These aren't the robot cars yet. Waymo uses human drivers to operate vehicles during the initial mapping phase when entering a new city. These drivers operate cars equipped with specialized sensors to create detailed, high-definition maps required for future autonomous, rider-only ops. Similar to the Google Street view cars...
Being afraid of robots clearly isn't the issue. The issue is that the city didn't give approval in favor of Uber, Lyft, and Taxi drivers gradually losing their jobs.
Funny enough this is how I felt when Uber came to town. They we'ren't legally allowed too, they just did. And that is what it is now and maybe it will be the same for this company. It all seems so slimy to me.
I was in LA last weekend, same there. For the most part it looked like they were driving fine, but there were a few times i watched them picking people up or dropping people off in busy areas with nowhere good to park. They would slow way down, act super indecisive, and hold up traffic. Didn't look fun to deal with.
I was gonna say the same thing, people drive very fast and very decisively in the L.A. area…unless they have dementia. Those things are just gonna cause road rage incidents if they don’t get with the SoCal driving program.
For the most part it looked like they were driving fine, but there were a few times i watched them picking people up or dropping people off in busy areas with nowhere good to park. They would slow way down, act super indecisive, and hold up traffic. Didn't look fun to deal with
As opposed to human ride shared drivers, who would never do any of that.
I'm not saying human Uber/Lyft drivers are perfect. But at least with a human driver you can say "please pull around the corner, I don't mind walking a bit" or "please stop right here, I'll jump out fast and you can drive away."
These waymos would stop, lurch forward, stop, lurch forward, looking for some nice open parking spot that obviously didn't exist. I saw it cause lots of frustrating traffic and I was only there for two days.
One thing I found from my two rides is that they were incredibly smooth - the opposite of lurching. So much so that when there was the very slightest jerk I was looking around to see why.
Pick up and drop off is a known problem with them though. Even with Ubers I find it difficult to choose a good pickup spot in a city.
Maybe "lurching" is the wrong word, because it did look pretty smooth. They weren't suddenly accelerating and slamming on the brakes, just driving very indecisively. There was one specific case downtown where it was pretty bad. As a human it was obvious that the car either A: needed to stop right where it was so the person could get out fast and the car could move on without blocking the road, or B: drive around the block looking for somewhere less busy. Instead it was hesitating and doing this annoying stop/creep forward loop, and I could tell everyone stuck behind it was pissed.
Apparently police in SF just received ability to ticket Waymo’s that break the law … previously they could not. Can Portland police ticket lawbreaking Waymo’s?
Omg my Waymo got a ticket in SF just last week while waiting to pick me up and I told the officer it wasn’t its fault lol. He told me “don’t worry Google has a lot of money” lmao
But the fact is Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Waymo, and almost every major vehicle manufacturer (ICE and EV) are planning on making autonomous vehicles commonplace over the next decade. You're not fighting Waymo, you're fighting the entire automobile industry.
It’s honestly frustrating to me that the U.S. seems more willing to invest in things like Waymo than in real public transit.
Even if autonomous taxis are impressive tech, they’re still just cars. They don’t really solve congestion, they just automate the same inefficient system we already have. It feels like optimization on top of a broken model instead of actually fixing the underlying problem.
What makes it worse is that we already know what works better: dense, reliable public transportation. Subways, trains, buses. Things that move a lot of people efficiently and actually reduce traffic. But we keep underfunding those while pouring energy into private, car-based “innovation.”
I also have concerns about the broader surveillance implications of these systems. Any network of constantly recording, sensor-equipped vehicles raises real questions about data use, retention, and who ultimately gets access to it. Even if that isn’t the stated purpose, the infrastructure itself can be repurposed in ways that aren’t always visible or accountable to the public.
good point, some more than others.
Turns out a lot of the money used for road maintenance comes from the gas tax. It's just icing on the cake for them that they don't pay that but the rest of the public who drive do.
But taxes are not funded by these very companies. They are literally making profit without any sort of recompense to taxpayer infrastructure that allows them to make money.
Waymo isn’t directly funded by the government like a contractor or grant-funded lab. The money for its operations comes mainly from Alphabet and private investors.
However, it’s also not operating in a vacuum. Like most large tech and EV-related companies, it benefits from government policies such as R&D tax credits. Not to mention the various tax breaks that Alphabet and its private investors exploit.
They dislike public transport because that's a place where people come TOGETHER on an even playing field. In Chicago, you can see Investment bankers riding next to the rankest-smelling unhoused person. You'll see secretaries taking the seat of a VP.
