Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.

Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants.

You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off.

Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.

There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.

Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo

With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.

In an automotive setting you can almost always safely decelerate to a full-stop, put on hazards and call it a fail. Good luck trying that in an aircraft over urban areas.

But this assumes the need for a car, but cars are one form of transport. A more wholistic look at transportation with be “Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B.” If you have more services within walking distance, it reduces your need for a car. If there is lots of bike infrastructure, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent trains, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent bus services and bus lanes to get around traffic, it reduces your need for a car.

On the other hand, if there are more cars then you need, at minimum if we imagine self-driving cars, more road capacity. But realistically more roads and more parking. More space for roads is less space for the actual places people want to go, pushing those things farther apart. Being farther apart reduces the number of places you can get to by walking or biking, which means you are more likely to need a car, which means more cars, which means more roads, which means less space for the actual places people want to go, repeat. Cars are basically the worst option in terms of infrastructure cost, land usage per person, personal cost to use/operate, deaths and injuries, etc.

So people will be willing to drive further for cheaper rent, or the self driving car might add a couple extra miles to park somewhere cheaper, so overall congestion would get worse.

So when I have the option I'd rather take the train - of course I also drive a lot of places.

If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.

Because of decades to centuries of investment, holistic planning and expertise, we have one of the best networks in terms of quality, punctuality and density.

It's a plant the trees for future generations kind of deal, especially in Switzerland, because large, "flashy" projects are rare compared to to the more continuous and steady improvements, due to how funding and planning are set up.

Trains to cover the longer distance and micro mobility options to get to exactly where you need to go

Oh the horror, you might have to walk a couple of minutes (probably less time wasted than circling around to find a parking spot, and then walking from it to your destination).

> at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive

Yeah, no. Trains in properly developed networks are extremely frequent. At the off-peakest of off-peak (Sunday late evening), the RER near me is every 15 minutes. During peak hours it's every 5 mins.

The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.

So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.

https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...

Cars will always have a purpose. But if you go to somewhere like The Netherlands, they are much less relied upon - it's more about delivery vans than getting individuals to places.

This is a silly expectation to have. As long as there are roads for cars people will put cars on them.

Trains solve traffic for the people who get on them, not for drivers. The more people taking the train, the fewer people impacted by the traffic.

If public transportation just encourages people to move to the suburbs and commute in every day you've actually just displaced the problem.

As someone who took the N across San Francisco every day for 5+ years: Yes, you would. Imagine a 5 mile journey taking 50 minutes. Even if you can nap or listen to a podcast, it's still a waste of time.

Self-driving cars may help with the actual weakness of transit, which is the long tail of trips. Trips on routes with too few passengers to justify good transit service, and with the trips too long for the last-mile solutions.

This has not been my experience since moving to Manhattan last January. Subways, alone, close the gap between regional rail and most destinations astoundingly well. I haven't yet needed to use a bus (but they seem abundant, too), and I haven't even thought of taking a taxi yet.

Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.

> Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.

How would that make those problems go away? It could probably slightly alleviate them in marginal cases, but any given road has a finite throughput limitation, and once it is reached, it wouldn't matter even if every robo-driver were perfectly synchronized.

You get the bus, or you cycle, which is a life skill any able-bodied adult should have, not limited to cyclists. Of course not everyone is capable of cycling, but not everyone is capable of driving either.

Slightly more realistic: enough people can and do cycle or walk to the train that pressure is relieved on the roads for those who cannot cycle or walk.

Im happy to let Americans be the beta testers

Surely you're describing metro areas? There's no way those five cities add up to 34 million people within city limits, given that none of them have 6 million people.

The MSAs added up to 27 million based on the 2020 census, so "close enough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

That said, Waymo's service areas are nowhere close to covering the full MSAs: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en

- SF doesn't cover East Bay (two thirds of the MSA by population).

- Silicon Valley doesn't cover San Jose, and barely reaches into Sunnyvale (basically just covering the Google Moffett Park office buildings).

- The Phoenix area is missing most of the densest parts of Phoenix itself, as well as anything north / west of the city.

- Los Angeles doesn't even come close to covering the city, much less the rest of LA County or any of Orange County. (Maybe 2-3 million out of 13, from just eyeballing the region.)

