Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

This is the Waymo 2

Yesterday I gushed about how autonomous Waymo cars is the way to go for ride-hailing. The only downside at the moment is the cost, and that the service is only available in limited cities. But time alone will solve those problems. Waymo - and other autonomous taxis - will continue to get better and cheaper. Once it reaches service and cost parity with UBER and Lyft, it’s game over.

The existential crisis of A.I. eliminating jobs in a massively hurtful scale remains to be seen. However, the example of robots replacing ride-share drivers is not an exaggeration. There’s zero reason to pay a live person to drive the car if the robots can do it for the same price, if not cheaper. In the near future I can see the taxi driver profession - whether it’s a classic yellow cab or a private car - get completely eliminated.

And if a car can drive itself, then it’s just a matter of scaling (says the guy who simply types and don’t hold any engineering degree) up towards larger vehicles. Bus drivers: your days are numbered as well! (Tongue somewhat in cheek.)

I think it can be a legit concern if A.I. obviates entire categories of jobs in rapid fashion. A bunch of people losing their jobs overnight is not a good thing. Pivoting towards another profession takes time and effort. In the meantime you’re going to have downstream consequences such as credit defaults and decreased tax revenue.

If autonomous taxi is destined to replace the driver, the current slow rollout of the technology will provide ample warning and time for people to adjust. UBER drivers operating in cities with Waymo might start to see a decreasing revenue trend-line as Waymo grab an increasing market share. At some point the math will no longer math, and they will have to go do something else. That’s a heck of a more palatable option than an abrupt termination.

Make wheels silver again.

This is the Waymo

Last week I took a Waymo - an autonomous taxi - for the very first time. And I have to say: goodbye, Uber and Lyft. If a driverless taxi is available, I am picking that over the other options.

Of course, the elephant in the room is costs. But that’s only going to get cheaper as the technology matures and the autonomous cars proliferate. There aren’t drivers operating the cars who are going to (rightly) demand periodic incoming increases. I quite like that I did not have to tip the robot. The price shown on the app is truly the price to be paid. It’s magical.

The only minor flaw I’ve seen riding a Waymo is that the car follows the speed limit right to the signage number. You and I both know that human drivers go above the speed limit all the time, in a very safe manner of course. At least there isn’t road rage towards the Waymo going the speed limit: what’s the point in getting mad at a robot? Unless you’re truly in a hurry, Waymo obeying the speed limits religiously is not a problem.

Other than that, the autonomous taxi behaves much like the human driver. It will speed through a yellow turning into a red. It will inch forward into the intersection on a left turn, even though I’m pretty sure the rule says you’re not suppose to. It will make that left turn right after the walking pedestrians have left behind a big enough space, even though the rules states you’re suppose to wait until pedestrians have finished crossing.

The best feature of a Waymo is of course the lack of anybody else in the car. No smells, no conversations, no stranger danger. Other than cost (for now), why would anyone choose a human taxi over the robot? I am team Waymo all the way from now on, where applicable.

Ride along.

Must protect number one

I’ve noticed amongst people I know from out of town that when they visit San Francisco, they are eager to take a Waymo autonomous taxis. It’s almost a tourist attraction in it of itself. That is, until it proliferates into other cities and regions. I myself have yet to hail a Waymo ride, just like I’ve yet to take a ferry to visit Alcatraz island.

As a person of introverted proclivity, I am on paper a big fan of autonomous taxis. To not have another stranger (the driver) there at all - never mind interacting with them - is serene music to my ears. But as with everything in life, there are tradeoffs.

Robots may be predictable, but humans are definitely not. On public roads there are multitudes of negative potentialities you must account for. And I don’t see how a driver-less taxi is capable of handling those situations. For example: what if a gang of dudes walks over to your stopped Waymo in a menacing fashion? If I were driving, the law gives me protection to mash the gas and get the hell out of there by harmful means.

Would a robot do the same? Has Waymo put into code calculations of when it is appropriate to run people over? There’s got to be a hierarchy of which life is more valuable, right? Perhaps the person paying for the autonomous ride should be supreme. If the outside world is threatening the occupant(s) inside a Waymo car, stopping and locking the doors cannot be the only option!

