Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.

When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.

According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.

According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.

So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.

More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make

No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m...

Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.

https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics

US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...

I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.

these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.

Well, the point is that if we reach a point in which a robot can do it better and cheaper, it's no longer useful work.

I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case)

It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.

Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.

I wont really miss taxi drivers. I guess that says a lot about them.

I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.

I've taken taxis in the US, and i can understand why people wouldn't want to. Taxis in other countries are a different experience.

I've been mercilessly downvoted for the suggestion, so at least on HN we can assume it's not what people want. :-)

Some people, not me, just can't go a second without conversation.

Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?

Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"

Absolutely would choose the robot.

Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.

This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.

I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.

the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.

Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.

But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.

One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.

I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.

That's not outrageous as a car price once you add insurance, maintenance, taxes, parking, license fee, cleaning, etc

Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.

https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...

The average monthly payment for a used car in the US in 2025 was $532, according to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-car-paym.... This does not count insurance, taxes, parking, or gas.

A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.

> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.

This can vary a lot.

6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.

Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.

> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.

$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.

> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.

Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.

That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.

And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.

Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.

The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.

Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of

- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything

- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up

- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns

Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.

You are ridiculous. The all in cost is easily that. Cars don't run on air. Insurance costs money.

And you don't use "ingenious" there.

huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(

In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.

> Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas?

Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"

But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.

Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.

> I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.

Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance.

That was not what I expected, ok.

I’d put Berlin ubahn halfway between nyc and japan in terms of cleanliness and orderly behavior, the bigger problem is that there’s no ac in the summer

its mostly pee and vomit, poo is indeed rare.

Didn't see any poop in berlin, but did see it in Shibuya station, spread out by hundreds of people.

How many war crimes are committed every year in Berlin?

From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.

Im not because the statement you wrote is too generic, « not solving driving » … solving driving could mean many different things. It’s the classic rage bait one liners you see on Reddit from Tesla bag holders. It’s funny because everything you’ve described IS solving « driving » from my perspective. I sit in the back and go read hacker news without having to drive.