I want Waymo for Father's Day for all the reasons you cite! It is especially frustrating as a parent to be like "yay, no more daycare, my 11 year old is more independent...wait, soccer practice at 4:30 twice a week?"
The part that bewilders me about this anecdote is that when I was 11, I just biked to Girl Scouts, basketball practice, piano, and dance lessons. I took the bus to my clarinet lesson. So I wonder whether soccer practice is too far away from school to bike because of the death of municipal rec leagues, or is it just that people nowadays won't let their 11-year-olds go places alone anymore?
I wonder about this as well. My parents did a great job of buying a house that had elementary school behind it, middle school up the street about 3 blocks, and high school at the end of the street like 8 blocks. So it was walk or bike everywhere to school, soccer, baseball, friends, cub scouts, park, and then long rides to where my Dad worked. Hop the fence and explore the creeks. But this was the same for almost all my friends. We even learned to ride the bus to the mall (the #26!), which was big for us suburban kids.
I would encourage you to be the outlier anyway. The biking was normal when I was 11, but I had to talk my friends' parents into letting us ride the bus to Berkeley at that age because my parents were outliers even then. My sisters were a lot older than me, so even though I was born in the 90s, I was getting 70s-style parenting because my parents didn't change their methods. I arrived at college way more capable than most of my peers because I'd been moving around independently and doing all the chores for years at that point. I had to teach several of my dorm mates how to read a bus schedule and how to do laundry.
During the summer after I graduated high school, I went on a trip with 3 of my friends to London and Paris that we planned and mostly paid for ourselves. One of the parents I'd talked into letting us ride the bus all those years ago mentioned to my mother that she was only comfortable letting her daughter go because I was going, since I was so level-headed. Even helicopter parents think independently-raised children are more capable adults.
"In general, women are more likely to be skeptical of emerging technology. A poll for The Argument this fall showed that 39 percent of men wanted to allow self-driving cars, but just 19 percent of women said the same. That stat isn’t a one-off: Forty-eight percent of women wanted to ban the technology compared to just 32 percent of men. In other words, the people who stand to benefit the most are also the most skeptical."
Fascinating - that's what I've found as well. Guys are like, "Wow, this is amazing I can't wait to try it." And women, almost universally are saying, "Absolutely not."
I suppose it’s just risk aversion. Which I get, I’m also risk averse, that’s why I want to have self driving cars so I won’t be KILLED BY SOME DUDE DRUNK DRIVING. Smh
Heh, yes, I'm such a weirdo for loving nuclear power and GMOs that I pretty much only talk about those things IRL when I'm indoctrinating my kids against bad information they've gotten from their teachers.
I think a lot of it isn't even about the products themselves, it's downstream of STEM stuff coming from tech "bros". Leadership and culture and employee base overwhelmingly male, regular allegations of sexism, general yolo attitude towards risk-taking and rule-breaking. I can't operate on this AI, he's my son.
You mean outside of this post? I know that The Argument has some relevant crosstabs for AI, but only for paid subscribers. Other polling shows similar trends, of historically greater emerging technology acceptance ~across the board for men, and definitely for AI nowadays, but most of those I tend to see embedded into posts as images rather than a direct link to Rasmussen or whatever that's easy to share here. If it was a question of *correlation* - that is, given X attitude on AVs, how accurately can we predict Y attitude on AI, or vice versa - that I'm not sure of? I just know if you ask about either thing in isolation, the breakdowns are similar, at least wrt sex.
It's proooobably true for "SV in general", though you'd want to be careful with question wording. Like, many people are saying they love Amazon or Netflix or Spotify etc even if they hate "tech".
Could hunt something down if it's genuinely important, don't particularly feel like it for a two-day old off-the-cuff comment though. Searching Twitter or the archives of DWATV for images, and then backtracking to the original citation...it's doable, just annoying and time-consuming.
It's a bold claim that women's distrust of new AV tech is "downstream of tech bro sexism". Your argument implies that if we want to increase autonomous vehicle adoption in society, we should start with reforming silicon valley culture.
Again I'm not asking you to go track down data for some random stranger on the internet, I'm just asking whether you actually saw this correlated somewhere or if this was just some throwaway comment ("it doesn't surprise me that women don't trust AV because we all know the tech industry sucks").
No, it was specifically the "bro" part, with sexism (active discrimination) being just one avenue. There's a reason there's no gender-swapped equivalent of the term tech bro. Who can we compare to, say, Travis Kalanick among the fairer sex? The pipeline starts early, too, with notably differing preferences as early as grade school...so just like Matt's quixotic quest to get more progressives into policing, it's very hard to start at the industry level, because by that point you're already working with a limited pool. There isn't some huge corpus of female scientists, engineers, coders, etc just waiting in the wings to seize the reins. Representation matters, not only in the direct influence upon the work (consider how Caroline's post is both pretty intuitive, and also a basic effort, an actual professional comms team from Alphabet could make this case much stronger - but these mostly aren't the arguments they use), but also because people are more open to new strange things if they see that People Like Them are also trying them, also building them.
And furthermore, while I do in fact think SV reforms would increase AV/AI acceptance as a side effect, that's kind of a bank shot? Easier to focus on one narrow part of the industry first. The parent comment was pondering the sex differences in AV opposition, and that's all I'm opining on, not generating some grand game plan for burnishing tech's image. Suppose that polling showed there's, say, a 2:3 ratio of opposition to AI from Republicans, and also a 2:3 ratio of opposition to Big Tech from Republicans, and AI is a subset of Big Tech...it really doesn't seem very bold to suggest there could be some similar factors at play in both cases. These are fake numbers for a toy example, to be clear (actual political skew is not this large in magnitude, yet), but one could postulate it has something to do with the modal SFBA tech worker being fairly progressive, even if the C-suite recently swung rightwards. You don't earn the White House's ire for being a radical woke company if your people and product are not, in fact, somewhat left-leaning.
I'm happy to concede the argument out of laziness though. My bad for not bringing receipts to an empirical argument. Standards tend to be more lax on SB, so I have to admit I've fallen out of ACX epistemic habits.
My mom started talking about all the "safety issues" with self-driving cars, and I felt like we were living in different information universes. It was so weird to hear from her, especially because she is a teetotaler with a lifelong fear of drunk drivers (who has a lot of true stories from my dad's years working in ERs).
I guess my social circle is wildly divergent from the nation, but most of my female friends are down with the technology, and very _positive_ on the part where they're not getting into a car with an unknown man. (The taxi medallion system was problematic, but it at least meant you expected taxi drivers to have been screened to a greater degree than rideshare drivers.)
I have wondered that too, and would love to know if there have been studies done. I have found that the fact that the ride-sharing apps make reporting issues of fraud so easy, no matter which city I am in or the language the driver speaks, makes me feel safer in them than I do in even the most regulated cab cities like New York or London.
My hunch is that the major ride-hailing brands are actually safer than local taxis. Medalion systems vary across cities and countries. Taxies are often used by visitors who will have a much harder time reporting issues in an unfamiliar city than they will by tapping it into an app that has their location and route.
