Waymo Money, Waymo Problems
November 06, 2025 at 01:10AMFederal immigration agents aren’t the only forces invading Los Angeles. So are robots, in the form of Waymo driverless taxis and Coco food delivery vehicles. Joanne McNeil, a resident of LA’s Echo Park neighborhood, examines the infrastructure behind the AVs:
In response to criticism, Waymo cites its low accident rates, but this data is skewed—unlike human drivers, who traverse through all kinds of obstacles and weather, Waymo robo-taxis do not (yet) drive on freeways, and they stay within geo-fenced districts that the company selected as testing grounds. Meanwhile, this charade of AI obscures how Alphabet, a private company, has over decades acquired unprecedented control over public roads. Google Map sat-nav and geospatial data already commands how traffic flows and how public alerts on wildfires and mudslides are shared, among other facets of city infrastructure. The way it amassed this power, behind the spectacle and novelty of Google Street View and Google Earth, anticipated the present-day rollout of the Waymo AVs.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/05/waymo-money-waymo-problems/
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