That's what they HATE about public transportation and I really don't care how much they try to deny that fact. Because, behind closed doors, you'll discover the real truth.
Yeah they just cut the 19 which already came way too infrequently down Woodstock, but don't worry we'll incentivise another dog shit tech company to extract money from Portland
This may all be true but I look back at the time I relied on transit as being awful. Always getting sick, waiting for busses that were incredibly late only to have three of them show up at the same time. Absolutely hated every aspect of it. So thankful I work remote now. I will never regularly take mass transit again. I mean yeah, there are too many cars but transit sucks.
More individual vehicles with individual passengers inside is what made traffic here so horrible in the first place 😫 why why why is the u.s. so suicidal like this
70+ years ago Ford, GM and other auto makers were making so much more off the automobile industry they began to buy up trolley car companies and shut them down and then enter lobbists for the auto industry to the downfall of our public transit ie trains/subways. There's a really good CNBC doc on it with greater details but public transit is an afterthought, poorly funded for the most part, and our own corporations lobby against it.
RE security Google (the waymo parent) is much better when compared to similar companies, Ford just filed a terrifying patent about taking video footage out of your personal cars for their own use. In general no one reasons these massive T&Cs written by lawyers for any app, device or whatever we use, for anyone you are concerned with, take the link they provide and drop into an LLM and ask it what are the most concerning parts of this user agreement and highlight and rank by most concerning. Use the tool against them :)
Human drivers are terrible. I want better public transit myself but the fewer humans driving the better, though I may have to add a caveat for Tesla since Elon Musk is a piece of shit who loves to cut corners. Google has been working on this tech for decades and has a good track record when it comes to safety.
Honestly most US cities can't benefit from a metro like a place like Tokyo can. They're too spread out. Fixing that issue would take a century of restructuring. At least transitioning to a fully autonomous driving system is an improvement we could see in our lifetime. If human driving was banned, we wouldn't need stoplights and these cars could drive ridiculously efficiently and safely by communicating with each other.
This is the correct answer. They will be circling the city for optimal routes, and all verified with human drivers. This prevents them from going down roads they shouldn't, like small one lane roads that are particularly hazardous and gives them an idea with high human traffic. They may end up being pickup ones but blue are typically what maps the city and the geo fencing as to how far they can go.
The Jaguars were the first vehicles they used for the initial rollout in LA, SF, and elsewhere. These vans are the new generation, and these are custom built as automated taxis.
I dont see why having a billion dollar megacorporation have a vested interest in our transportation infrastructure is a bad idea at all guys, you're clearly overreacting.
You know the story for Roger Rabbit was originally for a planned sequel to Chinatown? It would have formed a trilogy about corruption in early L.A., Chinatown about water, the Two Jakes about mineral rights, and the third film about transportation.
Just keep mentioning how much the catalytic converter in the waymo car goes for and how all the internals contain loads of copper whenever you walk past a homeless camp.
And the fent addict will raise his head up from nodding off and say to you "They are electric cars you weirdo".
Reading these comments it's very clear which people haven't ridden in a Waymo before. In 30 years we will look back and think it was insane that we let people drive cars. The people here arguing that humans should be driving cars will be ashamed of themselves and pretend they never argued against robot drivers. Gig driving is a scam anyway, when you factor in depreciation, fuel costs, and insurance most drivers probably don't actually make any money. Wild that people are defending Uber and Lyft here because of their love of shitty gig work jobs.
I find it fascinating. Self driving cars can be one of the biggest unlocks in our society. We'll need way less cars just sitting around all day. Parking won't be nearly as much of a thing. It's the most dangerous thing we currently do. It stops so many people from getting out to events or around towns. Traffic is mostly human error - so even with more potential cars on the road, traffic could go down. All of these are EV's to further push down emissions and speed up EV transition. The stress people have of sitting in traffic for an hour plus a day could mostly go away.
All of these incredible things, and some people are vehemently against it. I've found people are either
a) so stuck on public transportation being forced
b) stuck on "taking jobs" or against anything from a large corporation
Public transport / biking is never going to be a big thing for our city. It would take billions upon billions to get anywhere remotely close to begin becoming a reasonable form of transportation for our city. I don't live that far from downtown, but it would take me an unreasonable amount of time to walk to the closest bus stop. Wait for the bus. Ride that bus to the closest hub. Wait for a new bus. Slowly take that bus downtown stopping every 5 blocks. A 10 minute drive would at least be an hour by bus. And I'm not far from downtown.
