June 25, 2024
- Waymo One
The Waymo Team
The wait is over. Starting today, anyone can hail a ride with Waymo in San Francisco. Rain, shine, or Karl the Fog, just download the app, and ride.
We’ve been operating in San Francisco for years now, deliberately scaling our service over time. With tens of thousands of weekly trips, our Waymo One service provides safe, sustainable, and reliable transportation to locals and visitors to the city alike.
Now it’s available to anyone.
Waymo rides for all, 24/7, across the city
San Franciscans are using Waymo to connect to the city’s social fabric, making fully autonomous rides part of their daily lives.
About 30% of Waymo rides in San Francisco are to local businesses. We’ve provided thousands of rides to and from individual restaurants, live music venues, bars, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, parks, and museums, boosting the local economy. In a recent survey, over half of our riders said they used Waymo in the past couple of months to or from medical appointments, highlighting the value of personal space during these trips. Additionally, 36% of our SF riders used Waymo to connect to other forms of transit, like BART or Muni. Some of our San Francisco riders even use Waymo to depart in style from their weddings.
“I'm thankful to be living in a city that embraces technology when it can improve our lives with convenient and safe modes of transit,” says Michelle Cusano, Executive Director at The Richmond Neighborhood Center.
Waymo’s fleet is all-electric and sources 100% renewable energy from the City’s CleanPowerSF program. Since the beginning of our commercial operations in August 2023, Waymo’s rides have helped curb carbon emissions by an estimated 570,000 kg, contributing to California’s ride hail emissions goals. This also empowers our riders to travel more sustainably — Waymo’s recent rider survey revealed that 53% of our San Francisco users feel that Waymo has helped them be more environmentally friendly.
Plus, more than half of Waymo riders in SF say that riding with Waymo has improved their sense of personal safety when getting around, according to the survey.
“I enjoy riding in Waymo cars and appreciate the ease of transportation,” says Charles Renfroe, Development Manager at Openhouse SF. “Members of our community, especially transgender and gender non-conforming folks, don’t have to worry about being verbally assaulted or discriminated against when riding with Waymo.”
In addition to improving mobility for locals, Waymo offers a unique way for visitors to experience the city. Thousands of tourists have enjoyed the sightseeing from Waymo vehicles, exploring San Francisco’s iconic landmarks from the Presidio to the Ferry Building. By supporting Spanish and Chinese languages through our app and in-car features, we ensure a more inclusive experience for a diverse group of local riders and visitors to the City by the Bay alike.
In total, nearly 300,000 people, including those who live, work, and visit San Francisco, have signed up to ride with Waymo since we first opened a waitlist —more than a quarter of the city’s population. We’ve been welcoming new riders to the service incrementally, and we are now excited to open it up to everyone.
Scaling our operations safely and responsibly
Safety leads everything we do at Waymo, and this step in our journey builds on over 15 years of experience building safe and convenient autonomous driving, ever since we took our first rides on the streets of Palo Alto back in 2009. With more than 20 million rider-only miles and nearly 2 million paid rider-only public trips under our belt, we’re now bringing the safety benefits of the Waymo Driver to more people in San Francisco.
Road safety is urgent. Thirty nine people were killed on San Francisco’s roads in 2022 and twenty five more in 2023, with thousands reporting injuries every year. Traffic violence kills around 40,000 people in the U.S. annually. The status quo on road safety doesn't serve the people of San Francisco, and the Waymo Driver can help change that.
"Drunk driving remains the leading cause of fatalities and injuries on American roads, claiming over 13,000 lives in 2021 alone. As drivers increasingly drive while impaired, the need for technological intervention becomes evident,” — says Patricia Rillera, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) California State Executive Director. “MADD proudly collaborates with autonomous vehicle leaders like Waymo, recognizing their potential to prevent tragedies caused by impaired, distracted, and drowsy driving."
Our track record for safe operations is unparalleled. We’ve been safely transporting passengers for over six years, now providing more than 50,000 rides a week across three major urban areas. Over more than 30 scientific papers, it’s become clear that the Waymo Driver is already improving road safety in the cities where we operate. The Waymo Driver avoids high-severity collisions better than even the most attentive human drivers, and the data shows that we have fewer insurance claims and injuries or police reports than human drivers.
Our operations improve safety for other road users, too. Over the 3.8+ million rider-only miles we’ve driven in San Francisco through the end of March, the Waymo Driver was involved in 17 fewer crashes with injuries and 12 fewer police-reportable crashes compared to human drivers*.
We’re committed to growing our service gradually and responsibly. We work closely with city and state officials, first responders, and advocates for road safety to ensure our service helps local communities gain access to reliable, safe, environmentally friendly transportation and has a positive impact on mobility.
A huge thanks to our many riders, community partners, and the residents of San Francisco for their support on this journey. Together, we’re providing locals and visitors to San Francisco with a safe, clean and fun mobility experience, keeping the city on the forefront of technological innovation.
And if you’d like to experience full autonomy for yourself, download the Waymo One app on the App Store and Google Play and take a ride today.
*The comparison is informed by Waymo’s methodology introduced in December, 2023.
