Meanwhile, the 47 Muni bus that connects the Van Ness transit corridor to Caltrain has been “suspended” since 2020, and the extension of Caltrain to the transit center is still unfunded.<p>I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.
The Bay Area has reliable, clean, consistent public transit right now, it's just not evenly distributed
> The program applies to all 27 San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies that accept contactless Visa tap-to-pay.<p>Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?
They haven't created AGI either, they're just applying the CADT development model to money.
It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.
While I understand that “plain fact” is highly subjective, I would think downvoting is more appropriate than flagging. (Vouched)
Would it make sense for cities to wait around, and buy huge fleets of autonomous vehicles? Probably.
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Excluding the fact that drug addicts are still humans deserving love, care and the opportunity to recuperate - fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.<p>Maybe the moral depravity of SF breeds truly irredeemable addicts, but as someone whos met a lot of troubled people and ridden a lot of public transit your statement seems alarmingly and unhelpfully critical
>fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.<p>In your opinion, what is that solution? If we take a survey of the highest ranked transit systems, it seems like most solutions involve not allowing drug users to use transit systems, whether it's the unthinkable in Asian countries or peppering the system with officers and cameras in Berlin and London. Is that really treating them with love?<p>Considering how much often I smell alcohol and weed in Waymos, maybe it's actually the most tolerant solution.
London's public transport was safe before the cameras became common. Its something everyone used, and everyone let their kids use, decades ago. Affluent people commuted from the Surrey "stockbroker belt" to London at least as far back as the 70s. Kids used trains and busses to go to school- some of my friends did at least as young as eight.
No. It means not allowing drug addicts (and everyone else) to mis-use transit systems.<p>They are not hotels, homes, rehab clinics, or personal drug use pods.<p>Cigarette smokers manage to ride trains and buses without lighting up. We should expect the same of everyone.
There’s barely any officers in the Berlin transit system. I get checked like 3 times per year
There's nothing compassionate, loving or caring letting people kill themselves consuming hard drugs.
Loving or caring for someone is not giving their addiction a Carte Blanche, it can often be to allow them access to treatment and a path out of their situation.
They can access treatment. There are a lot of options. The question is should we force treatment at some point.<p>Use the veil of ignorance to answer that.<p>Suppose your loved one was one of these afflicted individuals literally killing themselves on the street. Would you want to force them to get clean or would you want to make their lives "easier" by giving them some "harm-reduction" that will allow them to persist in their zombie state?<p>Or what if you were in the grips of this lifestyle. Would you want someone to force you to get help or facilitate you killing yourself?<p>I know my answer
Walking through the tenderloin on a bad night seems like Carte Blanche to me, and it seems cruel and unusual (except maybe Philadelphia).
I don't know what the "tenderloin" refers to, but I guess it is a part of a US city.<p>That's generally the point I am trying to make. By letting these people suffer from addiction and homelessness, not offering good medical and social care, you are not caring or loving them, which is a kind of cruelty.
FWIW if you search "tenderloin city" the answer appears immediately.<p>It's a big internet, sometimes people will mention neighborhoods or customs you're unfamiliar with. In my experience, the polite thing is usually to take 3s to make the Google.
In my experience the polite thing is to just say “San Francisco” instead of talking down to people.
This is the problem with context and language and assumptions and algorithms. Even with that I get two restaurants and one Wikipedia article on meat before I get anything resembling a city district in my search results.
So what, put them in prison?
Can we really blame individuals when we have recorded, legally admissable evidence of corporations knowingly pushing the over-perscription of extremely addictive drugs while claiming they are safe and non-addictive?
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The situation is weird. No one thinks like this, or it isn't a problem, in cities that actually have good public transport. A drug addict has never entered my mind when riding public transport in London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, etc.
IMO the root cause of problems you guys are having is internalized classism and strong affections with the idea of natural selection. You can have a homogeneous society with good welfare and not worry too much about spoiling ourselves, a near or even actual communism with extremely subsidized educations can still have bloodbath levels of internal competitions. You can do that and then you can make it weird for tons of over/under class people with absolutely no way out to be just there in plain sight.
