Transit rewards
waymo.com
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I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260830071400/https://www.jwz.o...
I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.
Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?
Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...
Portland, Oregon has a similar organization called Metro that I am not familiar with, other than it is similar to the Metropolitan Council. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Oregon_regional_governm...
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
these aren't "good reasons" or unavoidable laws of nature or understandable tradeoffs. it's just a uniquely dysfunctional political system
Cost per passenger trip:
BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73
Passenger Fare collected per trip:
BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45
Subsidy per trip:
BART: $12.57
SF Muni: $6.37
Caltrain: $18.27
Cost per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile
Subsidy per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $0.84/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.26/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $0.94/mile
For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
the person riding transit benefits themselves, and their landlord, and the people driving.
they also benefit their workplace, by both working there, and not having to store a car there, and then anywhere they spend money at their destination, or the transit stops they used.
the value of the transit line is all over the place
Often called 'land value uplift' these days, or 'unearned increment'/'land monopoly rents' in days gone by.
Theoretically in a free market, the landlords will be able to increase rent in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the tenants (short commutes, etc). Likewise, homeowners will sell for a higher price - capturing the value that would be conferred to new owners. A city with good transport demands higher rents in outer suburbs serviced by that transport.
Your workplace likely also rents their premises too. They now have a convenient train station 5 minutes' walk away - and guess what, their landlord ups the rents too. Once again, in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the workplace. The nearby cafes will now increase their coffee price to cover their increased rent.
Although this is the position of most economists, politicians are often reluctant to draw attention to it. Instead, where I live, they use models like commute time saved per person' x 'number of people' x 'average hourly wage'.
You can verify all of this yourself by viewing residential and commercial rental listings in your city.
Many economists have proposed solutions to this problem, often in the form of land value taxes.
The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
So if everyone's value goes up 40% your property tax bill stays the same. If your area climbed faster than others, it goes up but not by 40%.
the property value goes up because of increased demand for it
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
> several cents per vehicle mile
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.
Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.
The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
Unless you try to build housing.
https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...
Tillman cites $1M of costs, of which $200k were 'city fees' (not itemized) and the rest were presumably normal costs for developers/engineers/architects/etc (of course, these would potentially be smaller if there was less regulation). The development start to approval time of 3.5 years is not crazy for a first time 'accidental developer' working on such a large project.
After approval, there seems to have been a~12 month period of bad faith activists slowing down the project. Tillman filed a lawsuit, did a media campaign, and the project was re-approved later in 2018.
He then sold the pre-approved project to a Cresleigh Homes for $13.5 million in early 2019.
So we've had 6 years of financial delays as Cresleigh tries to fund the build vs maybe 1 year of 'bad faith' development approval delays 2017-2018.
And of course - funding the build would have been much easier if the landowner didn't want $13.5 million for an empty lot! (or $12 million if you subtract the development costs). So arguably Tillman did more to delay housing than anyone else.
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
Note that a 12 seat private jet also costs less per passenger mile than BART does. That's not beacuse jets are cheap, but because BART is currently absurdly expensive.
* Few take it because it doesn't meet their need [low denominator]
* Let's spend money to make it meet people's need [numerator goes up]
...
?
It's about cost comparison: SF Muni's operating costs (in terms of costs per passenger mile) are so bloated they're comparable to chartering a helicopter.
This should not be possible, and it's a strong signal of poor fiscal management. SF Muni operates at $3.62 per passenger mile. For comparison, Transport for London (TfL) operates at around $0.50/passenger mile and Shanghai Metro operates at $0.11/passenger mile.
Doesn't the Highway Trust Fund pay for road maintenance as well?
instead you need to find the overall economic benefit and related government revenues from each transit trip, not just the cost of the trip alone
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.
If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, the cost of everything will go down by 30%+ percent.
For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.
Buy America Act makes buses roughly three times more expensive, and then they use decades-old technology due to a lack of competition.
The MTA in NYC has two-person subway crews, which is almost unprecedented in this day and age. BART could be driverless if unions wouldn't revolt.
There's an irony that American unions are strong enough to prevent automatization, but weak enough to fear it (unlike say Denmark or France).
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
SF could be so much more.
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
A lot of people are commenting about "externalities". That's just handwaving.
The real solution is to increase the ridership and the frequency. Public transit must be _reliable_. I live in SF and experience Muni's unreliability first hand.
