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Meanwhile, the 47 Muni bus that connects the Van Ness transit corridor to Caltrain has been “suspended” since 2020, and the extension of Caltrain to the transit center is still unfunded.
I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.
They haven't created AGI either, they're just applying the CADT development model to money.
The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:
Every single ride requires a $6 to $18 subsidy, paid for by tax dollars.
For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
Are you factoring in fixed costs to that estimate? That may be partially misleading if so.
How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.
I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?
I think most economists would contend that the value of the subsidies is largely captured by landowners. Public investment, private profits.
and that's why property tax exists (land value tax would be better, but anyway).
Because it makes in implicit comparison with a hypothetical transportation mode with zero dollars of government subsidy.
The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
They're discarding the cost per mile to a driver. If you add that back (and especially if you add externalities back) driving is more expensive.
Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and only look at marginal costs, they're profitable.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
The usual rule of thumb is that fixed costs of public transit are covered by increased property values. It could mean a private transit company developing the areas around stations (as it often works in Japan), or it could mean the government getting more money from property taxes. Or it could even mean more money from income taxes, if the transit project stimulates economic activity.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
Thought experiment: What would happen with total profitability, given positive marginal unit economics, if readership were to greatly increase?
But the Bay Area’s highway networks are at saturation during peak hours. 101 and 280 are at least as bad as before the pandemic.
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
Infrastructure for cars is massively subsidised too. Since tansport is infrastructure it it interacts with everything else (eg less cars in the city => less spending on car infra) and has a lot of positive externalities. The investment pays back in positive outcomes which can also be quantified in terms of money of you like. It's like you've got a balance sheet but you're filtering it to only look at two items.
Additionally, the other poster failed to mention that the unit economics for the marginal rider are much more favorable.
Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
You're missing a lot of externalities here.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
Caltrain rides allow riders to be productive during the ride and generate income taxes in a way that cars do not.
If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.
Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.
Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.
Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.
Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.
And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.
As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.
In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
Unless you try to build housing.
https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
But you can't ignore the financials. SF Muni's $3.62 cost per passenger mile is atrocious. At that price point, it's cheaper to charter a helicopter. I'm not kidding. You could literally charter a 20-seat Airbus H175 helicopter to fly people around for $2.50 per passenger mile. And you'd get there faster.
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
Good luck scaling that “solution!”
Perhaps what’s broken is your financial analysis.
Is it just because of an artificial low denominator?
It's circular:
* Few take it because it doesn't meet their need [low denominator]
* Let's spend money to make it meet people's need [numerator goes up]
...
?
Roads are fully paid for by road users (i.e. everyone).
Not really. That’s a tautology anyway.
Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
Yeah I was shocked as well when I learned about the financials. I'll the subsidy per passenger mile to the table as well.
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
Incredible!!! Wow, is this apparent extraordinary cost discrepancy anybody’s fault, or is that just how it has to be?
In my opinion, the primary driver is the astronomical cost of housing in the SF bay area (which is 3x the national average), which drives up the cost of all labor. Public transit is infrastructure heavy, very labor intensive, and the high cost of labor makes it very expensive.
In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.
If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, the cost of everything will go down by 30%+ percent.
For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.
That's a feature, not a bug. Public transport is viewed as a jobs program in the US.
Buy America Act makes buses roughly three times more expensive, and then they use decades-old technology due to a lack of competition.
The MTA in NYC has two-person subway crews, which is almost unprecedented in this day and age. BART could be driverless if unions wouldn't revolt.
There's an irony that American unions are strong enough to prevent automatization, but weak enough to fear it (unlike say Denmark or France).
iirc the NYC subway is only about 40% subsidized by fares. I’m happy to pay more in taxis for it to exist and subsidize lower income residents. There are huge economic benefits to the city that you’re not factoring in.
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
SF could be so much more.
