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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 47: Waymo - Autonomous Taxis
As we look to the future, we examine the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on our transportation systems. In America's car-centric society, these innovations hold immense promise but also pose significant challenges.
Doors are closing. Public transit that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. My stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life.
Speaker 2:On this episode of Transit Tangents, we get early access to ride in a Waymo self-driving car here in Austin. Are self-driving cars the future of transportation? Find out on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Lewis, I'm Chris and I'm Vumsi. Yes, we're joined today by a good friend, vumsi, here, who is actually going to be giving us access to Ride on Waymo, which has limited release here in Austin. If you're not familiar with Waymo, it is a self-driving version of an Uber, lyft, something like that. Fun fact here too.
Speaker 2:One of the very first conversations I had with Vumsi around two years ago when we first met, was about when the first time we thought we would ride in a self-driving car. At the time, neither of us had done it. Fast forward to today, all three of us have done it. Before I got to ride in a Waymo for the first time a week or two ago with Vumpsie, chris has ridden in Cruise, which used to operate here in Austin, so it'll be fun to kind of get out and really show all of you all what it's like to ride in Waymo, which is pretty impressive. After my first experience, I'm excited to see your first experience.
Speaker 3:I'm excited to see what the difference is between sort of Waymo and Cruise, and it's been a while since I rode the Cruise, so I have to go back to some deep memory there.
Speaker 2:Totally. In addition to riding an awaymo and speaking with Vumsi on this episode, we'll also be mixing in portions of a conversation that I had with Joel Johnson, a self-driving car enthusiast who runs a YouTube channel focused on the topic, called JJ Ricks. You can find a link to his channel in the description. During the episode, we'll also cover the relationship between self-driving cars and public transportation. This is a slightly different format for an episode, so let us know what you think after watching. Also, please be sure to press the like button, subscribe and consider supporting the channel on Patreon and to get started. We've already requested it. But, Vumpsie, do you want to just give us an idea and kind of explain how it works, to kind of go ahead and request a Waymo.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so for anyone who's used the Uber app or the Lyft app, the experience is very similar. The main difference is that Waymo, in all of the places where it's launched, is only a limited service area, so it'll only work if you are in the service area and if the destination is as well. So you open the app, which we'll show you all later, and you set your destination, set your starting point and just request the ride, and the ride will show up to the nearest point to you.
Speaker 2:Alright, here's our Waymo. We'll do the full loop here For those of you just listening. The Waymo has a large round sensor on the roof and smaller sensors that spin in the front and rear of the car.
Speaker 5:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Hallelujah.
Speaker 2:Alrighty.
Speaker 3:Nice relaxing music. When you get in it says your name.
Speaker 2:We'll get the doors closed here. Nice, all right. Wow, you're even greeted with a nice good afternoon I I. I think it will have picked up on the microphones also as you're getting in, it says your name, which is kind of fun. Um, awesome, should we? Uh. Yeah, should we go for it.
Speaker 4:feel free, yeah, to hit start. Yeah, I was going to say I got the magic Start ride.
Speaker 1:Heading to Zed's Real Fruit Ice Cream. Please make sure your seatbelt is fastened. For any questions, press the call support button to speak with a rider support agent.
Speaker 2:I love that we're going to get ice cream also. Vumsi for the uh full background. In the last two episodes we have actually uh discussed, uh, we, we stopped at amy's ice cream and I said that I liked jenny's better. And chris, uh, chris, oh wow you're also upset wow, okay, so I'm losing that battle so we're in the way, mo.
Speaker 3:We've picked it up in downtown near second street. We are now on our way to zed's, which is on the east side of town Right now. It says we'll have about 16 minutes till we get there and we'll see how well it does.
Speaker 2:So, bumsy, you've had over 100 rides in Waymo's. At this point, I guess, do you want to explain how you've used it and just like your general impressions of using it so often, because most people that I mean we've only ridden in self-driving cars a couple times. Most people have ridden in it once or twice, but you've got a lot more experience.
Speaker 4:Right. So to give a little bit of background and full disclosure like I am an employee of Google, but I'm here in no capacity related to that. Anything I'm saying doesn't represent Google or Alphabet's position on anything. I'm just an autonomous vehicle enthusiast. But the fact that I do work for Google means that when they opened up their initial testing program to Google employees, I signed up for that and that's how I got my initial access in August of 2024.