On Uber (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16011725?hl=en) there's also Atlanta (which looks like it actually has very nice coverage, other than the western half of the city) and Austin (again focused on downtown / commercial districts) which help drive up the numbers.

The population that's had opportunity to see Waymo in the wild is probably higher because they're testing in quite a few cities now (a sibling commenter mentions NYC, for instance).

Also a lot of UK driving requires communication with other drivers (letting people out, etc.) in a way that US roads don't. I'm not sure how driverless cars can handle that.

I really wish we could get them, because they're great. But I'd say we're talking 10 years behind the US simply because of the extra engineering challenge.

Are they also planning on completely overhauling their economy and tax system to attract the engineers required to make this happen?

And in any case, there's no reason that public transit needs to be self-funded. We don't expect the same of most of our other public services.

I think self-driving cars may eventually become common in areas where cars are currently common. I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates, because it is simply a superior user experience for the majority of people when the government cares to invest in it. (Not to mention far cheaper and more egalitarian.)

I am conveying my lived experience in most European cities I've been to.

We don't have a last mile problem, we have legs for that.

And it's not just the EU. I'm sure that e.g. China and Japan will continue to invest in their excellent public transit infrastructure even when there are more self-driving cars on the road.

These backup warning systems operate at approximately 1,000 Hz, producing sound levels between 97 and 112 decibels.

Santa Monica’s municipal code adds another layer of complexity, prescribing exterior noise limits of approximately 50 decibels during the day and 40 decibels at night.

The continuous operation—with vehicles reversing dozens of times hourly, including during late-night hours—continues to challenge community peace.

So, constant car screaming BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP I'M BACKING UP HERE right outside your residential window. Kinda sucks. A whole lot.

What likely happened now is that SFO got a kick up their backside from the Mayor after the press started asking why it was still dragging its feet, while SJC approved Waymo swiftly.

So its not even about willingness to pay more

Gig drivers are cooked

I would need to see Waymo be able to handle something like Southeast Michigan before I could even get comfortable with trusting it to get me ubered t/o from home for maintaining the vehicle I need to commute when I can take a remote day or two...

And then also delivering that for a good cost.

I put it that way because, I do tip Uber drivers well (unless they cray cray) and they would need to properly 'undercut' uber with whatever model they serve up in more complex areas.

There is no downside to having someone drive you Uber has homogenised the experience.

https://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-ve...

The most important thing for Waymo is scaling up production of LIDAR and maintaining them efficiently. They will have a massive fleet running very sophisticated radar+computers. That's a huge logistical investment when it's a million cars. Those sensors will break or be damaged.

Not having to pay drivers is an enormous source of profit.

There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.

Its a real and verifiable threat to their core business. Much larger rev than waymo (current and future).

Known nickname or typo?

Which can be bad - I often find it easier to just pay for a few minutes parking on dropoff/pickup.

That's way mo' information than needed thanks.

But seriously. I wonder why they have a designated pickup point if it would make sense to spread the cars out to alleviate traffic bottlenecks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38973404

Other drivers aren't your only challenge out there.

Overall though, I think I agree with you.

I've seen them driving around SF as well, but they're not yet available here.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tesla-robotaxi/id6744257048

Direct competitors are uber and Lyft which they can undercut since they don’t pay drivers.

The people who want to take buses and trains will continue to do so although Waymo might sway some with their ease and if pricing is reasonable.

Bikes and e-scooters only get you so far. Last time I was in SF I didn’t see too many bikes but I saw a ton of e-scooters. Are you really taking an e-scooter further than a few blocks? And when it rains?

Self owned cars make sense for longer trips out of the city but parking is a pain and driving is stressful so this is an easy win for Waymo.

It’s cheaper now so they can take market share. And their cost will certainly be lower than Ubers so they can win the pricing battle. But long term monopoly gonna monopoly. Perfect pricing is a given with the wealth in SF and how many rides will be on a business CC.

Even if they were the only one, it would be odd to classify autonomous rideshare as a distinct market given they compete directly with other vehicle for hire services where they have nothing close to monopoly-like power.

(Also, arbitrarily reclassifying things as tips is hard, because legally 100% of tip revenue has to go to workers, not management, and certainly not the company's investors or coffers).