I live in the heart of the Mission and I endorse that quote from the parent comment 100%.<p>Once every few days I even share public transit with a homeless person! Oh, the horror!!<p>The people I see out on the street are suffering terribly, sick, unable to escape the gravity of their situations, and the vast majority are not malicious. Anyone who does not see this has chipped away key bits of their own soul.
Or hasn't been smacked in the face yet , or had someone unhinged on the nyc subway state they are going to kill everyone on the train in a manic episode.<p>These are not un-rare events at all, it's just in a city with millions of people, most may never have it happen but we've all seen it. Nobody wants it to be them that day.
Yes, but the minority who are malicious can render public spaces completely unusable.
Drug addicts,when treated properly, are alright manageable. Without treatment or support these creations of a dog eat dog world become unpredictable.
No
Absolutely not.
I have had enough to do with them to believe this lie.
They are broken people that are ruled by the drugs they are taking. they can be manageable when they have had their dose, but their entire life and existence is ruled by the need to find drugs for the next shot.
And believe me. When they feel that withdrawal they do not give a flying F about you or your rights. They need that drug.
People should not be forced to be around junkies
Not to get too political, but if you're right, why does it seem like societies which do not tolerate drug use have much fewer problems with rampant drug use than societies which tolerate it?
“Tolerate” is doing a lot of lifting here. You responded to someone saying treatment and support make addiction manageable. In the United States we had drug companies devising as many ways to make a profit off pain pills for years, so there’s tolerance, but when people started losing their jobs and their minds in mass due to the poison these companies were knowingly getting their customers addicted to, there was no plan or inclination for treatment or support.
Disagree lol.<p>We could move the entire population of San Francisco into full time care for very little compared to what we're spending on AI.
Are you arguing that the reason that the public transportation system in SF sucks is because of drug addicts? LOL
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The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:<p><pre><code> Cost per passenger trip:
BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73
Passenger Fare collected per trip:
BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45
Subsidy per trip:
BART: $12.57
SF Muni: $6.37
Caltrain: $18.27
Cost per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile
Subsidy per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $0.84/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.26/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $0.94/mile
</code></pre>
Every single ride requires a $6 to $18 subsidy, paid for by tax dollars.<p>For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
> The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible.<p>The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.<p>Wait, that's not how it works.<p>[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road <i>construction</i>, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
But you can't ignore the financials. SF Muni's $3.62 cost per passenger mile is atrocious. At that price point, it's cheaper to charter a helicopter. I'm not kidding. You could literally charter a 20-seat Airbus H175 helicopter to fly people around for $2.50 per passenger mile. And you'd get there faster.<p>If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
Of course, this is what happens when there's no profit motive. If we weren't making the marginal cost of using a road zero, and they had to compete with each other, and the people running transit wanted to make money rather than satisfy the requirements of a law, transit would be cheaper. That's how it is in all the places in the world where transit is really good.
Dude. Public transit can carry hundreds of thousands (millions even). How many helicopters you planning on having? How many landing pads? Where are they going to go? You going to spin up a municipal ATC? This is silly.
Is it just because of an artificial low denominator?
Good luck scaling that “solution!”
Perhaps what’s broken is your financial analysis.
Roads are fully paid for by road users (i.e. everyone).
Infrastructure for cars is massively subsidised too. Since tansport is infrastructure it it interacts with everything else (eg less cars in the city => less spending on car infra) and has a lot of positive externalities. The investment pays back in positive outcomes which can also be quantified in terms of money of you like. It's like you've got a balance sheet but you're filtering it to only look at two items.
Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.<p>BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.<p>Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
>BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services<p>Unless you try to build housing.<p><a href="https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-years-1-mi/" rel="nofollow">https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...</a>
> public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.<p>Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
That's a minuscule amount of the value it creates. And that's a problem, and a problem we can only fix by privatizing it. But most of the value it creates is for the landowners around it. And that's why successful transit companies are also real estate developers. Even in our own history, that's how private transit worked before we killed it.
