I’m on a plane heading back to San Francisco. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for most of the years since 2009, and a large fraction of that time the place has felt near the brink of self-driving cars. (Well, everywhere has, but San Francisco feels like the first testing ground for the most interesting experiments in technology.) And that has felt like a big deal. So I kind of expected them to arrive with a good amount of ceremony.
In my own life at least, their actual arrival has been gradual and underwhelming. At some point I learned that you could call Waymos to drive you around a subset of the city of San Francisco. This was wild and exciting, but not actually very useful, since getting anywhere in San Francisco seemed to require traversing a greater subset of it than that, plus I nearly always want to also drive to or from Berkeley. I took Waymos a couple of times, and one of them might have even had transport value.
In the last few days, multiple people not from the Bay Area have casually assumed that I take self-driving taxis all the time, which caused me to investigate and learn that Waymo is now all the way up and down the West Bay Area, seemingly including the airport. So tonight when my plane lands I hope to finally get half way home without a driver! It’s not clear this will improve my experience, since I will then have to catch a Lyft in downtown San Francisco, and probably explain to them that I have all this luggage because I took a self driving car as far as I possibly could before resorting to a human driver. But I am still excited.
Photo by gibblesmash asdf on Unsplash
How far did you get?