Speaker 4:The main way in which I've used Waymo so far has just been commuting to and from work. It's been really helpful to not have to think about parking. I'm sometimes able to answer emails and chat with teammates while in the ride, and that's been the primary use case for me, and doing that twice a day pretty quickly gets you up to 100. Yes, and I think one thing I think is worth mentioning is that you know it started as the Google self-driving car project, which itself started because of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and this is a bit of history of the autonomous vehicle industry at large. But DARPA, which is a federal agency, had a competition, a yearly competition, in which teams would construct autonomous vehicles and then send them out into the desert in these races.
Speaker 4:To my knowledge, I think most of the competitors were like universities and research teams at these universities, but they did these, I think, like 2004, 2005, 2006. And one of the teams from Stanford that ended up doing really well in these competitions ended up getting hired by Google and that seeded the initial self-driving car project and that started in 2009, like officially as part of a google effort. So Waymo has been at this for 15 years at this point and, uh, I think that that's always worth mentioning, because when people see these on the street, it's their first time seeing these. They're not really aware of how much time has gone into these efforts, and other companies that are now also starting to get permits to test on public roads have been doing it for a considerable amount of time as well, but usually less Like. I think Cruise started in 2013 or 14.
Speaker 2:We'll jump back into the Waymo in just a second, but the Google self-driving car project is initially what got Joel into self-driving cars to begin with. Joel's been riding in them for almost five years. At this point, let's jump over to my conversation with him to learn about how some of the technology has changed over time.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I got interested in self-driving cars kind of around 2012. I think I saw a news piece on the Google self-driving car project, and so I kind of had half an eye on them all the way up until the end of 2018 when they started, uh, doing public rides in phoenix. Um, a little bit fuzzy on the timelines there, but essentially I I signed up around the end of 2018, I got in around mid 2019, um, and so from there I started taking rides with safety drivers, because they hadn't done the fully driverless yet with public passengers. So it was around October 2020 when they finally transitioned to full fleet autonomous, and that was kind of when I started the content and really the main driving force behind that is.
Speaker 5:I saw so many people online that had questions about what does this technology look like today? And I had the capability of answering that question and so I said I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, figure this out. I'm gonna make some videos, I'm gonna put them out there and see what people think, and people were very positive about it. So I just kept going and going and going and now it's been four years and I'm still going, so I'm having a good time.
Speaker 2:Especially because you have experience with this from even back when they had a safety driver in the car. Can you talk about some of the biggest changes you've seen? Like I would imagine that it's it's probably gotten better on an exponential level. I'm curious kind of the the changes that you've seen over time absolutely.
Speaker 5:I started around the pacifica era I guess you would say so. They had the, the chrysler pacifica plug-in hybrid minivans with the fourth generation sensors um. And so when I started around mid-2019 it was it was pretty good. It always has felt like um. It's maintained a consistent driving style. But the confidence. If I were to pick one uh axis of improvement, I would say confidence is one of the big ones for waymo, like mid 2019 it. If you were to say, bring the car into like a parking lot with pedestrians walking everywhere, it would really struggle with that. And then, over time, I've seen improvements and improvements and then, once they jumped to the fifth gen, it was clear that a lot of work had gone into that as well, and so over time, it's become a more and more confident and more assertive driver, while also being very safe.
Speaker 2:I asked Joel to elaborate a little bit more on his thoughts on how safe self driving cars really are.
Speaker 5:From my experience, even from from the beginning in like mid 2019, it's always erred on the side of caution and that's always continued to be true. I always try and throw it into weird things as as just kind of my content strategy. It's like, is my coverage worth anything if I'm not going to try and poke at it?
Speaker 5:right so it becomes this kind of funny adversarial game and we go back and forth and mostly nowadays, waymo wins that fight. When it comes to waymo's mistakes, though, it's never about safety. It's always about, like, blocking traffic or something like that which you know you could. You could argue there's a safety component to that, but at the end of the day, I have never felt unsafe in a waymo, probably because there's like a good communication strategy as well. When you're in the waymo car, as you've seen, it'll show you a map of everything that it can see and how it's going to react uh in the future, and to me that's having that, that two-way street there, like of uh communication and and just the driving style being so confident and safe around pedestrians I I think it'll probably save a lot of lives totally, and I mean the.
Speaker 2:The major thing I always point to too is like a waymo is not texting and driving. A waymo didn't just leave the bar and have three drinks and be like, yeah, I'm probably fine to go home like it's. It's significantly safer in that regard that than a regular person might be. We continued the conversation around safety and some of the more technical information back in the car with Fumsi.