I explained the first part of the article to my wife about how liberating Waymo and she said she’d never put any of our kids in a Waymo for reasons she then listed.
What were the reasons? What I've heard is a lot of people haven't noticed their cars downloading over the air updates containing who knows what software.
Thank you for reading and for sharing your wife's concerns! In the event of an accident, Waymos call 911 much faster than a human can, especially one who has just been involved in an accident.
In the event of a breakdown, I'm imagining the police could also be called to make sure the child is transferred safely to the new Waymo. The doors could remain locked until the police scanned a QR code or identified themselves some other way.
This seems like something of an education issue because- what DOES happen if a Waymo breaks down or is in an accident? I would hope the car pulls over and uses some kind of audio to announce that a new Waymo is coming and to please wait in the car until the replacement arrives, but I have no idea.
Would love to see Waymo offer vehicles with built-in children’s seats eventually. Especially in a large urban market, it would not be hard for a company to keep a small fraction of the fleet “family friendly” and make those an option to choose from the ride hailing app of choice.
It’s not hard to carry a booster (or even a bigger foldable forward facings seat) around and you will want that rather than relying on Waymo’s installation
I say this as someone who relied on one before getting a second car
To say the least, gender parity is far from the best argument I’ve heard for this amazing technology (which will save thousands of lives and open the door to many other benefits). But I suppose I’ll take whatever avenues of support are available.
Sure, but in the context of a Mother's Day special I think it's fair enough to put a spotlight on how this could alleviate an issue mothers especially have where they have to play taxi-driver for kids who need to go places but can't drive themselves.
"Can women get around cities safely at night" is also a good argument for policing public transit effectively. But agreed it's frustrating we even have to rely on such arguments
Maybe resistance to driverless cars will evolve like resistance to answering machines in the 1970's. My parents and their friends reacted to the first answering machines with anger, "How rude! I'm not going to talk to a machine! Why are they too lazy to pick up the phone?!?!?" A couple years later, "Why doesn't Bob have an answering machine? How rude! I can't be expected to keep calling!" The objection to driverless cars is different, but the adaptation to the convenience will be the same.
My son was hit by a human driver running a red light in the school crosswalk a couple of days ago. One of the first things he said after was 'a driverless car would have stopped.' He wrote this essay on the phone from the hospital bed in the wee hours last night after surgery to repair his leg. He'll make a full recovery and he's resting at home now. But he wants his message public if it could help speed up technology adoption that would prevent these accidents. Here's his words unedited:
Humans Can't Drive
8 May 2026
Yesterday morning, I was hit by a car. I am 17 years old. I was in a crosswalk, almost at my school, when a human-driven car ran the red light and hit me. It was the edge of the front of the car that hit me, and it knocked me onto the ground. With all the adrenaline that came with being hit by a car, I did not realize that my leg was broken until I tried to get back up and found that I could not walk and my leg was deformed. Very fortunately, I was the only person hit and my only injury was the broken right leg- my fibula and tibia both cleanly snapped, without leaving any fragments. After being driven to the hospital (not rushed, as it was merely a leg-threatening injury, not a life-threatening one) I had a surgery in the evening that put a titanium rod in my tibia to stabilize it and the doctors said I might be able to walk again (though with a limp) in a few days. I am very grateful to have such a relatively small injury. It hurt a lot, but had I been just a foot or two less advanced in the crosswalk, I might have died. The silver lining of that possibility is that I wouldn't have been in much pain for very long, although I much prefer being in pain because I am alive to not being in pain because I am dead.
I do not know why the driver of the car was unable to stop. She had a toddler in the back seat; perhaps that caused a distraction and she didn't notice the red light and group of children in the road. Perhaps she was checking her phone. I don't know why it happened. What I do know is that humans are unreliable. Every year, there are thousands of people who are not as lucky as I was. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), between 7 and 8 thousand pedestrians in the US are killed every year from being struck by cars. Some of these may be jaywalkers, but many were in the same situation as me, where the accident was only because of someone else being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was injured entirely because of human error, and most car accidents are the same.
Humans are just too unreliable. Some of us are irresponsible and text while driving or even drive drunk. But even the best of us can be distracted by checking maps, or by unpredictable occurrences both inside and outside of the vehicle. Our vision is also very limited. We have many blind spots. Without turning around or checking mirrors, which takes our eyes off of whatever is in front of us, we can only see what is in front of us. And only when the area is well-lit. A week ago, one of my friends rear-ended someone while it was dark late at night, totaling his car. Nobody was hurt, thanks to all the safety features in modern cars, but it obviously would have been better if there was never an accident in the first place. The way to ensure safe roads is not to better train human drivers. People can know every traffic law, but that is of little help when they cannot react in time to follow them. The way to guarantee safe roads is to completely ban human drivers on public roads. Aside from private racetracks where people drive their cars for fun rather than to get somewhere, all cars should be autonomous.
Admittedly, current technology is far from perfect, but it is much less far from perfect than humans are, and it will only improve in the future. Admittedly, autonomous vehicles are involved in more accidents than regular cars, but there is a low sample size and a vast majority of those accidents are from humans hitting them. That wouldn't be an issue if all cars on the road were self-driving. Self-driving cars can have a 360° field of “vision” no matter how dark it is. They can also react much faster than humans can. If someone ran in front of one, it would be able to react instantly and, if not come to a complete stop, at least slow down enough to greatly reduce the force of the collision, unlike the human driver who hit me.
In addition to improved safety, the efficiency of self-driving cars is incomparable to that of human-driven ones- it is likely that in the future all self-driving cars near each other will share information with each other, so when one slows down, stops, or starts moving, all those behind it slow down, stop, or start moving at the exact same time, which would greatly reduce travel time and completely eliminate phantom traffic. Estimating that it takes cars 2-3 seconds to accelerate after a light turns from red to green, and there being up to 10 cars at a red light, 20-30 seconds could be saved per red light when all the cars accelerate in unison, which is simply not possible for humans to safely coordinate. And if all cars were not just self-driving cars, but self driving taxis, like Waymo, society as a whole would actually spend less money on vehicles, even though self-driving cars cost more than manual ones- especially if a carpool system was in place. Most people only spend a fraction of their day in a car. Even during rush hour, a majority of cars are passively sitting in a garage or parking lot, not being used. Having one car per person is just unnecessary and a waste of money and resources. Ideally, we could have one car per five (or more) driving people, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing cost.
Something I read about in Sam Kean's book, “The Disappearing Spoon,” a few months ago was the usefulness of palladium. It's amazing for electronics, jewelry, dentistry, and medicine, but nearly all palladium is used in cars. If all cars were self-driving carpooling taxis, we wouldn't need nearly as many cars, and could use all that palladium elsewhere. I could probably find a lot more similar examples of valuable resources we would save by having fewer cars, and while there aren't many more productive things I can do while I'm lying in the hospital bed, there are many less productive but more entertaining things I prefer to do. And of course, there are plenty of things people could spend their money on if they didn't have to buy their own cars. For instance, healthcare or education.
