Comment by dangus
3 days ago
Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilization and providing more ways to walk and cycle that feel and are safe.
They’re even bad for drivers as they are more detrimental to traffic than personal car ownership. They take up space on the road even when they aren’t being used to transport anyone.
I think we should spend less time worrying about ride share policy and spend more time working on the root cause of the need to drive so often.
Achieving this goal is not something that necessitates giving up single family homes, or suburbs, or small towns, or the ability to own a personal car, or anything like that.
Being around a Waymo makes me feel WAY safer than being around a human driver. If more cars were replaced, I would probably bike even more.
Seriously, Waymos follow at a respectful distance and overtake me safely. They stop at stop signs. Sometimes they even stop and wait for me to make a decision about which way I'm heading.
It's not "human driver versus waymo driver," it's "car versus no car" or "10 cars versus 2 cars" or "fast cars versus slow cars."
No, it's the human driver vs the Waymo. I'm not going to entertain fantasies where all the cars magically disappear from the road; there's no political will for that and no politician is dumb enough to try.
To be perfectly clear, the difference between an empty road and a Waymo is mostly academic if you're on a bike. The Waymo is just that good at respecting space.
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> Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilization
Anecdote: I take transit way more in San Francisco with Waymo. Because booking is deterministic (it says 20 minutes, it will be there in 20 minutes, even if it’s a short ride), I can connect with the loose network of city and regional rail systems in a way that was tedious with human drivers.
(I lived in New York for 10 years, and eagerly take the subway there.)
Which, again, is a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity.
> a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity
Maybe. American suburbs are already spread out. It doesn’t make sense to run subways to every corner the way we do in urban centers. Doing last mile with shared transport—versus cars which park idle for most of the day around train stations—makes sense.
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We live in the real would and have to work with what actually exists. I'd love it if my city had Tokyo's rail system, but it doesn't, and won't.
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Personal cars also take up space on the road when they aren't being used. It would be much easier to build physically separated, safe biking lanes and drop off areas if we could use all the space we currently dedicate exclusively to personal vehicle parking on public streets.
Not usually, and not in the same way. They are usually parked in a parking spot or garage.
Taxis and Waymos stop in areas that are explicitly marked not to stop or park.
Taxis (and Uber etc) also take up space on the road when they only have their driver and no fare paying passenger on board, so I don't see that a Waymo is any worse than that.
Both human-driven and robo-driven taxis are financially incentivised to spend as much time as possible carrying fare paying passengers and as little as possible driving empty to pick someone up.
Anyway, I agree that walking, cycling, and public transit, are all IMHO preferable to any form of taxi.
>> Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilisation and providing more ways to walk and cycle that feel and are safe.
This is nonsense. Even in places with great public transport a lot of people own cars because taxi's and Uber's are unreliable or unavailable. Given Waymo should be available at any time of day and not pick + choose rides as randomly a lot of car owners should be able to give them up.
Studies have proven over and over that rideshare/taxi is bad for traffic, reduces transit utilization, and doesn't reduce personal car ownership.
Example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z#Sec8