The reason a person would prefer to drive over taking the Muni is a simple one: she knows the car will be there when she's ready to head back. Muni, on the other hand: one never knows when the next bus will come or if it will come at all. And then the City hands out Muni passes to all homeless people, regardless of behavior. Yesterday I sat down in a Muni train and guess what? A used piece of TP (about a foot long) was blowing around on the floor and everybody was playing dodge-the-TP, trying to jump out of its way. Buses and trains are often not cleaned at the end of the day.
Question is: why doesn't the City subsidize Uber/Waymo etc. also to the tune of $6.37/trip (inside SF)?
What would be the cost of turning all those transit trips into car trips? Would rush hour start at 5 am and end at 10 pm?
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...
This is a part of why there were so many tiny little towns out West which were essentially just a railroad stop and a few buildings.
you can get to hong kong or jspan in hours to days. the train boom is about a century away
Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
Federal and state governments own large parcels of prime NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other metro land, most of which is underutilized. As an example, they operate or sublease numerous surface level parking lots in those places.
The federal government owns a prime parcel on State Street in Chicago, prime real estate, that is completely abandoned. There are many examples of this.
Your solution is to place this responsibility into the hands of those who have shown complete and utter incompetence across successive administrations?
If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.
And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.
Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.
It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.
Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.
So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.
It seems like the best solution would be to implement registration fees to offset externalities like pollution and road wear, and have congestion fees for when the roads are busy (including for vehicles such as busses). Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road. I think if such a system were implemented, the biggest change in behavior would be people taking fewer car trips during peak traffic hours.
is road wear the only cost, or the highest cost to consider of the comparison?
is it even the right comparison, vs a 4 person street car where its running on rails?
is lowest cost even the right thing to optimize for when it might mean people lose jobs?
Is it? Total cost of buying 4 cars, maintaining 4 cars, potential piece failure across 4 cars, calculating and distributing gas for multiple stations for the gas to be available for all 4 users, parking for 4 vehicles...
you distribute the cost, but lower it is not. Having a single bus depo, where you fill them up, clean and have pieces that can be quickly swapped and repair across a fleet is much much cheaper.
Also in last mile trips or low usage areas, you can use smaller vehicles (like vans) instead of full sized buses. Which increases the advantages over cars in terms of weight and space and usage.
> since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.
Cars keep increasing in weight, with Mercedes G Wagon going over the ton
and also problems like space, parking and pollution are exponentially more worrying than road repairs. Which can even taken a step further and removed as a consideration with Trains over buses, which should be a final, last mile solutions or for lower density populations where trains might be too cumbersome.
> Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road.
When you have set up the ENTIRE system around car use, the price signalising would be entirely disregarded. If you have to get to work, and the only option is to use your car because there is no bus, then the price of the road is unavoidable.
The only possible effect is that the price signal is so loud, that they quit their job as their cost to travel is higher than their earnings. In which case businesses would suffer from only being able to hire people who can walk to work.
You would also be at the behest of lobbyist that can (and have) influenced the system to remove externalities that affect them. And oil and car manufacturing would instantly demolish your legislation making the status quo set itself up again.
And for the price signal to work, it should also be available and legible to suers, so the congestion fees should either change like the stock market (to influence real time usage) which means finding out the cost of travel is very difficult. or set up per hours, in which case essential services, and unavoidable commitments (like taking kids to school) become more expensive without a workable alternative. You can use your electronics after the price surge is down from your electric company, but you cant take your kid to school after "Peak Hour congestion charge" has expired.
However, if I need to make an appointment on time, or just reduce morning hassles, I take a Waymo, but afterwards, I may be inclined to take public transit in the return direction. Same distance, similar route, but distinct criteria for budgeting time, money, and mental health.
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
What exactly are we missing with our "ridiculously outdated" busses?
Can you tell me what a "Not outdated" bus looks like to you?
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.
If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.
They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.
They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.
Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).
The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.
Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.
There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis
It's a part of a transit ecosystem that makes it possible to survive without a car. It fills in the the gaps where it's not economical to add train/metro lines.
So the car might need to stop on red multiple times (unless following a bus), while the bus will have most lights automatically turn green in front of it.
If you're sprinkling in little rules like "ah but you couldn't park at C", well, "the bus doesn't go to C" is also a valid restriction I run into often. So often when I take transit, its drive to train station -> take train someplace -> take bus someplace -> walk several blocks to destination -> walk several blocks back to bus stop -> ride bus to train station -> ride train back to train stop -> take car home so a A,B,C,D,C,B,A trip is actually quite common just to do the same as A,D,A with a car.
Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
You have a really dim view of humanity </3
People need to get from point A to point B. Traveling to meet up with friends is in no way gratuitous.
The point is if you start getting into what's gratuitous and what isn't then suddenly everything becomes gratuitous.
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.
In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.
It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
Why not fund public works through taxes and let everyone use it freely? Do you prefer toll roads and going through a toll over literally all the other roads that have no fare? Are roads worse because stupid and poor people can use them too?
Oh, and funny note, most toll roads in the US are in a weird system where you paid for it's construction with your taxes and then that infrastructure is basically gifted to a company.
Fareless options have been tried before and it comes out to that it makes problems with antisocial behaviour even worse. So I'd say we should just charge fares that cover actual costs, and then for people who can't afford that, provide subsidised fares.
The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.
I've seen Visa branded ads for some e-payment solution in a South-East Asian country. The solution worked with any credit card, but the flyers were clearly Visa marketing material.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)
To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.
If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...
Meanwhile, a waymo to a stadium on that same train line is $26. If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.
This is often the case for any mass transit vs personal transit option.
As for home -> taxi -> mass transit -> taxi -> destination; you have to have a pretty short journey on the mass transit for it to reliably work out cheaper to do home -> taxi -> destination, which pretty clearly restricts the pool of people that applies to.
Amongst other reasons, I use Waymo for covering the last mile of a trip made by bus or light rail in my city (Houston, TX). Our public transit service is very reasonably priced but it would be awesome to get a discount!
> rideshares like Waymo
At least in the US, the traditional taxis were terrible - only way to order is via phone call, you have no idea when your car will arrive, nor how much your trip will cost, there is no easy way to send feedback to driver, and there was a good chance for an generally unpleasant experience...
Uber/Lyft changed this all and actually made the car-for-hire services usable. In my circles, this was the real reason why everyone simply stopped using taxis completely the moment any alternatives appeared.
And Waymo has a nice app and clean experience, and won't take you long way so it can charge you more, hence people group it with rideshares, despite it technically being closer to taxi.
(I understand that in other countries, taxis were much better. Before Lyft, I always felt envious while reading about their taxi systems)
how much cheaper and accessible transportation would be. on the other side uber Lyft etc enabled plenty of people who were perennially unemployed to gain income. while the subsidized rates are gone, seems the ride share companies are making some of their money on food deliveries instead (another place robots could take over ??)
anyways this is a good move from Waymo if only the program can be maintained for 20+ years.
Delivering bombs is much easier, unfortunately.
But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.
A regular road loses capacity with increased speed due to increased distances between cars, braking ripple effects etc.
At 75 mph/120 km/h, two seconds distance is 33 meters, likely enough to fit three more autonomous cars into the same lane.
Also hope it can applied to more rural areas eventually too, where driving is the only realistic option. DUIs, accidents, and whatnot are way higher than they ought to be in these places because there’s few or no alternatives. And you’ll never convince everyone to give up their imbibing.
Home -> waymo -> Caltrain -> Waymo -> sf concert venue
For me smoothly
I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)
> KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...
It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.
Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.
It’s Commuter Rail where this is a net benefit, and honestly the target I’d go after were I Waymo, because selling these vehicles as fleets to large metro services as last-mile for commuter rail service (where busses would travel further with less passenger density) makes a lot of sense compared to huge parking lots.
In the mornings and evenings, the Waymos shuttle commuters to and from the rail station. At all other times, they provide last-mile transit where bus lines can’t reach effectively or consistently. If the cost can be covered by your transit pass, or a transfer can act as a discount, then that’s even better.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
(Is it given that there's a play? Waymo is culturally a little distinct from Google so from personal experience I can't actually rule out that they're just doing this coz they think it would be good for the world).
The more people use it, the easier it is to remove alternatives. Then everyone's movements and spending habits are tracked.
The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.
The VC playbook heavily suggests the latter
What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.
Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.
And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:
> “San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”
Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.
> When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.
Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.
But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.
I do think transit just needs to be better, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they will drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)
I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Without traffic, a car has me (and a friend) curbside in 12 minutes for $30. Even during rush hour, the southbound traffic between the 7th St onramp and the SFO exit is almost never very slow (while NB is always a standstill).
BART is 30 minutes on the train + however long it takes to walk to the station + the transfer from BART to SFO AirTrain to get to the terminal. Minimum 1 hour. Easily another 30 min if you're unlucky with train arrivals. And by getting off BART at the airport stop, you pay a premium fare of $11.80 per person.
I simply don't bother taking the train.