Society would be better off if there were no human drivers. It is illogical for people to disagree because they “don't trust” technology. The alternative is trusting humans. Even before I became a victim of the unreliability of human driving, I knew humans were untrustworthy in this regard. I had seen the data. Now, I’m a part of the data and I know even better, and feel stronger (metaphorically, not physically) that humans should not be allowed to drive. We already have the technology for self-driving cars. It's only a matter of time before we have enough of them.
Waymo and its competitors are not a panacea, but they provide a very valuable service - safe, reliable transportation - particularly for those who can’t easily get around otherwise. We need more, not fewer, such opportunities. (Yes, it feels weird the first few times you get in and the car takes you to your destination without a driver - but you get over it quickly.)
I definitely look forward to Waymo/Tesla FSD when I'm older and unwilling or just not as able to drive. Wake up, hop in a car, stop for lunch, boom in Tahoe. No work. And presumably not in winter. Once the cars can handle driving in the snow...that will be fire. But just getting to Dr.'s appointments and the grocery store.
I don't see this being cost effective anytime soon. I get how it will replace conventional rideshare, and maybe opens up a few other use cases, but I'm deeply skeptical of these takes that have everyone selling their cars and using autonomous taxis exclusively. Why would I want to pay Waymo to do something I already do for myself for free?
It would depend on the price. You're paying for a vehicle that's typically isn't being used +22.5 hours a day. With higher utilization your cost per mile could be lower with a Waymo than a vehicle you own.
Depreciation is more mileage than age. I kept my last car nearly 20 years, and still got like $6k for it (and the damn stealership turned around and sold it for $10k). I'm sure the wheels will be falling of these Waymo cabs after a few years of service.
There's also the other point, I don't want to hail a cab (autonomous or otherwise) every time I need to go somewhere. I want my car in my garage which I have exclusive use of and which I can leave stuff in. If it can drive itself, great.
Obviously this doesn’t affect, everyone, but it’s not unheard of for people to pay hundreds of dollars a month for parking in a major city. Higher utilization also means less money spent on building parking structures.
You’re clearly not the marginal consumer here, and that’s fine, but I wouldn’t discount the business model just because it’s not relevant to you.
There's definitely a business to be had here, I'm sure they'll make money. It's the more expansive takes about how this will upend private car ownership entirely that I'm deeply skeptical of.
I suspect it’ll eventually do so *just* enough to be a huge culture war issue.
That is, people in walkable places who are already kind of marginal car owners will decide they can do without. Meanwhile rural residents will definitely still need one. And in the middle, a continuum of how much you need a private car (and how many) based on how dense your neighborhood is.
You can hear the culture war nonsense already just from this description: “those godless commies want to push us into car collectivism” vs “conservatives just don’t care about people, it’s why they’re still driving in their own cars”
The real shitshow isn’t going to be around private ownership vs hire car, where no one is really going to care what others do IMO, but around whether local or county jurisdictions can mandate autonomous operation or not.
I suspect most people over about 30-35 today will want to maintain ownership AND human operation for most of their lives, so that puts any self driving ubiquity at least 50 years away. We’ll see, it could be an interesting case of technology vs cultural inertia.
Separate from efficiencies associated with higher utilization, getting the time back from driving will be worth it for a lot of people. For a professional earning a high enough salary, being able to work during your commute would be worth the premium. There are a lot of things I could do myself for free, but I pay someone else to do it because I don’t have the time.
There’s a whole continuum of scale. You might as well say there’s no point in first class seats in commercial flights because rich people have private jets.
I think commercial air is more like the city bus in this comparison. Riding the bus would definitely save money, but that juice isn't worth the squeeze. Just like rich people can opt out of the TSA and airline experience. Most people can't afford that, but they can afford a car.
As I mentioned below, it costs much more to purchase a third car and hire an after-school nanny than it would to have one's kid take a Waymo from school to their afternoon activities. So for this type of consumer, Waymo would be instantaneously the more affordable option. And then it would presumably get even cheaper as competition lowered prices.
Yes, I could see that happening. There's definitely a market for it and this is a big country, capturing even 0.1% of all trips taken is still a huge market. I was responding to the idea that fleets of Waymos would largely replace private auto ownership. I just don't see that happening in my lifetime. In your scenario I'd imagine mom and dad still have their own cars, and use this as a supplement so they needn't ferry junior to soccer practice.
There are 750,000 private vehicles in the city of Philadelphia, and 500,000 street parking spots.
I would be astonished if these figures aren’t reduced by 80% as the cost of self-driving vehicle hire converges with “depreciation+maintenance/operations+energy” as is the norm in commoditized service markets.
I won’t make predictions on timeline, but if the technology matures as expected there will be a timeline on which this becomes true, and it’s going to extend deep into the suburbs.
Waymo does depend on backup teleoperation for a small fraction of unusual situations. And it’s also essential that they’re working in areas where they have enough car presence that they stay updated on changing conditions of potholes and debris in the street and the like. It’s a lot harder to scale this to personal ownership.
Aren’t they part of Alphabet? Seems like they could get Google Maps data from, like, everyone, and I think a lot of cars are starting to be equipped with these sensors and cameras. I’m generally against my car storing or selling my data, but I don’t really have any problem with it selling that to Google for that limited purpose. It’s not like Google doesn’t know where I’m at 100% of the time anyway
OK, there are still going to be times when a self driving car is the first vehicle to see a new road, or some crazy out-of-distribution scenario happens and you need someone who isn’t 11 years old to be able to drive the vehicle
Tesla has this (Full Self-Driving). As both a mom and a user of this technology, I’m in the skeptical-for-now camp. I’ve had to correct our car’s route on multiple critical occasions…
I do, too, but I would take Waymo in the meantime. I think it's likely to be available to me before the prices on self-driving cars I can purchase come down to my price range.
> There’s good reason for this. From 2017 to 2022, a total of 400,181 Uber trips resulted in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in the United States alone, court documents examined by the New York Times show.
Mentioning this is irresponsible, if not dishonest, without mentioning the denominator: **11 million rides.** This is a rate of slightly less than 1 per 5000. If you commute by Uber every weekday, both ways, 52 weeks a year, you would average less than one sexual assault per **decade**, two if you assume that all assaults. That is very, very far from being the most dangerous thing you do that night. "Would you rather be alone with a man or a bear" tier. If you cross a street drunk to get to the Uber, that's probably significantly more dangerous than the ride.
I think you're on the right track, but where did you get the 11 million number? I think it's around 2 billion. The rest of your math checks out.
BTW, it's important to note for context regarding even that 400k number:
"Ms. Nilles said that about 75 percent of the 400,181 reports were “less serious,” such as making comments about someone’s appearance, flirting or using explicit language. She added that the reports had not been audited by the company and could include incorrect or fraudulent reports submitted by people trying to get a refund."
Where do you see that? In their safety report, it appears to be to be ~2 billion (they don't say exactly but you can infer from other numbers). Also, 400k / 11m = 1 in 27.5 chance of being subjected to some kind of sexual misconduct, which would be insanely high.
You also have to weigh it against the fact that the driver provides some level of deterrence against homeless guys trying to get in the car with you that you don’t get with Waymo.
