Inconvenient Waymos

I live on kind of a weird street. The Mission in San Francisco is filled with them. They’re these mini one block long one-ways that cut the city’s neat grid block system into sub atomic units of housing clusters. Generally speaking you’ll never have heard the name of any of these streets unless you happened to be visiting someone living on one.

These streets are charming and they create quiet alcoves of peace scattered around the Mission but they’re quite narrow and traffic on them can present a problem. These streets barely have room for the one narrow lane for through traffic they allow plus the one side of street parking they have. More than once someone has double parked their moving truck or delivery van and forced me to back out of my one way right onto a busy road.

A recent change I’ve noticed is that Waymos no longer drop off nor pick up on my street. Maybe there were too many complaints about awaiting pick up Waymos coming from the neighbors, or maybe the self-driving Jaguars combined with the realities of the school which is across the street - whose parents cause their own share of chaos during daily child dropoffs and pickups - was just too much for anyone to bear and the easiest thing to do was just to blacklist the street to Waymos and avoid the problem altogether. I’ve dealt with this question before, and as a local network manager at one of these companies you resist the pressure to add complexity to your network for as long as you can but eventually the grousing and the grumbling gets distracting enough that you cave and then you never think about it again but your system is forever on just a little less efficient.

The result of all this is that mine is no longer a door to door Waymo transportation experience. I’ve gotten pretty used to taking a Waymo home after a late night out - enjoying the privacy and new age transcendant sound bath music Waymos would play by default - as a luxuriating moment to decompress and reset before getting home. But now those Waymos take the long way around and they drop me off at the further end of the street and I have to walk a block down to get to my front door.

It used to be that Waymos were a strictly premium consumer experience. Waymos were never perfect substitutes for Ubers the way that Lyfts are a totally interchangable alternative.

The Waymo cars were newer, the privacy was absolute, the self-driving technology experience was novel and the whole thing felt like pure magic. Given the same price and ETA I’d choose a Waymo every time and often I might even accept a slight premium in time or money or both.

Now the sheen is starting to come off, just a little bit. The Jaguars are beginning to show their inevitable wear and tear, the magic of what was new about self-driving has now become banal, and - dare I say - the jerky and sllightly nauseating way that Waymos drive is either getting worse or at minimum it’s certainly becoming more noticeable. And now they don’t even drop me off at home! Waymo the company has unilaterally decided that dropping me off close-by-enough is good enough.

Waymos are still not perfect substitutes for Ubers, but they’re also no longer strictly premium either. When I take an Uber I generally expect a car that will be pretty clean and it probably won’t smell and it will probably drive smoothly, with a certain band of uncertainty around every factor I’ve listed. But I also know that it will certainly not senselessly get confused and stuck in the middle of an intersection and it will pick me up in a pretty logical location and manner, even I’m coming out of a busy event, and, by golly, the Uber will drop me off at my front door! So all that is pretty nice.

There was a period of time when CEOs told us that the future of transportation was not one solution but instead a patchwork of transportation options, networks where you’d take the right option according to what self-driving tech had solved and maybe make a couple hops along the way, sort of like how you take a car to take a plane to get back in a car but instead at a local intra-city transport level. So far that has not come true, I still take one method to get to one place, but instead what I’m seeing at this moment is this imperfect set of similar but not equivalent choices that I need to choose between for each given situation. And I expect that the way I reason through my calculus is different from other consumers like me and it’s different from women and from parents and I’m sure there’s all sorts of funny and interesting differences in consumer persona shapes.

So anyway, the world has become futuristic and really cool and neat but for now mostly what it’s done is that it’s made consumer choice more complicated. And I have to choose between the bliss of Waymo privacy whereby I can avoid the feeling of feeling eavesdropped upon by another person in my metal box on four wheels, versus the certainty that my Uber will figure out how to get from A to B in a sensible way and drop me off at my front door. Can you imagine that.