You are completely ignoring the MASSIVE benefit the transit provides to the city. It allows densification. It allows people to get places without driving (and thus without parking). It frees up roads/traffic for those who do decide to drive.
Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?<p>If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.<p>For BART, that number is:<p>$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.
<i>> the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART</i><p>If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?<p>And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?<p><i>> several cents per vehicle mile</i><p>It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.<p>Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.<p>In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.
Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.<p>Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.<p>Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.
Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.
When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.
And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.
You're missing a lot of externalities here.<p>Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
iirc the NYC subway is only about 40% subsidized by fares. I’m happy to pay more in taxis for it to exist and subsidize lower income residents. There are huge economic benefits to the city that you’re not factoring in.<p>Not everything has to be directly money making.<p>If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.<p>Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.<p>SF could be so much more.
For another comparison, Moscow Central Diameters system (electric trains traveling from Moscow to nearby small towns) has 4 lines, 137 stations, 188 miles total length. It uses united fare payment system with buses and subway and transfer from a train to the subway is free of charge. Fare is about $1-$3 depending on the route. To be fair, it goes through Moscow at a slow speed and takes an eternity to get anywhere, and its range is limited [1].<p>Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro</a>
But the Bay Area’s highway networks are at saturation during peak hours. 101 and 280 are at least as bad as before the pandemic.<p>We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
Are you arguing that specific past bad economics are somehow indicative of a theoretical hard ceiling for any potential future performance? If so, how are other places in the world then regularly above that ceiling?
Ancient cities in Europe and Asia, and some of the US east coast cities were already very dense and well served by transit before the car was invented.<p>The US Midwest and West were built out more recently and at lower density, which is enabled by private car ownership.
And how much do people spend on cars, gas, maintenance, insurance, parking, etc.?
Yeah but the cost per passenger is in the hundreds due to private car ownership
I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.<p>And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.<p>Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
Are you factoring in fixed costs to that estimate? That may be partially misleading if so.
Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and only look at marginal costs, they're profitable.<p>But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
Thought experiment: What would happen with total profitability, given positive marginal unit economics, if readership were to greatly increase?
The usual rule of thumb is that fixed costs of public transit are covered by increased property values. It could mean a private transit company developing the areas around stations (as it often works in Japan), or it could mean the government getting more money from property taxes. Or it could even mean more money from income taxes, if the transit project stimulates economic activity.<p>If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.<p>I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
Because it makes in implicit comparison with a hypothetical transportation mode with zero dollars of government subsidy.<p>The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?
They're discarding the cost per mile to a driver. If you add that back (and especially if you add externalities back) driving is more expensive.
Looking at the financials outside the US might also be relevant. There are no reasons for the US to be special here in my opinion.
Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.<p>You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
Yeah I was shocked as well when I learned about the financials. I'll the subsidy per passenger mile to the table as well.<p>I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
it's almost like public transport is a service and not a for profit business
I wonder if something like this could improve the economics of public transport though. Passengers do the bulk of their travel on the well used train line, and then the last part of their trip is covered by waymo which could be more cost effective than running mostly empty busses.
> unning mostly empty busses.<p>I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.<p>Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.<p>So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.
The best formula for public transit is the Rail plus Property business model. In Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards. Then makes money from renting out the properties adjacent to the station.<p>JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
I don't like having more feudalism though. One company owning all the good land - yikes!
No need to give distant examples - the US train boom used the same strategy.
Did it? I always assumed the US train boom aligned with shipping companies more than land at the destinations, which is why even today cargo gets priority over Amtrak.
Outside of the Eastern part of the US, the railroad land grant programs were a major part.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...</a><p>This is a part of why there were <i>so</i> many tiny little towns out West which were essentially just a railroad stop and a few buildings.
Sound Transit still uses this strategy in Seattle region.
Sure, that might be the optimal strategy. But to fix what already exists, using self driving cars to feed in to the existing network could work.<p>Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
This is why the main train company in the Netherlands has dirt cheap bike rentals at most train stations. Saves a bunch of last-mile headaches, as a traveller.