Speaker 4:It takes a lot of time to build trust with the public, trust with regulators, but they've done the work, want to think about all the technology, too that goes into the vehicle.
Speaker 3:So when we walked up to the car, you see all of the sensor domes, the cameras, you have LIDAR and radar, and you're collecting all of this data and pushing it through machine learning algorithms, and that also has to hit a database of, you know, countless driving scenarios. The fact that you can pull all of that technology together into this vehicle and be able to do exactly what we're doing now is absolutely amazing, and it does make a little bit more sense when you talk about hey, this is an effort that's been going since 2009, but it still doesn't make it any less amazing, impressive, what they've been able to achieve?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 4:And you know a tremendous amount of the training these systems undergo. And when I say training like we're talking about AI, these are relatively sophisticated systems, I don. Training like we're talking about AI, these are relatively sophisticated systems. I don't know why I said relatively.
Speaker 4:These are extremely sophisticated systems that incorporate machine learning and very advanced, you know, ai learning systems into every facet of their stack, and so when I say training, I'm referring to when they're trying to improve the capabilities of these systems.
Speaker 4:A lot of that work actually happens in simulation and doesn't necessarily require you know, to get to a certain level of capability doesn't necessarily require the public road testing.
Speaker 4:I feel like I want to be careful about my language there because obviously anytime that you're building these systems, you cannot really validate them unless you have tested them on public roads. But every time they're making a change to these systems, they have simulated environments, sometimes that map exactly to what the city that they're planning on launching in looks like. So they have, for instance, the entire city of San Francisco in simulation created and they have their cars driving around that simulated environment and doing the vast majority of their training miles in that environment before they feel confident testing it on public roads. And I don't have, like, any real details on exactly what the rollout process looks like. But even in cities where they have launched, you will see cars with safety drivers behind the wheels, and my assumption is that they're doing that for, like new releases of updated software, they're going to always put that on the road with the safety driver there, because they want to be as careful as possible.
Speaker 1:Getting close. Don't let your belongings ride away. Grab your stuff now.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is a great, a great.
Speaker 4:Oh, this is a great. A great Because technically we have a. I guess?
Speaker 2:a flashing red light. Yes, flashing red light. Waymo does not run over the kids in their Halloween costumes.
Speaker 3:That's good it made the stop in time and waited for them to get out of the crosswalk. Yes, we survived.
Speaker 4:And now when we close the door, you can actually peek in there and you'll see a little countdown to say when it's gonna call the ride done, and then the handles proceed and it drives off.
Speaker 3:I wonder how many people have made a mistake by touching the spinning sensor. That's a good question. Alright, we made it to Zedd's, got our ice cream Cheers. Not a thing but it is now. I guess we're making it a thing.
Speaker 2:Well, we're enjoying our ice cream. If you haven't liked this video, please do so Also. If you're interested in seeing more from us, consider hitting the subscribe button or supporting us directly on Patreon.
Speaker 3:The intrusive thoughts say touch the spinning thing. Ha ha.
Speaker 2:Will it get mad if I put my bag in the front seat? I think you should, okay.
Speaker 3:It hits the brakes bag falls, hits the gas. Yeah, that's Final destination moment. Yes, Wow.
Speaker 4:Definitely get a good amount of like just yeah, I feel like that's the most interesting part. It's the most jarring.
Speaker 2:Yes, Thank you. I'm curious what you've done Tons of these at this point. Oh God, oh God, oh wow. That was actually really impressive, considering it knew that the cars were stopped right here. That was actually at first. Just looking left, I was like, oh my God, what are we doing? Yeah, but it knew that that car was stopping basically.
Speaker 2:That was actually very impressive, knew that that car was stopping, basically. Yeah, that was actually very impressive. Um, so, having ridden in these so much, I'm curious what you think like the future of technology like this is and obviously like there's. There's like a future that is going to happen sooner rather than later, and then there's like things that are going to be decades down the line. Frankly, um, but you know, where do you see this all kind of going, yeah, and I think this is that person's also filming us um, yeah, I mean, I feel like america tends to be a pretty car-centric society.
Speaker 4:Even in the cities where public transportation is pretty well established and pretty accessible to the public, cars are still commonplace and roads are still one of the primary delivery systems for both people and goods.
