higher than cars, even after averaging in the longer empty miles. (40 passengers is a pretty comfortable, not crowded bus.) Simplifying, but a mile of 40 people, averaged with 10 miles of 1 person, is still an average of 5 people. And those are deliberately bad numbers. As I understand it, average bus occupancy in Seattle is around 10 or 15 people per bus, during non-commuting hours. (Commute is often quite crowded).by fwip
8/23/2026 at 9:53:14 PM
I'm a half-mile from downtown. Yes I'm sure it's crowded downtown, but most of the mileage is not burned downtown, it's burned by driving way out of town and bringing in 0 or 1 or 2 people until it fills up right near the center.Buses appear way more efficient than SOVs until you actually spend a couple minutes of critical thinking to realize they're not
by tjwebbnorfolk
8/21/2026 at 10:22:43 PM
Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places.People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them.
Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and have data about where they’d have the most impact. Internet at large would probably decry it as enshittification.
by phoghed
8/22/2026 at 8:32:45 AM
> Waymo could make a bus too anywayOh hell no. Cars are bad enough from the damage they can cause by kinetic energy, but a bus? Especially a bus where people don't wear seatbelts or, worse, are standing?
by mschuster91
8/22/2026 at 12:45:38 PM
> don't wear seatbeltsI just want to point out that the safety record of public transit drivers is typically impeccable. There is no safer vehicle out on the roads except buses and trains. I have been a rider of public transit for 50 years, minus about a decade when I owned a car, and in 3 different major cities, and literally I've never been aboard a bus that hit another vehicle, hit any obstacle, or had a reportable accident. Literally never happened. (I was aboard a light rail train that collided with an SUV, but that's a whole other ballgame.)
I've never felt unsafe without a seat belt on board a bus. Seat belts in cars may be a bit of a panacea, but I challenge you to find any metropolitan area where the buses have accidents, much less injury accidents, on a weekly basis.
by ButlerianJihad
8/22/2026 at 7:40:22 PM
Well, you'd need to crash for that too be an issue. We have to wait for the data to prove it out, but I much prefer a Waymo driver than a human one, especially if I'm walking home right after the bars close.by fragmede
8/22/2026 at 11:46:30 AM
It would probably be safer than most bus drivers currently, so I don't see the issue. The discomfort around damage being caused by statistical anomalies vs individual error is not a rational one if the former is, in the aggregate, smaller than the latter. Individuals have stories, but societies operate more closely in line with the laws of physics: probabilistic at the small scale, deterministic more broadly. From that view, we are just replacing one statistical possibility with another, one which will result in less people dying; or, more importantly, less likelihood you or your loved ones will die because of a bus accident.by DiscourseFan
8/21/2026 at 11:52:09 PM
Bus was just fine in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.by malnourish
8/22/2026 at 12:30:49 AM
> Bus was just fine in PortlandYes, if you live within about 1 mile of downtown and also work there. If you live downtown and your job is in Beaverton, you're likely in for a 90 minute commute. Or if you live in Beaverton and your office is downtown. Portland's mass transit is adequate for a subset of people and completely impractical for most.
Source: I've lived in and around Portland for 50 years. Worked downtown much of it, and have lots of friends and former colleagues who used public transit. You have to really want to not have a car because the time commitment is real.
by rootusrootus
8/22/2026 at 8:09:20 PM
That 90 minute commute by bus isn't one where you're driving though. A strict time comparison ignore the fact that the bus or train ride merely requires you to get out when you reach your destination. You don't have to sit in stop and go traffic driving. Sitting in traffic driving sucks unless you have comma.ai or equivalent. Mentally it's just exhausting by the time you get home/to work. If you have to drive and can shitpost HN for those 90 minutes, vs trying to do that while driving (don't do that), then who cares if it takes a bit longer? There's obviously too much longer, but still.by fragmede
8/22/2026 at 1:13:20 AM
Okay, but clearly there’s a difference between, “the bus makes sense if you live or work near downtown,” and, “people only ride the bus when there is no other option,” as the GP said.by derektank
8/22/2026 at 5:18:43 PM
Yeah theres a couple spots that it’s fine for people that have never experienced what’s actually possible.by phoghed
8/22/2026 at 11:41:56 AM
Bus is fine in select areas at current fares, but would be less popular if people realize each drive costs more like $16 in total instead of the $2 fare they pay.by xnx
8/21/2026 at 11:25:16 PM
An average bus load in the US is around 18 people. So if you just compute the raw bus emissions, then an electric bus is maybe about 2x more efficient than personal EVs.But wait, there's so much more!
A single bus/subway ride costs about $20, which is a surprisingly consistent figure for various US cities. In NYC it's $17, for example. I'm talking about the _true_ cost, as in: "yearly operational budget divided by the number of trips". And most of this cost comes from 3-4 drivers that every bus needs, not from the hardware itself.
Price is a pretty reliable proxy for CO2 emissions for general market goods and services. And with these kinds of numbers, personal cars are competitive. Even if we factor in subsidized road maintenance cost ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ).
