Public transit is not only cheaper, it is also the only feasible possibility.

Waymo has ~2,500 cars on the road in the US by last count, and combined they are doing between 400,000 and 500,000 rides per week. Total. For the whole country.

TriMet, in just the Portland metro area, did 122,000,000 rides last year, or roughly 2,300,000 rides per week.

Let’s say you moved every single Waymo car in the United States to Portland. Great. You’ve now covered 17% of what TriMet did last year.

Now you simply have to build/buy five more Waymo cars for each one that you brought to Portland, bringing the Portland metro area’s Waymo fleet to ~15,000 cars.

Since we’re abolishing public transit for some godforsaken reason in this thought experiment, that’s fifteen thousand cars that are on the roads constantly. It’s not like adding 20,000 new households where people’s cars are often parked, it’s much, much worse than that.

These 15,000 cars would also likely need additional dedicated infrastructure for fuel/charging, which is expensive and extremely logistically difficult.

It’s not just a terrible idea fiscally (unless you truly believe that Waymo could finance, insure, maintain, and provide infrastructure for a fleet 6x the size of its current nationwide inventory with a budget of $555mm), but it’s logistically just… bad.

It is bad for one simple reason: Waymo, as it exists, does not compete with public transit. It competes with taxis and other ride hailing services. Modes of transportation at scale are not interchangeable. Anyone can buy and legally fly a Composite-FX Mosquito helicopter, but Composite-FX does not compete with airlines or airports.

Waymo’s self driving stuff could eventually be useful on buses, but Waymo-as-a-municipal-transit-vendor would be a completely different business from “Uber without drivers”.