I don’t mean getting into the car while the ride is going, I mean pushing in on you while you’re getting in or stowing away in a car that’s picking you up, they’ve already had a few incidents of these that have made the news.
I love a good "homeless guys" panic as much as the next Slow Borer. But the risk is less than with private vehicles (waymo picking you up in front of your bar/restaurant/office rather than you walking to your car in some deserted parking lot).
"Akshually, it's safer to have a random stranger driving your car vs just making sure nobody is lurking next to your waymo" is a weird take.
I mean that's a good point, but it seems very technologically solvable. The sensor technology to know "is someone still in this car when they shouldn't be" is absolutely possible. As is sensing when someone is yelling , "Waymo help me, take me to the police station there's someone in the car".
One sexual assault per decade still seems like kind of a lot? I mean I expect to have zero sexual assaults over my lifetime (and zero of any kind of assault over my adult lifetime).
People with disabilities also stand to benefit hugely from self-driving cars. Having to choose between paying through the nose for an uber, relying on infrequent or nonexistent public transit, or pleading for a ride with family or friends (which needs to be planned in advance even if they love you and are willing to help) every single time you want to go anywhere is no fun. This is an invisible problem for so many. People who can drive tend to assume every adult can, and don’t think about the implications of not being able to.
Grocery delivery is of course already available - no need for self-driving for that! Though if self-driving manages to unlock real economies of scale, then it may start making deliveries cheaper - if you’re able to go out and unload the car rather than wanting the driver to drop it at your doorstep.
I do grocery pickup rather than delivery in my current area because the stores farm delivery out to instacart which means at least a 20% tip for the gig workers who also have to shop the stuff. But pickup requires no tip because it's the grocery store's own employees. A waymo delivery would certainly come with a cost over pickup, but I think it'd eventually be a lot less than 20% of my weekly grocery bill.
"America is at historic highs of pedestrian fatalities and I don't feel it is safe for my 10 year old to get to get school by himself because all the cars drive 50mph on residential streets and he would have to cross a four lane road where people are often driving 60+ mph" is why people drive their kids to school, not because they are afraid of kidnappings and organ harvesting.
Sending your kids in the steel cage of a Waymo alleviates the actual concern.
yeah, there's absolutely no way my niece and nephews would walk or bike to school ever...their elementary school is a mile and a half up the road and their middle/high schools will be 2 miles away, but the speed limits on the arterials to get there are 45 and 55. oh yeah, and no sidewalks or bike lanes
School buses just didn’t exist in my hometown, or didn’t exist for my neighborhood, or something. I still don’t understand what exactly the situation was, just that I legitimately thought school buses were some sort of TV myth until I moved to my current location a few years ago.
I grew up in Italy, and from an early age (5, if I recall correctly) I had a monthly bus ticket and went everywhere around the city by bus (I couldn't bike due to a health issue affecting my sense of equilibrium). At 14, as is still very typical in Italy, I got a small motorbike ("ciclomotore"-- e.g. a Vespa would be one, although mine was a different brand) and went everywhere on that, having outgrown my equilibrium issues enough.
Later, my children did get their ciclomotori at 14, but the cultural vibes had shifted enough that my wife vetoed their going by bus all the time on their own until they were, I believe, 11 or so. I wonder how my four grandchildren, now aged 3 to 11, will fare, as cultural norms keep shifting...
Yeah, I’m talking about the school bus, which I think is a specific American kind of hell. City buses would have been different (and better) because there would have been adults in the mix, but that’s not generally how US kids get to school outside of a few major cities. My suburb barely had any city bus service at all.
Would have been nice to get a moped at 14, but we did all get cars at 16. Once that happened I was always taking road trips. Gas that was less than $1/gal helped…
School buses can be incredibly unsafe. It’s a bunch of kids packed together with no supervision. I was sexually assaulted (super common for girls in my age group) on the bus. My sibling witnessed a stabbing.
I’m one of those parents who will do what I can to avoid school buses unless and until they put a second adult on board who can actually monitor the kids.
Yep. I don’t doubt that at all. I was in an affluent suburb and im a guy so to me it wasn’t *that* bad, but there was lots of bullying and fighting that went on. I only had to do it for middle school and a little bit of 9th grade, at which point I had an older friend I could carpool with.
A lot of people live way too far from schools for their children to walk or bike. There is only the yellow school bus for public transportation, and that does not allow for after school activities.
It’s one of many reasons why growing up in rural areas is so rough for kids.
I am as pro-Waymo and pro-automated driving as they come (I would support the state finding ways to encourage and then force adoption). But I wanted to push back a bit on a piece of the argument deployed
"Women who already want larger families are more likely to have them if raising kids feels manageable, especially if it’s easier to combine that responsibility with a career".
I think family/men/women's time is subject to a version of induced demand. That is to say that, the more time available, the more people (mostly women) will cram family activities/"must do" parascolar activities till all the newly freed time is consumed.
So, while I welcome Waymo/self driving cars on security grounds (very much including women's safety from male taxi drivers), I would seriously doubt that this'll do anything for mothers - they'll find a way to increase Keeping-up-with-the-Jones style competition till all extra leasure time is gone.
Totally agree, which is why it was smart the author included a line about moms riding in the Waymo with their kids being able to focus more on the kids instead of driving. I bet that's exactly what true helicopter parents will do.
I want Waymo for Father's Day for all the reasons you cite! It is especially frustrating as a parent to be like "yay, no more daycare, my 11 year old is more independent...wait, soccer practice at 4:30 twice a week?"
The part that bewilders me about this anecdote is that when I was 11, I just biked to Girl Scouts, basketball practice, piano, and dance lessons. I took the bus to my clarinet lesson. So I wonder whether soccer practice is too far away from school to bike because of the death of municipal rec leagues, or is it just that people nowadays won't let their 11-year-olds go places alone anymore?
I wonder about this as well. My parents did a great job of buying a house that had elementary school behind it, middle school up the street about 3 blocks, and high school at the end of the street like 8 blocks. So it was walk or bike everywhere to school, soccer, baseball, friends, cub scouts, park, and then long rides to where my Dad worked. Hop the fence and explore the creeks. But this was the same for almost all my friends. We even learned to ride the bus to the mall (the #26!), which was big for us suburban kids.
Yeah, same here. Mostly the expectations have changed. Everyone drives so it is hard for multiple reasons to be the outlier.
I would encourage you to be the outlier anyway. The biking was normal when I was 11, but I had to talk my friends' parents into letting us ride the bus to Berkeley at that age because my parents were outliers even then. My sisters were a lot older than me, so even though I was born in the 90s, I was getting 70s-style parenting because my parents didn't change their methods. I arrived at college way more capable than most of my peers because I'd been moving around independently and doing all the chores for years at that point. I had to teach several of my dorm mates how to read a bus schedule and how to do laundry.
During the summer after I graduated high school, I went on a trip with 3 of my friends to London and Paris that we planned and mostly paid for ourselves. One of the parents I'd talked into letting us ride the bus all those years ago mentioned to my mother that she was only comfortable letting her daughter go because I was going, since I was so level-headed. Even helicopter parents think independently-raised children are more capable adults.