Yeah but the cost per passenger is in the hundreds due to private car ownership
For another comparison, Moscow Central Diameters system (electric trains traveling from Moscow to nearby small towns) has 4 lines, 137 stations, 188 miles total length. It uses united fare payment system with buses and subway and transfer from a train to the subway is free of charge. Fare is about $1-$3 depending on the route. To be fair, it goes through Moscow at a slow speed and takes an eternity to get anywhere, and its range is limited [1].
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro
I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
it's almost like public transport is a service and not a for profit business
That's fine. It's just a matter of how unprofitable it should be. BART taxpayers are getting an absolutely terrible value for their money.
Looking at the financials outside the US might also be relevant. There are no reasons for the US to be special here in my opinion.
There is a reason why the US is special - Buy America Act. New Flyer and Gillig would collapse almost immediately if they were exposed to global competition.
Are you arguing that specific past bad economics are somehow indicative of a theoretical hard ceiling for any potential future performance? If so, how are other places in the world then regularly above that ceiling?
I wonder if something like this could improve the economics of public transport though. Passengers do the bulk of their travel on the well used train line, and then the last part of their trip is covered by waymo which could be more cost effective than running mostly empty busses.
The best formula for public transit is the Rail plus Property business model. In Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards. Then makes money from renting out the properties adjacent to the station.
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
No need to give distant examples - the US train boom used the same strategy.
Sound Transit still uses this strategy in Seattle region.
They really don't. They don't build residential or commercial property.
Sure, that might be the optimal strategy. But to fix what already exists, using self driving cars to feed in to the existing network could work.
Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
I don't like having more feudalism though. One company owning all the good land - yikes!
The government should own it. All infrastructure like that should be in a nations hand.
The problem is that personal vehicles inevitably leads to unsustainable traffic. Now, for low traffic areas, driverless cars might be an acceptable solution. But for busy areas, the geometry of transporting 1M people in cars vs buses is simply inescapable.
What they seem to be designing around here is that you take a self driving car through the low density last mile and then a train through the majority of the route.
If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.
And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
This is assuming all or nothing. More likely they will co-exist.
There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.
Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.
It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.
Yeah but then you're on a bus...
It's a double decker.
As a human who sometimes needs to use the restroom, I like my transit rides to take a predictable amount of time.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
Easy to solve with a colostomy bag
Probably quite a few young men with these in California too lol
Why? Can you explain?
West Oakland to Embarcadero is great: 7min BART, or 45-60(+) at rush hour on the bridge. No better timesave that I know of with BART.
Every person alive has had to use the restroom. What you mean is that you have a bladder issue.
No bladder issue. Probabilistically, when you load a bus up completely with people (the ideal situation for transit) one of them will have to use the restroom over the course of an hour and a half.
It takes a truly exceptional jam to make the crossing take an hour and a half. What about all the people in cars?
I've heard multiple times Americans complaining about being on the bus.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
Yeah. I took the bus in NY and SF and I’m also not sure why the complained. Maybe because I’m a tourist but especially in SF I had always nice interactions with the driver. Mind you I took the Bus in the City Centers. Is it that much worse in the outskirts or is it just the concept of taking a Bus with multiple other people the problem?
It's pure snobbery
I don't think so. American buses are ridiculously outdated, while having to compete with some of the most well-equipped cars in the world. If Europe had such buses, they wouldn't be popular either.
Europe isn't the richest place. Some of the western cities surely have nice buses, but there are plenty of old shabby buses there too and people still ride them. Might be that the routing and timing sucks, or the general cultural individualism.
We were discussing riding the bus to a place that depending on traffic is a 20 minute car ride from SF, or a 2 hour car ride in the worst case scenario traffic.
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
My understanding of the initial commend “But then you are on a bus” was a negative one to buses and or public transport in general.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
Buses are widely perceived as signaling low socioeconomic status in the US, to the extent that it's become a self-reinforcing negative spiral. (As soon as a system loses its higher income riders due to real or perceived dangers or inconveniences, political support for tax subsidies and infrastructure investments (bus lanes etc.) tanks, quality then actually declines, rinse and repeat.)
