| In my experience Waymo has been much worse compared to Lyft/Uber for longer rides. A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient. It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a worse version of the "Avoid highways" feature on Google Maps, and getting to a further destination can take almost twice the amount of time as compared to a Lyft/Uber. Another problem is its lack of human intuition and strategies when driving in the city during some kind of event where many of the roads are blocked off. A human driver would have been navigating the blocked roads throughout the day and already know where to go to avoid the crowds, where as Waymo naively follows its navigation system and gets stuck in a bunch of traffic for no reason. It also drives annoyingly slowly which leads to frustration from human drivers who constantly try to overtake you. |
(There's a slight component where as primarily a cyclist I feel that Waymos are much nicer to cyclists than human drivers are and it gives me affinity to Waymos that I don't feel for human drivers in the city.)
I find Waymo the most useful to take after a concert far from a MUNI stop because usually surge pricing makes Lyft and Uber really expensive and I'm usually tired enough to not want to walk to a stop or it's late enough that MUNI headways are far apart.