"In general, women are more likely to be skeptical of emerging technology. A poll for The Argument this fall showed that 39 percent of men wanted to allow self-driving cars, but just 19 percent of women said the same. That stat isn’t a one-off: Forty-eight percent of women wanted to ban the technology compared to just 32 percent of men. In other words, the people who stand to benefit the most are also the most skeptical."
Fascinating - that's what I've found as well. Guys are like, "Wow, this is amazing I can't wait to try it." And women, almost universally are saying, "Absolutely not."
Extends beyond information technology too, women are also more skeptical of nuclear power and genetically modified food.
I suppose it’s just risk aversion. Which I get, I’m also risk averse, that’s why I want to have self driving cars so I won’t be KILLED BY SOME DUDE DRUNK DRIVING. Smh
Heh, yes, I'm such a weirdo for loving nuclear power and GMOs that I pretty much only talk about those things IRL when I'm indoctrinating my kids against bad information they've gotten from their teachers.
You're doing God's work!
Ask them if they were trying to escape a bear whether they would rather get into a computer-driven car or a man-driven car.
I think a lot of it isn't even about the products themselves, it's downstream of STEM stuff coming from tech "bros". Leadership and culture and employee base overwhelmingly male, regular allegations of sexism, general yolo attitude towards risk-taking and rule-breaking. I can't operate on this AI, he's my son.
Are you just spitballing here or is there data showing that AV attitudes track AI acceptance or general attitudes towards silicon valley?
You mean outside of this post? I know that The Argument has some relevant crosstabs for AI, but only for paid subscribers. Other polling shows similar trends, of historically greater emerging technology acceptance ~across the board for men, and definitely for AI nowadays, but most of those I tend to see embedded into posts as images rather than a direct link to Rasmussen or whatever that's easy to share here. If it was a question of *correlation* - that is, given X attitude on AVs, how accurately can we predict Y attitude on AI, or vice versa - that I'm not sure of? I just know if you ask about either thing in isolation, the breakdowns are similar, at least wrt sex.
It's proooobably true for "SV in general", though you'd want to be careful with question wording. Like, many people are saying they love Amazon or Netflix or Spotify etc even if they hate "tech".
Could hunt something down if it's genuinely important, don't particularly feel like it for a two-day old off-the-cuff comment though. Searching Twitter or the archives of DWATV for images, and then backtracking to the original citation...it's doable, just annoying and time-consuming.
It's a bold claim that women's distrust of new AV tech is "downstream of tech bro sexism". Your argument implies that if we want to increase autonomous vehicle adoption in society, we should start with reforming silicon valley culture.
Again I'm not asking you to go track down data for some random stranger on the internet, I'm just asking whether you actually saw this correlated somewhere or if this was just some throwaway comment ("it doesn't surprise me that women don't trust AV because we all know the tech industry sucks").
No, it was specifically the "bro" part, with sexism (active discrimination) being just one avenue. There's a reason there's no gender-swapped equivalent of the term tech bro. Who can we compare to, say, Travis Kalanick among the fairer sex? The pipeline starts early, too, with notably differing preferences as early as grade school...so just like Matt's quixotic quest to get more progressives into policing, it's very hard to start at the industry level, because by that point you're already working with a limited pool. There isn't some huge corpus of female scientists, engineers, coders, etc just waiting in the wings to seize the reins. Representation matters, not only in the direct influence upon the work (consider how Caroline's post is both pretty intuitive, and also a basic effort, an actual professional comms team from Alphabet could make this case much stronger - but these mostly aren't the arguments they use), but also because people are more open to new strange things if they see that People Like Them are also trying them, also building them.
And furthermore, while I do in fact think SV reforms would increase AV/AI acceptance as a side effect, that's kind of a bank shot? Easier to focus on one narrow part of the industry first. The parent comment was pondering the sex differences in AV opposition, and that's all I'm opining on, not generating some grand game plan for burnishing tech's image. Suppose that polling showed there's, say, a 2:3 ratio of opposition to AI from Republicans, and also a 2:3 ratio of opposition to Big Tech from Republicans, and AI is a subset of Big Tech...it really doesn't seem very bold to suggest there could be some similar factors at play in both cases. These are fake numbers for a toy example, to be clear (actual political skew is not this large in magnitude, yet), but one could postulate it has something to do with the modal SFBA tech worker being fairly progressive, even if the C-suite recently swung rightwards. You don't earn the White House's ire for being a radical woke company if your people and product are not, in fact, somewhat left-leaning.
I'm happy to concede the argument out of laziness though. My bad for not bringing receipts to an empirical argument. Standards tend to be more lax on SB, so I have to admit I've fallen out of ACX epistemic habits.
Forty eight percent of women wanted to BAN self driving cars? This is so depressing.
My mom started talking about all the "safety issues" with self-driving cars, and I felt like we were living in different information universes. It was so weird to hear from her, especially because she is a teetotaler with a lifelong fear of drunk drivers (who has a lot of true stories from my dad's years working in ERs).
I guess my social circle is wildly divergent from the nation, but most of my female friends are down with the technology, and very _positive_ on the part where they're not getting into a car with an unknown man. (The taxi medallion system was problematic, but it at least meant you expected taxi drivers to have been screened to a greater degree than rideshare drivers.)
Did they ever do studies about the rate of assault of traditional taxi drivers? I don't think the medallion system would be very good for that.
I have wondered that too, and would love to know if there have been studies done. I have found that the fact that the ride-sharing apps make reporting issues of fraud so easy, no matter which city I am in or the language the driver speaks, makes me feel safer in them than I do in even the most regulated cab cities like New York or London.
My hunch is that the major ride-hailing brands are actually safer than local taxis. Medalion systems vary across cities and countries. Taxies are often used by visitors who will have a much harder time reporting issues in an unfamiliar city than they will by tapping it into an app that has their location and route.
Makes sense to me.
I explained the first part of the article to my wife about how liberating Waymo and she said she’d never put any of our kids in a Waymo for reasons she then listed.
Sounds like great safer technology to me.
What were the reasons? What I've heard is a lot of people haven't noticed their cars downloading over the air updates containing who knows what software.
If the car broke down or there was an accident, there’d be no adult to take care.
Thank you for reading and for sharing your wife's concerns! In the event of an accident, Waymos call 911 much faster than a human can, especially one who has just been involved in an accident.
In the event of a breakdown, I'm imagining the police could also be called to make sure the child is transferred safely to the new Waymo. The doors could remain locked until the police scanned a QR code or identified themselves some other way.
I mentioned the faster car computer response but it didn’t seem to move the dial.
This seems like something of an education issue because- what DOES happen if a Waymo breaks down or is in an accident? I would hope the car pulls over and uses some kind of audio to announce that a new Waymo is coming and to please wait in the car until the replacement arrives, but I have no idea.
“…the people who stand to benefit the most are also the most skeptical.”
Pure, uncut question begging.
Would love to see Waymo offer vehicles with built-in children’s seats eventually. Especially in a large urban market, it would not be hard for a company to keep a small fraction of the fleet “family friendly” and make those an option to choose from the ride hailing app of choice.
