alt Hacker NewsIt will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. Currently around 35% of the money spent on Uber/Lyft stays in the local economy. Waymo in SF still employs a large number of highly paid engineers who are paid the money which used to move through SF via Uber/Lyft. And those SF engineers spend a decent chunk of it locally on food, art, entertainment, and various other services - so it has (somewhat) less of an effect on the city's overall economy/total employment.
Waymo in Miami won't be locally re-spending nearly as much of Miami's money as Uber/Lyft did. Significantly more of it will be removed from Miami with each ride. This might be even more pronounced for cities like Houston, which don't attract tourism from Waymo staff.
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You don't think this will also have an effect on improving life in the cities where Waymo is utilized? I understand there is the threat to induced demand with too many waymo's being on the road but this is going to help improve city living and in turn, help increase people wanting to live there.
To the best of my knowledge, Waymo still has humans in the loop as Fleet Response agents that the vehicles can call for remote assistance when they aren't sure what to do. Caveat that the number needed likely isn't on the same order of magnitude as human drivers, but the job is likely higher paying. I could see a scenario where these should be locals for both latency (ChatGPT says SF to Miami RTT latency might be 80-100 ms and I don't believe the humans really teleoperate the vehicles, so that may not be meaningful, but that might be a bigger deal for international expansion) and knowledge of tricky intersections or road quirks in the city. They could also potentially help with labeling quirky city-specific scenarios and other various evals.
I think the pie will grow more than Waymo takes out. Stuff like a plumber realizing they're missing a part. What might be a trip to the supply house can be a self driving delivery instead.
Either way, it's not all that much different. Most of the money spent on getting around a city goes elsewhere through vehicle and gas purchases. Adding the cost of self driving to that probably won't move the needle all that much.
Isn't that how it always is when new technology disrupts an existing market? We no longer have telephone operators, toll booth agents, gas pump attendants, etc
Good illustration of input/output economics; a discipline that mainstream economics tends to elide over for reasons that escape me.
Not sure about the 35% here.
If I spend 100$ on an uber ride, 65$ goes to Uber while only 35$ is local ?
I thought it's was the other way around with a margin of 30% for Uber.
So many things wrong with the assumptions and chain of reasoning in this comment.
The easiest example is to look at Detroit.
Although, perhaps the username is a signal, and I fell for it.
> It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into SF.
Why SF? Does Google even still have an engineering office in the city? Alphabet is a publicly traded company with employees all over the USA and the world, even if you said the money would be funneled into Mountain View you'd be incorrect. The money will be funneled into 401Ks would be more accurate, and a lot of snowbirds in Florida are living off of their 401Ks and stock investments (which probably have a lot of Alphabet in them), so it is definitely something for Florida.
But I think your point is that gig workers won't be making the money anymore. That's definitely true. That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.