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.

can't find what cadt means

“Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers“ [0]

[0]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

The Bay Area has reliable, clean, consistent public transit right now, it's just not evenly distributed

It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.

The program applies to all 27 San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies that accept contactless Visa tap-to-pay.

Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?

The why would be the ~100 municipalities in the bay area.

You say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.

They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.

One of these doesn't require a multi-decade approval process for good reason. (Figuring out the logistics and civil engineering planning is a real thing and building it out isn't trivial) . Of course this could change

The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:

  Cost per passenger trip:
    BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
    SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
    Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73

  Passenger Fare collected per trip:
    BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
    SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
    Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45

  Subsidy per trip:
    BART: $12.57
    SF Muni: $6.37
    Caltrain: $18.27

  Cost per passenger mile:
    BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
    SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
    Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile

  Subsidy per passenger mile:
    BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $0.84/mile
    SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.26/mile
    Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $0.94/mile

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.

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.

Now you’ve created a property tax regime where nobody is going to want to own residential property near a transit station.

Do you mean that nobody wants property values go up? The government gets more property taxes, because properties near transit stations are more valuable than in other places.

Yes, if you don't intend to sell, and actually want to live somewhere, higher property values just mean higher taxes (or if constrained like with Prop 13, declining services).

Thought experiment: What would happen with total profitability, given positive marginal unit economics, if readership were to greatly increase?

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.

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.

the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART

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?

several cents per vehicle mile

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.

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.

On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.

The roads and houses are constructed with such separation and space that it is literally impossible without eminent domain of basically every lot. It’s simply not a possibility to turn the suburbs with huge stroads and subdivisions into mixed use high density living.

Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.

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'.

public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.

Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.

That's a minuscule amount of the value it creates. And that's a problem, and a problem we can only fix by privatizing it. But most of the value it creates is for the landowners around it. And that's why successful transit companies are also real estate developers. Even in our own history, that's how private transit worked before we killed it.

BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services

Unless you try to build housing.

https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...

The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible.

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.

Perhaps what’s broken is your financial analysis.

Please show his error.

Is it just because of an artificial low denominator?

Of course, this is what happens when there's no profit motive. If we weren't making the marginal cost of using a road zero, and they had to compete with each other, and the people running transit wanted to make money rather than satisfy the requirements of a law, transit would be cheaper. That's how it is in all the places in the world where transit is really good.

Or it wouldn’t exist at all in in this form…

Dude. Public transit can carry hundreds of thousands (millions even). How many helicopters you planning on having? How many landing pads? Where are they going to go? You going to spin up a municipal ATC? This is silly.

Roads are fully paid for by road users (i.e. everyone).

huh? Public transportation is fully paid for by everyone too.

Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense.

Doesn't the Highway Trust Fund pay for road maintenance as well?

The economics of roads are actually pretty good which is why basically every country has them, even the poorest.

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.

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.

If you think subways have no marginal cost per passenger, you should consider Zeno’s paradox more

it's almost like public transport is a service and not a for profit business

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.

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.

Did it? I always assumed the US train boom aligned with shipping companies more than land at the destinations, which is why even today cargo gets priority over Amtrak.

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.

unning mostly empty busses.

I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.

Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.

So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.

Cost per passenger mile for a bus containing 4 people is much higher than for 4 cars, and since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.

It seems like the best solution would be to implement registration fees to offset externalities like pollution and road wear, and have congestion fees for when the roads are busy (including for vehicles such as busses). Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road. I think if such a system were implemented, the biggest change in behavior would be people taking fewer car trips during peak traffic hours.

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.

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.

Clean, comfortable restrooms on buses are possible. There just has to be the will to do it.

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.

The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.

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!

Where I am, buses are heavily subsidised; cost is about $3 per passenger mile. Fares are much cheaper (so cheap nobody ever really thinks about it, other than worrying if they have quarters for exact change).

They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.

They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.

They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.

Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).

The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.

Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.

There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.

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...

It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving

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

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.

Bus / carpool lane going into the city at rush hour cuts 15-20 minutes from the drive. Just because it hits traffic doesn't mean it's a failure.

The situation we are talking about here involves a bridge with no dedicated bus lane or fast lane.

I never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.

They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.

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.

???

You have a really dim view of humanity </3

People need to get from point A to point B. Traveling to meet up with friends is in no way gratuitous.

Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train

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.

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.

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.

BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.

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.

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 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.

Took me a while to understand what you meant by "on each end". I'm guessing you mean as a connection to some public transit in the middle?

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.

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?

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.

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)

KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."

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.

Public transit networks and shared autonomous vehicles are part of a complementary mobility ecosystem. As transit agencies modernize their payment systems to accept tap-to-pay debit and credit cards, multimodal trips are becoming more convenient than ever.

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:

“San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”

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.

When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.

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.

Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.

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.

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.

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.

Why would they do it. Is it for marketing ?

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.

  > rideshares like Waymo

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?

There is absolutely no need to have this Visa only.

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).

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

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-...

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.

Maybe just an artifact of where I live (Los Angeles), but whenever Ive considered taking Waymo to the train station, it's usually easier and often cheaper to take it all the way to my destination. eg right now a Waymo to the train station is $16, then you wait 0-15 minutes to hop on the train, paying an additional $3.50 round trip. I'm pretty pro-transit, but I can't deny that the ipace is a much more pleasant experience than the train (I can play my music, don't have to listen to other people, guaranteed seating, guaranteed AC, fewer undesired encounters with strangers).

Meanwhile, a waymo to a stadium on that same train line is $26. If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.

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.

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).

I am not sure which rail right-of-ways in the Bay Area could plausibly be justified for AV lane deconversion. Maybe the ailing VTA light rail?

But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.

I love it. We can argue to death, as usually happens in Waymo threads about public transit but the general truth is mass transit is hard in America where cities are designed mostly around cars. Could it change, sure but most likely not. This seems like such an elegant solution that I hope other cities adopt and use as part of new transit planning.