Love this idea!
It’s not hard to carry a booster (or even a bigger foldable forward facings seat) around and you will want that rather than relying on Waymo’s installation
I say this as someone who relied on one before getting a second car
Omg this yes!!
To say the least, gender parity is far from the best argument I’ve heard for this amazing technology (which will save thousands of lives and open the door to many other benefits). But I suppose I’ll take whatever avenues of support are available.
Sure, but in the context of a Mother's Day special I think it's fair enough to put a spotlight on how this could alleviate an issue mothers especially have where they have to play taxi-driver for kids who need to go places but can't drive themselves.
Fair!
"Can women get around cities safely at night" is also a good argument for policing public transit effectively. But agreed it's frustrating we even have to rely on such arguments
I can't wait until self-driving cars are more widely available so I can replace all my driving with more scrolling!
Slow Boring FOREVER
Maybe resistance to driverless cars will evolve like resistance to answering machines in the 1970's. My parents and their friends reacted to the first answering machines with anger, "How rude! I'm not going to talk to a machine! Why are they too lazy to pick up the phone?!?!?" A couple years later, "Why doesn't Bob have an answering machine? How rude! I can't be expected to keep calling!" The objection to driverless cars is different, but the adaptation to the convenience will be the same.
100%. I remember my Boomer family members saying they would never have a cell phone.
My son was hit by a human driver running a red light in the school crosswalk a couple of days ago. One of the first things he said after was 'a driverless car would have stopped.' He wrote this essay on the phone from the hospital bed in the wee hours last night after surgery to repair his leg. He'll make a full recovery and he's resting at home now. But he wants his message public if it could help speed up technology adoption that would prevent these accidents. Here's his words unedited:
Humans Can't Drive
8 May 2026
Yesterday morning, I was hit by a car. I am 17 years old. I was in a crosswalk, almost at my school, when a human-driven car ran the red light and hit me. It was the edge of the front of the car that hit me, and it knocked me onto the ground. With all the adrenaline that came with being hit by a car, I did not realize that my leg was broken until I tried to get back up and found that I could not walk and my leg was deformed. Very fortunately, I was the only person hit and my only injury was the broken right leg- my fibula and tibia both cleanly snapped, without leaving any fragments. After being driven to the hospital (not rushed, as it was merely a leg-threatening injury, not a life-threatening one) I had a surgery in the evening that put a titanium rod in my tibia to stabilize it and the doctors said I might be able to walk again (though with a limp) in a few days. I am very grateful to have such a relatively small injury. It hurt a lot, but had I been just a foot or two less advanced in the crosswalk, I might have died. The silver lining of that possibility is that I wouldn't have been in much pain for very long, although I much prefer being in pain because I am alive to not being in pain because I am dead.
I do not know why the driver of the car was unable to stop. She had a toddler in the back seat; perhaps that caused a distraction and she didn't notice the red light and group of children in the road. Perhaps she was checking her phone. I don't know why it happened. What I do know is that humans are unreliable. Every year, there are thousands of people who are not as lucky as I was. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), between 7 and 8 thousand pedestrians in the US are killed every year from being struck by cars. Some of these may be jaywalkers, but many were in the same situation as me, where the accident was only because of someone else being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was injured entirely because of human error, and most car accidents are the same.
Humans are just too unreliable. Some of us are irresponsible and text while driving or even drive drunk. But even the best of us can be distracted by checking maps, or by unpredictable occurrences both inside and outside of the vehicle. Our vision is also very limited. We have many blind spots. Without turning around or checking mirrors, which takes our eyes off of whatever is in front of us, we can only see what is in front of us. And only when the area is well-lit. A week ago, one of my friends rear-ended someone while it was dark late at night, totaling his car. Nobody was hurt, thanks to all the safety features in modern cars, but it obviously would have been better if there was never an accident in the first place. The way to ensure safe roads is not to better train human drivers. People can know every traffic law, but that is of little help when they cannot react in time to follow them. The way to guarantee safe roads is to completely ban human drivers on public roads. Aside from private racetracks where people drive their cars for fun rather than to get somewhere, all cars should be autonomous.
Admittedly, current technology is far from perfect, but it is much less far from perfect than humans are, and it will only improve in the future. Admittedly, autonomous vehicles are involved in more accidents than regular cars, but there is a low sample size and a vast majority of those accidents are from humans hitting them. That wouldn't be an issue if all cars on the road were self-driving. Self-driving cars can have a 360° field of “vision” no matter how dark it is. They can also react much faster than humans can. If someone ran in front of one, it would be able to react instantly and, if not come to a complete stop, at least slow down enough to greatly reduce the force of the collision, unlike the human driver who hit me.
In addition to improved safety, the efficiency of self-driving cars is incomparable to that of human-driven ones- it is likely that in the future all self-driving cars near each other will share information with each other, so when one slows down, stops, or starts moving, all those behind it slow down, stop, or start moving at the exact same time, which would greatly reduce travel time and completely eliminate phantom traffic. Estimating that it takes cars 2-3 seconds to accelerate after a light turns from red to green, and there being up to 10 cars at a red light, 20-30 seconds could be saved per red light when all the cars accelerate in unison, which is simply not possible for humans to safely coordinate. And if all cars were not just self-driving cars, but self driving taxis, like Waymo, society as a whole would actually spend less money on vehicles, even though self-driving cars cost more than manual ones- especially if a carpool system was in place. Most people only spend a fraction of their day in a car. Even during rush hour, a majority of cars are passively sitting in a garage or parking lot, not being used. Having one car per person is just unnecessary and a waste of money and resources. Ideally, we could have one car per five (or more) driving people, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing cost.
Something I read about in Sam Kean's book, “The Disappearing Spoon,” a few months ago was the usefulness of palladium. It's amazing for electronics, jewelry, dentistry, and medicine, but nearly all palladium is used in cars. If all cars were self-driving carpooling taxis, we wouldn't need nearly as many cars, and could use all that palladium elsewhere. I could probably find a lot more similar examples of valuable resources we would save by having fewer cars, and while there aren't many more productive things I can do while I'm lying in the hospital bed, there are many less productive but more entertaining things I prefer to do. And of course, there are plenty of things people could spend their money on if they didn't have to buy their own cars. For instance, healthcare or education.
Society would be better off if there were no human drivers. It is illogical for people to disagree because they “don't trust” technology. The alternative is trusting humans. Even before I became a victim of the unreliability of human driving, I knew humans were untrustworthy in this regard. I had seen the data. Now, I’m a part of the data and I know even better, and feel stronger (metaphorically, not physically) that humans should not be allowed to drive. We already have the technology for self-driving cars. It's only a matter of time before we have enough of them.
Waymo and its competitors are not a panacea, but they provide a very valuable service - safe, reliable transportation - particularly for those who can’t easily get around otherwise. We need more, not fewer, such opportunities. (Yes, it feels weird the first few times you get in and the car takes you to your destination without a driver - but you get over it quickly.)
I definitely look forward to Waymo/Tesla FSD when I'm older and unwilling or just not as able to drive. Wake up, hop in a car, stop for lunch, boom in Tahoe. No work. And presumably not in winter. Once the cars can handle driving in the snow...that will be fire. But just getting to Dr.'s appointments and the grocery store.
