Comment by TheGRS
17 hours ago
I'm a little sad to see this because I'm moving northward to Seattle next month, I've lived in Portland proper for over 16 years, and Seattle doesn't have Waymo yet. Great timing lol.
Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.
They announced back in September that they’re coming to Seattle. https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/autonomou...
Waymo has already been mapping Seattle for months. I don’t see customers in Portland having access before Seattle.
God willing. Unfortunately Seattle has a recent history of award-winning marksmanship when it comes to turning its own feet into Swiss cheese. A few years ago we passed a brilliant gig worker minimum wage law which:
1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in
2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so
3. drivers end up making less than before, and
4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.
Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.