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
Service quality is just abysmal, extremely crowded at basically all times, delayed or skips your stop when your standing there, when it isn't crowded there's all sorts of other issues with the service, and this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't really take you where you want to go without transfers.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
The NL and other transbay buses are so fantastic. They do get stuck in bridge traffic though.
A bus that gets stuck in traffic is by definition a failure. It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving, meaning a reinforcing loop where more driving means more traffic for the bus to be stuck on, meaning the bus is even slower and less attractive...
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
If buses and cars participate in the same road traffic (i.e. the bus doesn't have dedicated lanes), then a bus trip will never be faster than a comparable car trip. This is because you have to walk to/from the bus stop at both ends of the journey, wait for a bus to show up, ride the bus and have it stop for other passengers, transfer between routes, the bus has slower acceleration and turning than a car, etc.
Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis
It's good to have dedicated bus lanes, but the point of a bus isn't to get from point A to point B faster than a car.
It's a part of a transit ecosystem that makes it possible to survive without a car. It fills in the the gaps where it's not economical to add train/metro lines.
Except that many buses broadcast their location, and many cities prioritize green lights for buses over cars.
So the car might need to stop on red multiple times (unless following a bus), while the bus will have most lights automatically turn green in front of it.
Yeah, the car will be faster, unless there are accommodations that benefit the bus only (like dedicated lanes). But the bus doesn’t have to be _faster_ to be viable to many people: there are other things going for the bus like not having to park, often being cheaper especially if it allows you to not own a car, etc. etc.
A big one: no need to find parking! Or to go back to your parked car on the reverse trip. You can do a triangle trip A,B,C,A with public transit. With a car it has to be A,B,C,B,A as you left your car at B.
Caveat: the bus can be a little bit slower and still win, because you don't need to drive. Or the car can be a little bit slower and still win, because people are antisocial. When the difference is more than a little, then you're correct.
In aggregate, people go the fastest way - no way to stop this from happening. In places where everyone takes public transit, the transit is fast. To make more people take public transit, you make the transit fast.
Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.
Bus lanes make a bus a very good alternative to driving, and they are much more efficient space-wise compared to cars (and god forbid, pick-up trucks), which means you can get more throughput...
I never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.
Make traffic for everyone else worse with this one simple trick
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
Indeed. Most people travelling around by taxi or public transport could be considered gratuitous anyway. You're probably not carrying a load of tools to do any work. You're more likely going to a bullshit job, going to meet friends, going to a concert or buying shit you don't need etc.
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
They can check to see whether you took transit! Similarly, when you enter transit with one card, you can exit with another card and they still know it's you.
To know that you've used transit.
Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.
In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.
It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.
It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?
Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
Google probably has the most credit card data already. Maybe even more than Visa since they work with multiple payment networks.
It sounds like Visa is coordinating the transfer data between agencies, and Waymo has just signed up to the existing program as if it were a transit agency.
They want to reduce the friction for next time: then you'll already have a card linked.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
It is Visa only, so there must be some collaboration, also because they must somehow be able to learn about transit payments (which they normally wouldn't have access to as these happen on a third-party merchant account).
The target audience of this offer presumably takes Waymo at least occasionally, so how is a Waymo credit "not real money"? And what does transaction data have to do with this?
Company scrib for the 3rd millennium - now with mandatory expiration!
What's wrong with paying out to you for this, the fact that you'd do it even without this promo?
Oh, I think it's a great idea to reward people for taking transit because it will help reduce traffic on the road and allow the Waymos to operate in tighter loops, increasing availability to other passengers, and possibly even bringing costs down as a result.
My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)
To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.
If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
I sometimes take the slower and older commuter train back home from the office during "green months" as I call them (May to September) to enjoy the scenery and the ambient clickclacks of the train wheels.