I don't see this being cost effective anytime soon. I get how it will replace conventional rideshare, and maybe opens up a few other use cases, but I'm deeply skeptical of these takes that have everyone selling their cars and using autonomous taxis exclusively. Why would I want to pay Waymo to do something I already do for myself for free?
It would depend on the price. You're paying for a vehicle that's typically isn't being used +22.5 hours a day. With higher utilization your cost per mile could be lower with a Waymo than a vehicle you own.
Depreciation is more mileage than age. I kept my last car nearly 20 years, and still got like $6k for it (and the damn stealership turned around and sold it for $10k). I'm sure the wheels will be falling of these Waymo cabs after a few years of service.
There's also the other point, I don't want to hail a cab (autonomous or otherwise) every time I need to go somewhere. I want my car in my garage which I have exclusive use of and which I can leave stuff in. If it can drive itself, great.
Obviously this doesn’t affect, everyone, but it’s not unheard of for people to pay hundreds of dollars a month for parking in a major city. Higher utilization also means less money spent on building parking structures.
You’re clearly not the marginal consumer here, and that’s fine, but I wouldn’t discount the business model just because it’s not relevant to you.
There's definitely a business to be had here, I'm sure they'll make money. It's the more expansive takes about how this will upend private car ownership entirely that I'm deeply skeptical of.
I suspect it’ll eventually do so *just* enough to be a huge culture war issue.
That is, people in walkable places who are already kind of marginal car owners will decide they can do without. Meanwhile rural residents will definitely still need one. And in the middle, a continuum of how much you need a private car (and how many) based on how dense your neighborhood is.
You can hear the culture war nonsense already just from this description: “those godless commies want to push us into car collectivism” vs “conservatives just don’t care about people, it’s why they’re still driving in their own cars”
The real shitshow isn’t going to be around private ownership vs hire car, where no one is really going to care what others do IMO, but around whether local or county jurisdictions can mandate autonomous operation or not.
And that is going to be a *shitshow.*
I suspect this will be an 80/20 issue in favor of private car ownership for the foreseeable future.
Hard agree - these takes drive me bonkers. People love their cars.
Only 20? Luxury! I kept mine 30 years, when I sold it it was just a bit of rust around a VIN number.
I suspect most people over about 30-35 today will want to maintain ownership AND human operation for most of their lives, so that puts any self driving ubiquity at least 50 years away. We’ll see, it could be an interesting case of technology vs cultural inertia.
Separate from efficiencies associated with higher utilization, getting the time back from driving will be worth it for a lot of people. For a professional earning a high enough salary, being able to work during your commute would be worth the premium. There are a lot of things I could do myself for free, but I pay someone else to do it because I don’t have the time.
I’ve had days so busy at work I’ve waymoed instead of commuting so I could do meetings.
Yes, and that person would probably own an autonomous vehicle. Just like rich people now have private drivers that work on their schedule and not Uber
There’s a whole continuum of scale. You might as well say there’s no point in first class seats in commercial flights because rich people have private jets.
There are people with private jets too. That doesn't mean there's no commercial airlines
I don't want to wait for my plane when I want to go somewhere!
I think commercial air is more like the city bus in this comparison. Riding the bus would definitely save money, but that juice isn't worth the squeeze. Just like rich people can opt out of the TSA and airline experience. Most people can't afford that, but they can afford a car.
As I mentioned below, it costs much more to purchase a third car and hire an after-school nanny than it would to have one's kid take a Waymo from school to their afternoon activities. So for this type of consumer, Waymo would be instantaneously the more affordable option. And then it would presumably get even cheaper as competition lowered prices.
Yes, I could see that happening. There's definitely a market for it and this is a big country, capturing even 0.1% of all trips taken is still a huge market. I was responding to the idea that fleets of Waymos would largely replace private auto ownership. I just don't see that happening in my lifetime. In your scenario I'd imagine mom and dad still have their own cars, and use this as a supplement so they needn't ferry junior to soccer practice.
I absolutely expect Waymo and competitors to replace our second car before we need to buy another one.
That is exactly how I would use it if I had it available to me!
There are 750,000 private vehicles in the city of Philadelphia, and 500,000 street parking spots.
I would be astonished if these figures aren’t reduced by 80% as the cost of self-driving vehicle hire converges with “depreciation+maintenance/operations+energy” as is the norm in commoditized service markets.
I won’t make predictions on timeline, but if the technology matures as expected there will be a timeline on which this becomes true, and it’s going to extend deep into the suburbs.
from my experience everyone just parks on the sidewalks in Philly!
I don’t want Waymo, I want the technology in a vehicle I own.
Waymo does depend on backup teleoperation for a small fraction of unusual situations. And it’s also essential that they’re working in areas where they have enough car presence that they stay updated on changing conditions of potholes and debris in the street and the like. It’s a lot harder to scale this to personal ownership.
No doubt, but I bet we get there in a decade.
Aren’t they part of Alphabet? Seems like they could get Google Maps data from, like, everyone, and I think a lot of cars are starting to be equipped with these sensors and cameras. I’m generally against my car storing or selling my data, but I don’t really have any problem with it selling that to Google for that limited purpose. It’s not like Google doesn’t know where I’m at 100% of the time anyway
OK, there are still going to be times when a self driving car is the first vehicle to see a new road, or some crazy out-of-distribution scenario happens and you need someone who isn’t 11 years old to be able to drive the vehicle
I’m sure it’s happened already, but I bet self-driving can get video game style glitches.
Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the "pretty good!"
The new Mercedes basically has it.
https://youtu.be/xlc8EOtxKm8?si=aVRlVfjN8bVYrhN2
How much? You know I'm looking.
Starts at $42k for the A220. IIRC the self driving is $3,500.
Not anymore it doesn’t https://insideevs.com/news/784404/mercedes-level-3-drive-pilot-canceled/
The scenarios where it was active were so limited it wasn’t useful.
They’ve always been leaders in car tech, nice to see!
Yeah, I would rather have that myself, but having a fleet of taxis would be cool too, especially when traveling
Tesla has this (Full Self-Driving). As both a mom and a user of this technology, I’m in the skeptical-for-now camp. I’ve had to correct our car’s route on multiple critical occasions…
I do, too, but I would take Waymo in the meantime. I think it's likely to be available to me before the prices on self-driving cars I can purchase come down to my price range.
> There’s good reason for this. From 2017 to 2022, a total of 400,181 Uber trips resulted in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in the United States alone, court documents examined by the New York Times show.
Mentioning this is irresponsible, if not dishonest, without mentioning the denominator: **11 million rides.** This is a rate of slightly less than 1 per 5000. If you commute by Uber every weekday, both ways, 52 weeks a year, you would average less than one sexual assault per **decade**, two if you assume that all assaults. That is very, very far from being the most dangerous thing you do that night. "Would you rather be alone with a man or a bear" tier. If you cross a street drunk to get to the Uber, that's probably significantly more dangerous than the ride.