If we now add mild carpooling, so that a single robotaxi drives 2-3 people, then classic transit just dies. It's like comparing horse-drawn carriages with steam trains.
by cyberax
8/22/2026 at 12:22:24 AM
Most of the cost comes from paying the drivers, but also cost is a proxy for emmissions?by NicuCalcea
8/22/2026 at 12:28:05 AM
Yes? Why is this strange?Drivers emit a lot of CO2, just like every person in the US. A driverless car allows these emissions to be reallocated to other more productive areas.
by cyberax
8/22/2026 at 10:42:35 AM
You're counting emissions from a person's breathing as part of the vehicle's emissions?by NicuCalcea
8/22/2026 at 11:45:06 AM
People take their salaries and buy food, clothes, heating and air conditioning, cars and fuel, and plane tickets, and furniture. All of those things generate emissions in their production and/or transportation. This is why dollars is such a good proxy for co2 emissions.by xnx
8/22/2026 at 1:46:29 PM
Surely a person driving 18 people will emit less than each person driving themselves? I can see how dollars can be a proxy for macroeconomic stuff, for example by comparing countries, but it doesn't make much sense for comparing individual units of transport.I don't understand why we have to do napkin maths to guess what's more polluting. There is countless research showing buses emit less than individual cars per passenger per km, self-driving or not.
And there's no reason buses can't be self-driving as well, if anything, them driving slower, on dedicated lanes and on fixed routes would make it much easier.
by NicuCalcea
8/22/2026 at 4:35:24 PM
> Surely a person driving 18 people will emit less than each person driving themselves?No. A person driving themselves does not create any _incremental_ CO2 emissions. They don't need a dedicated full-time position to do the driving.
> There is countless research showing buses emit less than individual cars per passenger per km, self-driving or not.
Care to share it? I actually read through most of highly cited articles in this area, and it's not at all so clear-cut. For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
by cyberax
8/24/2026 at 2:58:23 PM
The very source you are providing is pretty clear to me. For cars, only hybrids and EVs are more efficient, and that is because it's comparing electric passenger cars with all buses (most of which still run on fossil fuels). There is no data for electric buses, but it's pretty intuitive to me that they would emit less per passenger kilometre than an electric car.by NicuCalcea
8/22/2026 at 4:24:09 PM
A single bus journey is $20? That's insanely expensive.by Peanuts99
8/22/2026 at 4:28:15 AM
> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory.In the last two years there have been dozens of incidents of Waymos obstructing first responders in life-threatening situations. Every major metropolitan area Waymo has deployed in, the police departments have reported extensive issues with Waymos obstructing officers and emergency vehicles, and worse, their remote support staff often being unable to do anything about it.
If that's "so far ahead" of everyone else, then we are pretty fucked.
by KennyBlanken
8/22/2026 at 7:31:55 PM
> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo isWhat are you comparing it to though? Tesla Robotaxi service is fine, there's a safety driver that isn't really supposed to talk, and I'd say that Zoox is better than Waymo, except getting rides on that is very limited so I have less experience with it. I like the Zooclx vehicles way more than even the new Waymo Ohai vehicles. I think there's a fourth competitor in this space currently active but I can't remember their name off the top of my head. Cruise is defunct though they were mostly fine as well.
The real quandary is for the cars to freak out if something happens and just stop and sit there, while a human driver is going to drive off if you're getting eg carjacked.
by fragmede
8/22/2026 at 3:01:21 AM
So are they? I know that tesla is behind, but they have so many simulation miles, several generations of their own hardware, and lots of people behind the wheel taking over.I've also seen the autonomous waymo vans, which seem nice too.
Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead?
How do the finances look and does financial solvency count? will someone run out of money first?
There have been two waymo articles (about sensors, and now about hardware), is this a sign they are worried?
I am actually wondering.
by m463
8/22/2026 at 11:47:14 AM
> Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead?Yes. Waymo is doing something like 400K fully autonomous rides per week and Tesla is doing hundreds or low thousands of supervised rides.
by xnx
8/23/2026 at 3:32:38 AM
Tesla has 1.5m subscribers to FSD, maybe that's millions of drives per day (or two)by m463
8/21/2026 at 10:56:57 PM
FWIW they started actively testing in Chicago a few months ago. I frequently see them around town nowby classictraffic
8/22/2026 at 12:43:35 AM
Yes! I've seen cars as far north as Evanston and as far west as Oak Park.by xnx
8/22/2026 at 2:15:18 AM
I’m glad you said it because as a 40 something nerd roboticist taking a Waymo is nothing short of a miracle to me.I mean drafting code on my phone with chatgpt in a Waymo is legitimately some Jestons shit and I’m not hearing otherwise.
Amazing
by AndrewKemendo
8/22/2026 at 12:45:05 PM
And that's not even pointing out that also makes Waymo the most advanced robotics company.by xnx