The problem is that personal vehicles inevitably leads to unsustainable traffic. Now, for low traffic areas, driverless cars might be an acceptable solution. But for busy areas, the geometry of transporting 1M people in cars vs buses is simply inescapable.
This is assuming all or nothing. More likely they will co-exist.<p>There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.<p>Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.<p>It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
What they seem to be designing around here is that you take a self driving car through the low density last mile and then a train through the majority of the route.<p>If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.<p>And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
Taxis are not efficient or cost-effective for short trips, so they’re not an ideal last-mile solution. I’d rather rent a scooter, personally.<p>However, if I need to make an appointment on time, or just reduce morning hassles, I take a Waymo, but afterwards, I may be inclined to take public transit in the return direction. Same distance, similar route, but distinct criteria for budgeting time, money, and mental health.
For completeness isn't there a Muni (streetcar) line that covers this route?
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train<p>(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)<p>I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
> They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.<p>Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
Indeed. Most people travelling around by taxi or public transport could be considered gratuitous anyway. You're probably not carrying a load of tools to do any work. You're more likely going to a bullshit job, going to meet friends, going to a concert or buying shit you don't need etc.
A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.
> Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train<p>After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
It sounds like Visa is coordinating the transfer data between agencies, and Waymo has just signed up to the existing program as if it were a transit agency.
The target audience of this offer presumably takes Waymo at least occasionally, so how is a Waymo credit "not real money"? And what does transaction data have to do with this?
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
To know that you've used transit.<p>Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.<p>In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
> with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.<p>At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.<p>It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.<p>It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
The biggest benefit of fare gates is keeping out troublemakers. For whatever reason there is a large overlap between those who don't pay their fare and those who sexually harass other passengers, leave large messes, or vandalize.<p>The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.<p><a href="https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260518" rel="nofollow">https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260518</a>
Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?<p>Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.
They can check to see whether you took transit! Similarly, when you enter transit with one card, you can exit with another card and they still know it's you.
Company scrib for the 3rd millennium - now with mandatory expiration!
They want to reduce the friction for next time: then you'll already have a card linked.<p>OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
It is Visa only, so there must be some collaboration, also because they must somehow be able to learn about transit payments (which they normally wouldn't have access to as these happen on a third-party merchant account).
Google probably has the most credit card data already. Maybe even more than Visa since they work with multiple payment networks.
What's wrong with paying out to you for this, the fact that you'd do it even without this promo?
Oh, I think it's a great idea to reward people for taking transit because it will help reduce traffic on the road and allow the Waymos to operate in tighter loops, increasing availability to other passengers, and possibly even bringing costs down as a result.<p>My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)<p>To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.<p>If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
I sometimes take the slower and older commuter train back home from the office during "green months" as I call them (May to September) to enjoy the scenery and the ambient clickclacks of the train wheels.
I never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.
I love it. We can argue to death, as usually happens in Waymo threads about public transit but the general truth is mass transit is hard in America where cities are designed mostly around cars. Could it change, sure but most likely not. This seems like such an elegant solution that I hope other cities adopt and use as part of new transit planning.
Oh man this is brilliant.<p>Amongst other reasons, I use Waymo for covering the last mile of a trip made by bus or light rail in my city (Houston, TX). Our public transit service is very reasonably priced but it would be awesome to get a discount!
I use my commuter benefit debit card to pay for public transit. Notably this does not include rideshares like Waymo. In order to
claim the transit reward I could use a personal card to pay for both transit and Waymo, but that leads to considerable friction where I need to collect receipts and submit claims to use my commuter benefit.
Most companies in SF must offer a commuter benefit so it doesn't seem like many people will be getting this Waymo transit reward.
<p><pre><code> > rideshares like Waymo
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I don't live in California, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Uber and Lyft were ostensibly originally meant for people already travelling from point A to point B to share the ride with someone and make some money - and still could be used that way. But Waymo had always been a car-for-hire service with no pretension. So why is it grouped together with "rideshare" and not taxis?
waymo, uber, lyft, etc. are akin to a classic black cab service where you call a number to make a sort of ride appointment. these never needed taxi licenses, as taxis are specifically hailable from the street at will rather than prebooked.