I would really like a full door to door with one payment. Put in the destination, one price and get a Waymo on each end. React as best as possible to delays, etc.
Ugh, looks like this only works if you pay for the Waymo with a Visa card, and also use that same Visa card to pay for transit. I don't use a credit card for transit in SF; I use my Clipper transit card.
I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
Why do you use clipper? There is no benefit to clipper anymore over a credit card, right? And just the disadvantage that you need to reload it.
I mean it does save the public transit utility a lot of money in transaction fees so I'm happy to deal with it for that. But the main benefit is pre-tax transit benefits if your company offers it. It can go into a clipper card easily.
The point still stands. Regular transit users generally don't pay per ride, they use monthly passes. Or aren't those a thing in San Francisco?
It's possible to implement weekly/monthly passes on credit/debit cards too via capping, but it's indeed a bit more annoying and unpredictable. For example, NYC MTA weekly capping breaks if you ever remove and re-add your card to your phone. (And I can understand how not all transit agencies want to offer capping.)
Habit, mostly. I also have several hundred dollars of pre-tax transit money on my Clipper card from when I had that benefit at a previous job (and set the paycheck deduction way higher than I should have at the time), and I still haven't used it up. I assume there's rightly no way to get cash back for this, since then I could keep the tax deduction and spend it on anything. (And even if I could get the cash back, likely it wouldn't be worth the hassle vs. just continuing to use the Clipper card. The card is on my phone, so it's not like the experience would be any different.)
Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
Last time I used BART, I had no idea you could use a credit card at the turnstyles. They've changed how this works like 20 times, and it never worked well.
Daily and monthly passes are only available on Clipper. Credit cards can only be used for full fare single rides.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.
FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...
I do use a contactless Clipper card, on my phone. I don't think this bit is relevant: getting Visa to correlate transactions is probably a lot easier for Waymo to get done than integrating with Clipper to see if you've ridden transit in the past two hours. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.
I didn't disagree with you. I'm saying the key findings in that Clipper 2.0 postmortem were much bigger than any single incentive program like this Waymo one would have been. Hence I can see why Waymo avoid integrating with Clipper.
It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.
I'm also a fan of dedicated stored-value cards (they're generally much more robust during network or backend system outages), but I can really see the point of offering both in cities like New York or San Francisco.
Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.
What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.
Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.
And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:
Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.
Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
I don't really think it's about the data. I think by Occam's Razor, Waymo (owned by Google) just sees a way for them to put transit directions in Google Maps where the last mile of your trip is a Waymo. By subsidizing part of the transit cost and it all being on one credit card, in the future you could pay for a whole transit + taxi trip only once and not multiple times at each leg
That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.
But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.
I do think transit just needs to be better, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they will drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)
I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Yep. I live in SOMA, near both the freeway and a BART station.
Without traffic, a car has me (and a friend) curbside in 12 minutes for $30. Even during rush hour, the southbound traffic between the 7th St onramp and the SFO exit is almost never very slow (while NB is always a standstill).
BART is 30 minutes on the train + however long it takes to walk to the station + the transfer from BART to SFO AirTrain to get to the terminal. Minimum 1 hour. Easily another 30 min if you're unlucky with train arrivals. And by getting off BART at the airport stop, you pay a premium fare of $11.80 per person.
I simply don't bother taking the train.
Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
It seems odd that they want you to pay for transit with your visa. That excludes a lot of travelers who might have passes on their transit cards. Less common in the Bay since all our transit providers are different but I used to pay monthly for the Muni + Local BART pass all the time when I lived in SF.
They want to get on the margin to try transit, not subsidise people who already have passes.
I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.
Why would they do it. Is it for marketing ?