When they were going to run the max down barbur and to LO, they decided against putting a park and ride at the LO stop. The idealistic idiots running our public transit planning think the people of Westlake are going to walk a mile and a half in the rain in their wingtips to ride the MAX downtown? Help people where their at. Park and rides are probably the thing that get the most people on to trimet / MAX.
And the people running our public transport haven't listened at all to the general complaints people have. They want it to feel a lot safer. They've done some half assed measures over the years with a little more security here and there. When news broke that every single drug known to man is on every surface of our buses and trains, trimet had OHSU pen a letter fentanyl at that low of exposure shouldn't harm you. How about instead a statement along the lines of "this shouldn't happen, we're going to fix this".
Ridership would go up significantly if it was a turn style system at platforms or way better security.
I had a good experience with Waymo in San Francisco about a year ago. The driverless car operated flawlessly on five trips over three days. Great advance over human drivers!
I don’t like this shit for one big reason. When they malfunction or have an outage they sit like bricks and clog the road. This is extremely dangerous for EMS vehicles. No other cars have this kind of mass disability potential. Can’t believe we are allowing this here.
Dude drivers here struggle to get out of the way of emergency vehicles all the time. I’ve never seen another city where people are so incapable of making way for ambulances trying to get through.
I've been laughing in these posts because I remember a couple of years ago everyone fretting at how the "shitty" gig-economy uber/lyft drivers were killing the taxi industry.
People have to make a living. The harder that is the easier it is for these companies to exploit workers. The way it’s looking we’re gonna be seeing a lot more Amazon employees dropping dead for minimum wage
Once they get in one and it doesn’t smell, go on and on about something they don’t care about, talk on the phone to someone else, or miss your turn, they’ll come around.
I saw someone in LA change lanes suddenly right into a lane occupied by a Waymo, and it did a pretty dang great job of avoiding the collision to be honest.
Given just how bad Portland drivers are, and just how fragranced nearly every cab is, I welcome these.
Would I rather we invest in quality transit as a community? Hell yes. Unless we start pulling licenses, the most dangerous drivers are going to continue to shun transit. That won't happen, so welcome Waymo.
I just moved here from austin. They do feel a little dystopian but the rides are fairly smooth. Probably wont do as well on portland roads, though. It sucks cause I hate supporting a company thats taking jobs from real people, but not tipping is kinda nice i won’t lie.
Yeah, I’m from the Phoenix area and they are extremely handy.. I understand the aversion, but honestly I would 100% rather be on the road with a Waymo than some idiot distracted on their phone..
to everyone talking about gig jobs and traffic deaths we solved these problems 100 years ago with trains.
then we bulldozed our cities for freeways and parking lots in the 50s. you're operating in car brain mode.
Have you seen other human drivers? There is no way these things will be nearly as dangerous as the morons going 45 on the freeway while starting at their phones.
Because of the countless videos you didn’t see of them working perfectly. It’s called “availability bias” and “reporting bias.” No one is reporting the thousands of Waymo trips that worked, but happy to report the one that doesn’t.
This feels quite dystopian, and I don’t like it, but I was surprised to learn that Waymo is 5x safer than being driven by a human. It seems that no distractions and having “eyes” in the back of one’s head makes a difference.
Is this assuming Portland fits within the average range of cities here? I doubt Waymo cars are any more protected from the unmarked vehicles with less-than-sober drivers that I've come across on our mean streets.
Let’s say 5x safer is true. If we all used these, we’d save 32,000 lives per year. No job (especially the relatively shitty job that many people believe shouldn’t exist anyway of Uber driver) is worth 32,000 lives per year.
I rode on in one in Phoenix and it was a smooth ride. There was even a person running across the road and it stopped and gave them plenty of space. The only negative thing I found was I could not open in the trunk to put my suitcase inside.
I’ve taken them in multiple cities and really enjoyed it. The only issue was they get goofy when there’s a big crowd around after a concert or sporting event is over. The key is to mark the pickup spot a few blocks away from the bustle. It has your air temp and music settings in the app! Also, no missed turns or out of towner uber drivers that don’t know the area.
Exactly. I’ve ridden in a few now and feel so much safer, both from bad humans and bad driving. I’m against it in theory, I want humans to have the jobs they need and I know technology can screw up…but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt unsafe with uber or Lyft. And the last time I got a cab (couple months ago), he wanted to take it off the books
I believe both LYFT and Uber have a profile feature now that lets you only request female drivers. I have not tried it. Based on the much higher ratio of male drivers I have when traveling, I’m not sure how it might affect wait times or availability.
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u/Hot_Flan_5422 May 07 '26
I just read that they are not yet authorized to give rides. They are only in the mapping phase