Speaker 4:So I think that in the medium term, which I'm kind of thinking of as the next five to eight years, I think you're going to see a lot of this kind of solution Just five to seven person vehicles that are autonomous, that are able to go from any arbitrary point on a road system to another point. We have seen some a little more futuristic approaches to this same paradigm, like Tesla about a month ago, approaches to this same paradigm, like Tesla about a month ago, announced what they were calling the robo van, I want to say, which is essentially a bus, an autonomous bus, and so I think that, because roads seem to be the lowest common denominator for most modes of transportation, solutions like that are going to be very common. I would love to see high-speed rail and more radically different approaches, like drone-like copters, which some companies have been testing with. There was a company called Kitty Hawk.
Speaker 1:GPS signal lost.
Speaker 4:Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:That was not the car, that was me, that was my phone. That was not the car, for that was me, that was my phone. That was Jyoti's phone. That would be funny.
Speaker 1:Whoops that would be funny if the Waymo suddenly.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so there's a lot of companies trying a lot of different things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think the transit nerd in me the technology Sorry, the technology nerd in me, the technology, sorry. The technology nerd in me is super excited to see that right, like the amount of technology that goes into the vehicles. What you're talking about was sort of the hovering vehicles that people are trying to work on, which you know we think of, as it's not feasible, but back in 2009 I would not have said this was feasible either. Right, but the technology that's going into these different solutions is really cool. The transit nerd in me, though, is really apprehensive about the future of this and people assuming that this is going to be a disruptor and replacement for public transit, when, in reality, if everybody is still using autonomous vehicles, we still have traffic on the roadways, we still have conditions that may not be the safest for pedestrians and bicyclists, and you also aren't moving as many people at one given time.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's a really important point, especially because not only are we still just going to have a lot of cars on the road, now we're going to see a higher density of cars that have no one in them, right, and so I think it's important to note that the value proposition of autonomous vehicles isn't really to reduce traffic, it's just to make road transportation safer To me.
Speaker 2:it's a good complement to a public transit system in a city, not a replacement.
Speaker 3:one way or the other, and I think it is like what we talked about in one of our previous episodes about good end of the line service. If you're trying to get you know from that bus stop to the next place, that makes a lot of sense. And what I like about Waymo's mission, uh, the the future prospects for people with mobility issues. Um, that is the prospect there is great because you can, you know, leave your house, get into an autonomous vehicle, get to wherever you're going without having to worry about trying to navigate the bus station and the train station or whatever your mode of transport is. However, we're not there yet.
Speaker 2:So this vehicle, as nice as it is, if I'm in a wheelchair, I can't use this vehicle Right, and actually Vemsi and I talked a little bit about this the other day, If you want to I know Waymo and some of the other companies are working on vehicles that would be better for that specific use right now and I think that's really important that they actually follow through and do that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, chris, I actually was curious in your experience with Cruise, did you ever? Were you ever shown like images of the Cruise Origin prototype that they were working on? I wasn't, so this is actually, I think that's a very important point again, and accessibility is something that I think these companies should prioritize, because that's where I think the dearth of access really can be addressed, of access really can be addressed.
Speaker 4:So, like crews, in order to make their future solutions more accessible, came up with this origin model, which was a. It was essentially like a small bus that had these side doors that opened outwards, and it didn't have seats like this vehicle does or like a normal car would. It instead had bus-like seating and, in fact, had a space for a wheelchair, and they also had a ramp. I think that they were planning on putting in those. It hasn't yet seen production. I don't think they've even tested these vehicles, though they did demo the prototype itself at South by Southwest last year.
Speaker 4:But, yeah, those kinds of models can definitely address some of these pain points and, although they had to backtrack on this, waymo had been testing their next generation vehicle that had some similar characteristics. I don't think you might have to check me on this, but I don't think they tried to make it wheelchair accessible fully, but it was definitely something that was more spacious. You could definitely sit in the car more easily if you had certain mobility issues. Unfortunately, they had to pull the plug on that, or they decided to pull the plug on that, or they decided to pull the plug on that venture because it was a partnership with a Chinese company and the recently announced tariffs made it presumably economically non-viable. There we go. So instead, the next generation Waymo vehicle is going to be a retrofitted.
Speaker 4:Hyundai Ioniq 5. Gotcha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because right now we're driving in a Jaguar. I don't know the model, but the I-Pace. Okay, yeah, it's a nice car, it's very nice yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's what I was saying. The prospect is really high and exciting Because I have friends who Another good example right here. Way, the prospect is really high and exciting because I have friends who another good example right here. Waymo pulled right over, came to a stop huh, that is a really good example.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I have friends who that's. The top concern of theirs when it comes to public transit or any type of transport, is accessibility yeah, so. I'm, you know, excited to see what the future of accessible autonomous driving looks like.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's important questions to ask. You know, we can't really be building the future unless we're building it for everyone.
