‘when will Waymo come to my city?’
Waymo on Friday posted an item to its Waypoint blog with a short update on its popularity and commensurate expansion plans for the future. In the new blog post, the Alphabet-owned company boasted about completing “hundreds of thousands of weekly fully autonomous trips and over 100 million miles of public road experience.”
“Today, the Waymo Driver can navigate new cities safely and faster, validated by our expansion from Phoenix to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and soon Miami, Washington, D.C., and Dallas,” Waymo wrote. “Operating in 5+ major U.S. cities and testing across the country and Tokyo has strengthened our system, creating a robust and adaptable Waymo Driver that can expand to new cities.”
As this story’s headline quotes, Waymo says the top question it gets from people is when its robotaxis will start rolling around the streets of their cities. I wonder that myself here in the Bay Area too, as there are parts of the region—namely, the East Bay—which currently isn’t served by Waymo. Uber and Lyft are entrenched there, of course, but not Waymo. In all honesty, I acknowledge the tone of the company’s blog post is self-congratulatory; it’s important to recognize the function of a company-run blog—by any company, not just Waymo—but its laudatory messaging is deserved in at least one respect. As I’ve written numerous times, I’m a huge fan of Waymo’s product for its accessibility; without any hyperbole, Waymo has utterly transformed how (and when) I get around as a lifelong member of the Blind and low vision community. I won’t rehash my platitudes here, but suffice it to say, the autonomous driving technology is ducking cool and speaks to my tech nerd soul, while the “taxi” essence of the service makes getting around my city of San Francisco eminently more accessible. In other words, while the journalist in me is keenly aware of skepticism surrounding safety and other issues—Waymo isn’t without its warts, after all—the more salient message for me is as a user who more or less is dependent upon third parties for transportation. That Waymo gives me back such strongly explicit agency and autonomy, which then boosts my historically low self-esteem to all-time highs, is neither trivial nor is it fanboyish.
Waymo’s app has earned its permanent place on my iPhone’s Home Screen.
Today’s news from Waymo is complemented by news from The Verge Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana—whom I’ve interviewed before—talked up the company’s aforementioned expansion ambitions on the latest episode of the Hard Fork podcast. “You’re going to start seeing our cars in a lot of cities,” Mawakana told hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of Waymo’s growth. “If you think about our business in terms of scale, we’re currently giving hundreds of thousands of rides every week and, in all likelihood, by the end of next year, we’ll be offering around one million rides per week.”
Anyway, if Waymo is in (or will come to) your city and you haven’t yet tried it, do it.
