[lmkg]

Waymo does a lot of driving in suburban Austin and suburban Mountain View. Their claim is that this is more difficult than most driving, since stop-and-go traffic with intersections every quarter-mile and pedestrians around is a more complex environment than highway driving.

This claim is almost certainly true for the topic at hand, since long-haul trucking is the highway-est of highway driving. Outside of the topic at hand, my own extremely subjective opinion is that they chose some of the tamest suburbs possible (I have significant experience in the Bay Area, SoCal, Austin, and Pittsburgh).