I think you're on the right track, but where did you get the 11 million number? I think it's around 2 billion. The rest of your math checks out.
BTW, it's important to note for context regarding even that 400k number:
"Ms. Nilles said that about 75 percent of the 400,181 reports were “less serious,” such as making comments about someone’s appearance, flirting or using explicit language. She added that the reports had not been audited by the company and could include incorrect or fraudulent reports submitted by people trying to get a refund."
Uber reports 17 million rides in that period, 67% in the USA.
Where do you see that? In their safety report, it appears to be to be ~2 billion (they don't say exactly but you can infer from other numbers). Also, 400k / 11m = 1 in 27.5 chance of being subjected to some kind of sexual misconduct, which would be insanely high.
I got it secondhand and you seem to be correct. Not sure where they got it. EDIT: They quoted the number **per day** and I was very dumb.
You also have to weigh it against the fact that the driver provides some level of deterrence against homeless guys trying to get in the car with you that you don’t get with Waymo.
Homeless guys can't get into a Waymo where the doors are locked which they are.
I don’t mean getting into the car while the ride is going, I mean pushing in on you while you’re getting in or stowing away in a car that’s picking you up, they’ve already had a few incidents of these that have made the news.
I love a good "homeless guys" panic as much as the next Slow Borer. But the risk is less than with private vehicles (waymo picking you up in front of your bar/restaurant/office rather than you walking to your car in some deserted parking lot).
"Akshually, it's safer to have a random stranger driving your car vs just making sure nobody is lurking next to your waymo" is a weird take.
I mean that's a good point, but it seems very technologically solvable. The sensor technology to know "is someone still in this car when they shouldn't be" is absolutely possible. As is sensing when someone is yelling , "Waymo help me, take me to the police station there's someone in the car".
One sexual assault per decade still seems like kind of a lot? I mean I expect to have zero sexual assaults over my lifetime (and zero of any kind of assault over my adult lifetime).
So that number cited includes things like flirting or inappropriate language (I was also curious about that number and read the NYT article).
Most men have more than one sexual assault as defined here more than once a decade.
People with disabilities also stand to benefit hugely from self-driving cars. Having to choose between paying through the nose for an uber, relying on infrequent or nonexistent public transit, or pleading for a ride with family or friends (which needs to be planned in advance even if they love you and are willing to help) every single time you want to go anywhere is no fun. This is an invisible problem for so many. People who can drive tend to assume every adult can, and don’t think about the implications of not being able to.
+100
This assumes people don’t want to use their kids as a reason to cut out of work early
Hah! Why not both?
Grocery delivery is of course already available - no need for self-driving for that! Though if self-driving manages to unlock real economies of scale, then it may start making deliveries cheaper - if you’re able to go out and unload the car rather than wanting the driver to drop it at your doorstep.
I do grocery pickup rather than delivery in my current area because the stores farm delivery out to instacart which means at least a 20% tip for the gig workers who also have to shop the stuff. But pickup requires no tip because it's the grocery store's own employees. A waymo delivery would certainly come with a cost over pickup, but I think it'd eventually be a lot less than 20% of my weekly grocery bill.
The idea of, from 10 to 16 years, moms (or dads, or personal motorists) taking kids to and from school seems so strange...
I have many doubts if the kind of parents who as afraid of their children going alone to school would be safe in putting them in a self.driving car...
This is a non-sequitor.
"America is at historic highs of pedestrian fatalities and I don't feel it is safe for my 10 year old to get to get school by himself because all the cars drive 50mph on residential streets and he would have to cross a four lane road where people are often driving 60+ mph" is why people drive their kids to school, not because they are afraid of kidnappings and organ harvesting.
Sending your kids in the steel cage of a Waymo alleviates the actual concern.
yeah, there's absolutely no way my niece and nephews would walk or bike to school ever...their elementary school is a mile and a half up the road and their middle/high schools will be 2 miles away, but the speed limits on the arterials to get there are 45 and 55. oh yeah, and no sidewalks or bike lanes
It's not about safety. The custom has changed so there is a lot more peer pressure to drive kids to school and not make them take the bus.
School buses just didn’t exist in my hometown, or didn’t exist for my neighborhood, or something. I still don’t understand what exactly the situation was, just that I legitimately thought school buses were some sort of TV myth until I moved to my current location a few years ago.
I mean, the bus sucked, but I didn’t die
I grew up in Italy, and from an early age (5, if I recall correctly) I had a monthly bus ticket and went everywhere around the city by bus (I couldn't bike due to a health issue affecting my sense of equilibrium). At 14, as is still very typical in Italy, I got a small motorbike ("ciclomotore"-- e.g. a Vespa would be one, although mine was a different brand) and went everywhere on that, having outgrown my equilibrium issues enough.
Later, my children did get their ciclomotori at 14, but the cultural vibes had shifted enough that my wife vetoed their going by bus all the time on their own until they were, I believe, 11 or so. I wonder how my four grandchildren, now aged 3 to 11, will fare, as cultural norms keep shifting...
Yeah, I’m talking about the school bus, which I think is a specific American kind of hell. City buses would have been different (and better) because there would have been adults in the mix, but that’s not generally how US kids get to school outside of a few major cities. My suburb barely had any city bus service at all.
Would have been nice to get a moped at 14, but we did all get cars at 16. Once that happened I was always taking road trips. Gas that was less than $1/gal helped…
School buses can be incredibly unsafe. It’s a bunch of kids packed together with no supervision. I was sexually assaulted (super common for girls in my age group) on the bus. My sibling witnessed a stabbing.
I’m one of those parents who will do what I can to avoid school buses unless and until they put a second adult on board who can actually monitor the kids.
Yep. I don’t doubt that at all. I was in an affluent suburb and im a guy so to me it wasn’t *that* bad, but there was lots of bullying and fighting that went on. I only had to do it for middle school and a little bit of 9th grade, at which point I had an older friend I could carpool with.
A lot of people live way too far from schools for their children to walk or bike. There is only the yellow school bus for public transportation, and that does not allow for after school activities.
It’s one of many reasons why growing up in rural areas is so rough for kids.
> It’s one of many reasons why growing up in rural areas is so rough for kids.
I had to catch the bus at ~6:40 AM. I hated it, but it wasn't like the worst thing in the world.
I am as pro-Waymo and pro-automated driving as they come (I would support the state finding ways to encourage and then force adoption). But I wanted to push back a bit on a piece of the argument deployed
"Women who already want larger families are more likely to have them if raising kids feels manageable, especially if it’s easier to combine that responsibility with a career".
I think family/men/women's time is subject to a version of induced demand. That is to say that, the more time available, the more people (mostly women) will cram family activities/"must do" parascolar activities till all the newly freed time is consumed.
So, while I welcome Waymo/self driving cars on security grounds (very much including women's safety from male taxi drivers), I would seriously doubt that this'll do anything for mothers - they'll find a way to increase Keeping-up-with-the-Jones style competition till all extra leasure time is gone.
Totally agree, which is why it was smart the author included a line about moms riding in the Waymo with their kids being able to focus more on the kids instead of driving. I bet that's exactly what true helicopter parents will do.