I think calling them "rideshare" was always a legal euphemism.
"rideshare" means "taxis" now
Once you are in the Waymo, why bother getting out just to get on a bus?<p>In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-subway-and-bus-ridership-drop/" rel="nofollow">https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...</a>
The answer to both of your points is that mass transit is used for most of the travel and the last mile is taxi equivalent. Being unable to do the last mile is a common reason not to take mass transit, so more usable taxi equivalents tends to increase mass transit use. And most directly, taxi equivalents are often significantly more expensive or significantly than mass transit at crossing cities.
Last mile simplicity? Yes absolutely it incentives both ways. People taking mass transit and not Waymo and folks taking Waymo only. That’s ideal imo.
It makes a lot more sense for Bart. You can go places that don’t even have Waymo service.
Cost, presumably?
at times I wonder all that money pumped into uber & Lyft to subsidize rides could've been pumped into electric buses that run 24/7<p>how much cheaper and accessible transportation would be. on the other side uber Lyft etc enabled plenty of people who were perennially unemployed to gain income. while the subsidized rates are gone, seems the ride share companies are making some of their money on food deliveries instead (another place robots could take over ??)<p>anyways this is a good move from Waymo if only the program can be maintained for 20+ years.
I think of food delivery in urban areas as a good test case for “are people really going to lose their jobs to robots?” I think it’s gonna be a while? Unless it’s the customer doing some of the work by going down to the street to take the food out of the Waymo.<p>Delivering bombs is much easier, unfortunately.
I use ride share singularly for the convenience. I don’t really think about the cost all that much if it’s “reasonable” and no financial incentive they could provide to link multiple forms of transportation would be enough to overcome that single convenience.
This program is mainly a fig leaf defense that Waymo can trot out when it is criticized by transit proponents. Which is totally fine by me. Train transit as it exists in the US is largely indefensible. We will be better of the sooner we can rip up the tracks and put those right of ways to better use (AV and bike lanes).
I would really like a full door to door with one payment. Put in the destination, one price and get a Waymo on each end. React as best as possible to delays, etc.
Ugh, looks like this only works if you pay for the Waymo with a Visa card, and also use that same Visa card to pay for transit. I don't use a credit card for transit in SF; I use my Clipper transit card.<p>I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.<p>FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)<p>> <i>KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."</i><p><a href="https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-botched-clipper-2-0-launch" rel="nofollow">https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...</a>
I'm also a fan of dedicated stored-value cards (they're generally much more robust during network or backend system outages), but I can really see the point of offering both in cities like New York or San Francisco.<p>Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.
I <i>do</i> use a contactless Clipper card, on my phone. I don't think this bit is relevant: getting Visa to correlate transactions is probably a lot easier for Waymo to get done than integrating with Clipper to see if you've ridden transit in the past two hours. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.
Why do you use clipper? There is no benefit to clipper anymore over a credit card, right? And just the disadvantage that you need to reload it.
Daily and monthly passes are only available on Clipper. Credit cards can only be used for full fare single rides.<p><a href="https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares</a>
Habit, mostly. I also have several hundred dollars of pre-tax transit money on my Clipper card from when I had that benefit at a previous job (and set the paycheck deduction way higher than I should have at the time), and I still haven't used it up. I assume there's rightly no way to get cash back for this, since then I could keep the tax deduction and spend it on anything. (And even if I could get the cash back, likely it wouldn't be worth the hassle vs. just continuing to use the Clipper card. The card is on my phone, so it's not like the experience would be any different.)<p>Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
The point still stands. Regular transit users generally don't pay per ride, they use monthly passes. Or aren't those a thing in San Francisco?
It's possible to implement weekly/monthly passes on credit/debit cards too via capping, but it's indeed a bit more annoying and unpredictable. For example, NYC MTA weekly capping breaks if you ever remove and re-add your card to your phone. (And I can understand how not all transit agencies want to offer capping.)
Last time I used BART, I had no idea you could use a credit card at the turnstyles. They've changed how this works like 20 times, and it never worked well.