You can bet that I too would run over a gang of bikers in my Range Rover, if so provoked. Would an autonomous car do the same? I would like to know the answer before getting into one.

The late night filings.

Bangkok, part 2

If you think your late evening flight into Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) is going to be lonely experience, fret not. Apparently, plenty of flights get into Bangkok rather late. I thought my 11:35 PM arrival time would mean a very quiet immigration and baggage process, but no! Even past midnight, BKK was bustling with the sort of activity you see during midday at a domestic airport in the States. Our flight’s baggage carousel was right next to a flight from Hong Kong. Hello, my people!

Because BKK is still so busy into the morning hours, getting a taxi to your hotel in Bangkok is no trouble. The taxi queue outside of arrivals levels was healthy. Passengers punch in their information at the kiosk. It then spits out a ticket, with which you show to the next available taxi driver. I’ve read a lot of stories of taxi (and tuk-tuk) drivers ripping foreigners off in Thailand, but apparently the airport queue is highly regulated. Drivers are incentivized to treat airport customers fairly, lest they get banned from this lucrative route.

The government can’t risk harming the country’s reputation right off the jump!

I did not take a regular taxi to get to my hotel. Thanks to pre-supplied information, I downloaded the Grab app before leaving America. Grab is essentially the Uber of Thailand (and a few other Southeast Asian countries), and super convenient. It accepts foreign credit cards, so you wouldn’t even need to get cash right away at the airport. At BKK there’s a dedicated Grab pickup zone on the same level as the taxis. At 1:00 AM in the morning, it was lit (to borrow a parlance from the kids). It was so surprisingly busy that there was surge pricing, and my driver actually directed me to a different pickup point.

It ended up costing about 700 Baht to go from the airpot to the Phaya Thai district - where my hotel is. Had it been during “normal” hours, I would have taken the airport rail link. It would have cost only 45 Baht to get to the same Phaya Thai district.

Rush hour.

What did we do before?

I recently read about the utter nightmare situation for travelers into LAX: the airport decided to move the pickup location for taxis and rideshare cars away from the arrivals level and to a separate lot some ways away. LAX offers around-the-clock shuttle service to the new pickup lot, from where passengers can wait for their UBER or LYFT drivers, or get in line for the traditional taxi. It’s a move similar to my home airport, SFO: pickups for domestic travel have been moved to a nearby parking garage, though it’s less draconian of a rule than LAX as taxis can still pickup passenger at curbside.

Of course, the decision made by SFO has cascading effect for UBER and LYFT drivers as it created a brand-new traffic queue right out into the northbound exit of highway 101. The congestion problem created by the enormous amount of rideshare cars is still there, it simply moved to a different location - away from the terminals. I do wonder if if that was the original intent by SFO.

It’s no surprise then that the same situation resulted in LAX. A dedicated lot for rideshare may sound good on paper, but the sheer passenger volume is so great that UBER and LYFT cars and taxis are stuck in line for more than an hour just to get in the lot. As it is in SFO, moving the pickup point doesn’t really solve the main issue - too many people waiting for rides - other than punting it elsewhere. Again, maybe that is LAX’s goal: at least the terminals are nice and free-flowing, a sort of quality tax on passengers who rely on rideshare to take get them to their final destination.

Whether that seems fair or not is up to you.

This newfound malaise in our airports caused by the advent of UBER and LYFT asks the question: what did we all do before? The people hailing rideshare cars: did they take taxis before UBER was a thing? Or was it a combination of that and calling in favors from friends or family for a ride? Personally, I’ve always been the latter, even with the convenience of rideshare making it super easy to call my own ride. That said, the emergence of rideshare definitely shifted the passenger load from other modes of transportation, modes that previous have not caused the insane level of congestion we are seeing now. Taking rideshare is such an attractive option for travelers, but the existing infrastructure was not meant to accommodate essentially everyone calling their own taxi.

And what happens when UBER or LYFT - some would say inevitably - go bust? What are people going to do for transport now that we’ve all become accustomed to rideshare? Both companies are losing over billion dollars every quarter, with no prospects of profitability in sight. These companies aren’t necessarily too big to fail, but would they be too ubiquitous to fail? I think we’ll find out this answer sooner or later.

What’s in the box!?