Bc if they cement their status in people's minds as a last mile solution (there are other cheaper ones: bay wheels, lime scooters, etc.) that's an extra fare they didn't get before at a cheap customer acquisition cost ($3/ride)
I use my commuter benefit debit card to pay for public transit. Notably this does not include rideshares like Waymo. In order to claim the transit reward I could use a personal card to pay for both transit and Waymo, but that leads to considerable friction where I need to collect receipts and submit claims to use my commuter benefit. Most companies in SF must offer a commuter benefit so it doesn't seem like many people will be getting this Waymo transit reward.
I don't live in California, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Uber and Lyft were ostensibly originally meant for people already travelling from point A to point B to share the ride with someone and make some money - and still could be used that way. But Waymo had always been a car-for-hire service with no pretension. So why is it grouped together with "rideshare" and not taxis?
waymo, uber, lyft, etc. are akin to a classic black cab service where you call a number to make a sort of ride appointment. these never needed taxi licenses, as taxis are specifically hailable from the street at will rather than prebooked.
I think calling them "rideshare" was always a legal euphemism.
"rideshare" means "taxis" now
There is absolutely no need to have this Visa only.
Presumably Visa is subsidizing this in some way, if only by offering data sharing or access to some rewards platform to Waymo (they need to know about your Muni rides somehow to issue the credit, after all).
Does anyone know what the play here is?
(Is it given that there's a play? Waymo is culturally a little distinct from Google so from personal experience I can't actually rule out that they're just doing this coz they think it would be good for the world).
The way they mention the governor immediately made me think this is mainly to gain political capital.
I would bet it's part of the larger campaign by credit card companies to make contactless payment the only option for as many things as possible.
The more people use it, the easier it is to remove alternatives. Then everyone's movements and spending habits are tracked.
I suspect they are fielding complaints that autonomous vehicles increase road traffic, so they want to show that they are encouraging the use of public transit. Uber and Lyft have long been blamed for an increase in overall traffic.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.
The VC playbook heavily suggests the latter
Tried a similar app once; the rewards were so minimal it barely incentivized taking the bus over driving. Needs better carrots.
at times I wonder all that money pumped into uber & Lyft to subsidize rides could've been pumped into electric buses that run 24/7
how much cheaper and accessible transportation would be. on the other side uber Lyft etc enabled plenty of people who were perennially unemployed to gain income. while the subsidized rates are gone, seems the ride share companies are making some of their money on food deliveries instead (another place robots could take over ??)
anyways this is a good move from Waymo if only the program can be maintained for 20+ years.
I think of food delivery in urban areas as a good test case for “are people really going to lose their jobs to robots?” I think it’s gonna be a while? Unless it’s the customer doing some of the work by going down to the street to take the food out of the Waymo.
Delivering bombs is much easier, unfortunately.
Once you are in the Waymo, why bother getting out just to get on a bus?
In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...
It makes a lot more sense for Bart. You can go places that don’t even have Waymo service.
The answer to both of your points is that mass transit is used for most of the travel and the last mile is taxi equivalent. Being unable to do the last mile is a common reason not to take mass transit, so more usable taxi equivalents tends to increase mass transit use. And most directly, taxi equivalents are often significantly more expensive or significantly than mass transit at crossing cities.
I use ride share singularly for the convenience. I don’t really think about the cost all that much if it’s “reasonable” and no financial incentive they could provide to link multiple forms of transportation would be enough to overcome that single convenience.
I think this would be a perfect time to reflect on your financial privilege :)
Oh man this is brilliant.
Amongst other reasons, I use Waymo for covering the last mile of a trip made by bus or light rail in my city (Houston, TX). Our public transit service is very reasonably priced but it would be awesome to get a discount!
This program is mainly a fig leaf defense that Waymo can trot out when it is criticized by transit proponents. Which is totally fine by me. Train transit as it exists in the US is largely indefensible. We will be better of the sooner we can rip up the tracks and put those right of ways to better use (AV and bike lanes).
Americans will come up with anything just to avoid learning experience of socialist countries in public transport design.