A Waymo urbanist employee claims: we're on the same team

Amidst a tsunami of tepid coverage of Waymo's glitchy country-wide rollout and fears that circling empty robotaxis will skyrocket vehicle miles travelled, a Waymo employee is speaking out — on the urbanist activism site Streetsblog, no less. 

A recent Streetsblog op-ed from Arielle Fleisher, policy development and research manager at Waymo, makes the case that Waymo and urbanists want the same thing: safer streets, and fewer vehicle miles travelled. 

"A recent study from Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that AVs will generate excessive 'deadheading,' or empty vehicle miles, in New York City. The concern is fair, but the conclusion was based on a false equivalence: it treats the density of California as directly comparable to New York City. The literature is clear that deadheading depends on demand density. There are fewer empty miles when cars don’t have to travel far to find their next passenger," Fleisher writes. 

She goes on to assert that her personal activism in cycling and active transportation is precisely what brought her to work at Waymo in the first place, claiming that the fleet operator is just as incentivized as activists to keep empty miles down.

"Cities become more delightful when there are fewer cars circling and less curb space devoted to vehicle storage. Right now, roughly 40 percent of ride-hailing miles are empty, a figure that generally holds for AV fleets. But as a fleet operator, Waymo is incentivized to minimize deadheading because we bear the cost of every single empty mile driven. Every unnecessary mile means additional operating costs, energy consumption, vehicle wear, and risk exposure. Traditional ride-hailing platforms don’t internalize these costs; they are pushed onto the drivers. Waymo, like cities, wants to reduce empty miles as much as possible."

Her op-ed explores solutions to deadheading and implores closer collaboration with urbanists, claiming that "Waymo, city officials, and urbanists have common cause, and we don’t have to wait to start having these conversations." 

Read her full argument at the link below.