I mean it does save the public transit utility a lot of money in transaction fees so I'm happy to deal with it for that. But the main benefit is pre-tax transit benefits if your company offers it. It can go into a clipper card easily.
Rewards are a nice bonus, but reliable, frequent service that actually gets me places on time is the ultimate reward for transit users.
My city tried this, mostly just gave existing riders a few bucks off. Never moved the needle on getting new people out of cars.
There is absolutely no need to have this Visa only.
Presumably Visa is subsidizing this in some way, if only by offering data sharing or access to some rewards platform to Waymo (they need to know about your Muni rides somehow to issue the credit, after all).
Tried a similar app once; the rewards were so minimal it barely incentivized taking the bus over driving. Needs better carrots.
Does anyone know what the play here is?<p>(Is it given that there's a play? Waymo is culturally a little distinct from Google so from personal experience I can't actually rule out that they're just doing this coz they think it would be good for the world).
I would bet it's part of the larger campaign by credit card companies to make contactless payment the only option for as many things as possible.<p>The more people use it, the easier it is to remove alternatives. Then everyone's movements and spending habits are tracked.
I suspect they are fielding complaints that autonomous vehicles increase road traffic, so they want to show that they are encouraging the use of public transit. Uber and Lyft have long been blamed for an increase in overall traffic.
The way they mention the governor immediately made me think this is mainly to gain political capital.
It seems odd that they want you to pay for transit with your visa. That excludes a lot of travelers who might have passes on their transit cards. Less common in the Bay since all our transit providers are different but I used to pay monthly for the Muni + Local BART pass all the time when I lived in SF.
They want to get on the margin to try transit, not subsidise people who already have passes.
I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.
Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.<p>I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
Imagine a decentralized system rewarding actual transit usage with tokens. That could actually work and incentivize more.
Ridership of public transit has grown dramatically in the past 20 years, here in the Phoenix Metro area. I’m excited about this new offering, and I hope it is expanded as described!
As a Bay Area native I think this was the first time I've ever seen the accent over the E in "San José"
Why would they do it. Is it for marketing ?
Bc if they cement their status in people's minds as a last mile solution (there are other cheaper ones: bay wheels, lime scooters, etc.) that's an extra fare they didn't get before at a cheap customer acquisition cost ($3/ride)
Americans will come up with anything just to avoid learning experience of socialist countries in public transport design.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.<p>The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.<p>The VC playbook heavily suggests the latter
Exactly. No way to tell what's behind this. Once waymo has total market dominance and exists in every city, it's hard to imagine them continuing to support local transit. The thing about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is nobody suspects it during the Embrace phase because good motives and bad motives look exactly the same.
> Public transit networks and shared autonomous vehicles are part of a complementary mobility ecosystem. As transit agencies modernize their payment systems to accept tap-to-pay debit and credit cards, multimodal trips are becoming more convenient than ever.<p>What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and <i>aren't</i> ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.<p>Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.<p>And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:<p>> “San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”<p>Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.<p>Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the <i>Waymo</i> portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.<p>> When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.<p>Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
> Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.<p>This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
> <i>Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.</i><p>That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.<p>But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.<p>I do think transit just needs to be <i>better</i>, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they <i>will</i> drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)<p>I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Yep. I live in SOMA, near both the freeway and a BART station.<p>Without traffic, a car has me (and a friend) curbside in 12 minutes for $30. Even during rush hour, the southbound traffic between the 7th St onramp and the SFO exit is almost never very slow (while NB is always a standstill).<p>BART is 30 minutes on the train + however long it takes to walk to the station + the transfer from BART to SFO AirTrain to get to the terminal. Minimum 1 hour. Easily another 30 min if you're unlucky with train arrivals. And by getting off BART at the airport stop, you pay a premium fare of $11.80 <i>per person</i>.<p>I simply don't bother taking the train.
I don't really think it's about the data. I think by Occam's Razor, Waymo (owned by Google) just sees a way for them to put transit directions in Google Maps where the last mile of your trip is a Waymo. By subsidizing part of the transit cost and it all being on one credit card, in the future you could pay for a whole transit + taxi trip only once and not multiple times at each leg