Speaker 2:Right, that'll be the start of the episode.
Speaker 4:right there, another banger.
Speaker 2:Given that this is a podcast about public transportation, I did want to get JJ's perspective on this as well, so here were some of his thoughts. You kind of already alluded to this a bit, but obviously you'll hear some people make the argument that we don't need to be spending money on public transportation in general, whether that be buses, trains, anything in between, essentially because self driving cars are going to solve this for us and it's a waste of time and energy at this point. Do you subscribe to that argument or do you think there's a mixed approach that needs to be had here?
Speaker 5:Yeah, not really I. I grew up in Phoenix in an area with very little transit coverage, so my closest bus stop is several miles away and my closest train, late to light rail, is even worse. So I would, I would. I don't. I don't have as much experience, I haven't really thought about this as much, just because I've. I've lived in a world for so long where the transit is just not a reality, so it's it's just been kind of a blind spot for me, um, and I yeah, I do hope they can.
Speaker 5:I do hope that can be worked on. I think, uh, probably a hybrid model is probably a good idea to To me.
Speaker 2:I think it's like one piece of the like solution of traffic and travel and transit is as like, hey you know, in a major city, if everyone's getting around in a car, whether it's self driving or regular driving, I mean, there's still only so much space on the road to put all these people right.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 2:However, in an area where it's hard to serve by transit whether it be a very suburban area where you've got sprawling areas, things like that are hard to serve by a bus or a train efficiently. So if you have a network where you've got self-driving vehicles being able to feed into a larger transportation network, I could see that as like hey, this is a really positive solution to the puzzle. So it's always fun to see where people are on that. But that's kind of where I am is like some people in the transit space see self-driving cars as this evil thing, that they're just using it as a scapegoat to not fund public transportation. And I think you know in general, this more hybrid solution is really where things need to go.
Speaker 2:So with autonomous vehicles something that I learned today, and I think, Lewis, you also learned this today.
Speaker 3:I'm actually learning it right now, as Chris says it, if I'm being totally honest, the SAE, or the Society of Automotive Engineers, has developed five levels of autonomous vehicles. And technically I guess it's six because it starts at level zero. And technically I guess it's six because it starts at level zero. But you have, starting at zero, to five different levels of autonomy. Zero being you're in your car, you are just driving around town. There's no real assistance. You may have some assistive braking or collision warnings, but for the most part you were in full control of the vehicle. There's not any autonomous driving in it.
Speaker 3:The second level would be something that I think most people are familiar with, especially if you have a newer car, and that is if you're driving and you have an adaptive cruise control that sort of keeps pace with the cars in front of you. Again, you have to be fully alert. You can't take your hands off the wheel, but I think that's what most people are familiar with. Level three would be vehicles that can drive autonomously on their own. Uh, which what autonomously means? But they can drive autonomously under certain conditions. You still have to be pretty alert. So it's sort of driving without hands but with full eyes probably like tesla self-driving.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it's actually classified as level two.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay, officially and see, I think, of it as like, uh, rivian, somewhere around, like two to three, I think, two mostly where, like you, still have to have a hand on the wheel and it can drive on the highway on its own, but it's not going to navigate the city on its own. So there's I think that's something that a lot of people have some familiarity with now too. Level three seems to be pretty rare. Level four is what we're in now, so Waymo is able to drive fully autonomously. It is driving through the city, but it has restrictions on where it can go in its zone, where it's allowed to drive. So that's sort of level four. You have conditions. Level five, full autonomy, can drive in any weather conditions, can drive anywhere on any streets without human intervention, and so that's kind of where they classify these, these autonomous vehicles.
Speaker 2:thank you, waymo as we get out of the Waymo here. I hope you all enjoyed this episode. This was a different format from usual, so let us know what you thought. A huge thank you to Bumpsy for taking the time to drive around with us in a Waymo. Also a big thank you to Joel Johnson for chatting with me and hooking it up with a Waymo access code in Austin. If anyone here wants to go for a ride, definitely reach out to me. Also, consider subscribing, liking or rating us. Anywhere you watch or listen and enjoy the rest of your Transit. Tangents Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm saving that dough. Public transit's where it's at, watch me go.
Speaker 5:In the trunk.