Waymo had 708,000 paid driverless rides in California in March. Could this grow to be a replacement for public transport in the future?

source: [https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lpzxwhqcy223](https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lpzxwhqcy223)

Waymo is still far smaller than Uber for example

in April, Waymo said they are now doing 250k paid self drived rides per week, which would mean an annual rate of 13 million

Uber had roughly 11.2 BILLION rides in total around the world last year

however, Waymo seems to be doubling the ammount of rides it does every 12 months

how long can that fast growth continue remains to be seen

suffice to say, i think software wont be the bottleneck to Waymo’s expansion, but the production of cars itself

but on regional level, i could see Waymo cracking above 1% ride hailing market share in large cities in California as of right now, and by the end of the decade could easily cross 10-20%

question remains what will the growth be from

will it mostly take away customers from Uber and Lyft, or will it mostly take away people who would have used public transit OR personal car?

Replacement for uber and lyft, maybe. Replacement for low-frequency, low-ridership bus lines, also maybe. Otherwise no not really. The benefit of public transport is it tends to also be mass transport, you can get 100k people across a city much faster, much more economically, and much more conveniently with a train than with a series of cars.

burgers will literally let 2-ton robots cruise their cities before building mass transit it’s so joever

what if we connect all the waymos and make a chain of them to move people who are going the same general direction? Maybe even put them on special tracks to bypass traffic??