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Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!

Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.

> when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion

Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.

You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow?

Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that?

While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.

Waymo isn't really the answer to congestion, busses and other public transport solutions are. If Waymo is the answer, what is the question?

Q: How can I get to the gym and use the treadmill without having to walk all the way to the bus stop?

Its been proven over and over, and there are tons of studies that show that more lanes doesnt help congestion.

> more lanes doesnt help congestion

It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand.

And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees.

Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.

Streets with parked cars are residential and don’t need better throughput. They need safety rails so little kids can exist without being run over. They need to be exempt from gps routing so people can quietly live their lives.

In some places throughput isn’t needed… safety is.

You could widen sidewalks, place bike lanes, or plant trees in those parking spaces for the equivalent effect. Also the residential dichotomy isn’t true for lots of areas of the city. I live next to an office building, for example.

Who said they had to be car lanes

>Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion.

Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.

Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option.

Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.

Anecdotally, what I observe in SF is empty waymo cars driving around

Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.

That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.

> Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.

But that's not what congestion means.

It's adding indirectly, more space taken by parking lots means that you have to spread further, which begets the need for more cars

Less parking spaces > denser enviroments > more walking(Or other more compact forms of transport) > less cars (To an extent) > less congestion

The US has multiple (smaller) countries worth of parking space

I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.

It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive)

There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse.

I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.

On the same idea, I think the densest enviroments are a bad comparisson There's a noticeable middle ground between US Style Sprawl and say, Tokyo

But the alternative to Tokyo isn't Tokyo but with 20 million cars, it just stops being Tokyo

Density accounts for situations that expansion can't

So optimal would be to get entirely rid of private and single user vehicles likes taxis. Thus density could be maximised.

If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)

Robo-taxis can pack significantly more densely into a dedicated parking space than regular cars. Snout to butt and no room side to side, as there's no need for maneuvering. A robo-taxi parking lot just becomes a dense FIFO queue.

Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.

One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership.

The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers.

Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis?

Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.

> It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.

That’s because you live with scarce and expensive taxi service. I know plenty of people in Dubai who use taxi or uber/Careem for their daily commute and I have done so in periods too.

Cheap taxi could be only if there are cheap cars and cheap (imigrant) labor available.

Or cheap cars and no labor, which is the entire goal of driverless taxis

Nothing about autonomous driving—how it's being pitched, the valuations, hardware, etc—suggests it's going to be cheap

Really? That appears to be one of the primary applications, and it's discussed in many investor calls re Waymo and Tesla. The driver component in the total cost of taxi service is 60-70%. EVs also have a lower total cost of ownership, and this scales with the number of miles driven because electricity is cheaper than gas. Even if the price of EVs stayed exactly as they are, autonomous taxis would cost 70-80% less than convention taxis. That's a market disrupting drop.

Investor calls have bluff to pump stock prices.

Total cost of ownership not always lower, as the depreciation is faster, insurance and repairs costs more.

Cheaper than gas? Depends on your electricity source.

In my country all taxi are LNG-powered and are cheaper/same per km as electric cars.

Some parts of the world, like the countryside of many European countries, if you don't own a car, or are unable to drive for for whatever reason, taxi is the only available transport.

People help to drive the cost down by sharing taxis on common routes.

We have great public transport network, but only if one is lucky enough to live close by to well known cities.

Otherwise, you might have a few bus connections through the day if at all, and they might require walking down the village down to the closest stop a few km away.

> Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis?

Why wouldn’t the cost of car ownership be a factor?

It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas.

I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2]

[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...

> it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation

Anecdote: I wouldn’t be able to take public transit to the airport in San Francisco or New York without the last (EDIT: first) mile being done in a rideshare. The alternative would be calling a private car for the whole journey.

I don’t know what you mean by this, unless there’s a personal reason. LGA has a free shuttle bus from the subway, JFK and EWR have AirTrains connected to the subway, and SFO has a direct BART connection. I use public transit exclusively to get to all of those airports.

I have a place on 26th & Broadway. If I have a heavy case or a pet or it’s raining, I need a way to get to Penn Station. And I’m incredibly close to multiple subway stations.

As for the Bay Area, it’s all suburbs.

The scaling problem is the Robotaxi implementation details. Waymo is scalable in the way you describe. Tesla’s Robotaxi current restrictions make is what is holding back scalability.

> Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty,

Maybe in US, turns out most of the rest of the world didn't had the same problem, nor the lack of regulations US suffers from.

Across African countries we were already calling into taxi like systems via WhatsApp, some European countries had taxi apps, and the US gig economy doesn't work here, so not only is Ûber regulated after a few court cases, it is also integrated with the taxi network.