For some reason — no one seems to know why — self-driving cars can’t get away from a random, sleeping building in Santa Monica.

See for yourself: grab a cup of coffee at Primo Passo on 7th, Montana, and sit back. Before long they’ll set sail, one by one — Waymo’s self-driving taxis, white Jaguar electric SUV with Bulb sensor spinning top. I sat in the corner for less than an hour and counted no less than 10 self-driving laps.

“I’m here every morning, and they’re driving. All day.”And says Jennifer, a film producer and local resident, who asked that her last name not be used. “It’s a key point here,” she adds. “It would be good to know why.”

While we’re chatting, someone else pulls out a stoplight. I ran over and asked the safety driver behind the wheel—behind the wheel but not touching it—why they were going around the block. “There is no set path,” he said with a smile, as the car drove away. Five minutes later, another folded.

Waymo self-driving cars He arrived in Los Angeles last fall. They are still in test mode, each with a safe driver while the company waits to be approved to operate commercially. It is the third major market that the sister company of Google has entered. After Phoenixwhere consumers can now call up self-driving vehicles using the Waymo One app, and Her home is in San Franciscoas test cars are now truly driverless.

There are only a few dozen Waymo robots in the Los Angeles area right now, according to the company, in places like Santa Monica, Koreatown, and the Miracle Mile. Few cities are likely to be affected by self-driving cars as severely as Los Angeles, home of endless congestion and two-hour commutes, where saying “traffic” and ignoring can excuse any late arrival, and where that is Shocking image of Thanksgiving traffic backed up on a 405 It spreads every year because it never stops being real.

And sure, Waymo is licking its chips in hopes of reaping it all: Not only is L.A. a much bigger city than Phoenix or San Francisco, but there’s a sense that if you can handle the traffic here, you can handle it anywhere; In the western United States, at least, it’s the last boss of urban car culture.

What would it mean for riders, drivers and the city in general if the company was successful? If an automated robot becomes reliable and affordable — and replaces taxis and Lyft? On Valentine’s Day, I rode one of those Waymo Jaguars to find out — a rendezvous with self-vehicle destiny, if you will.

I met Sandy Karp, Waymo’s communications director, and Vishay Nihalani, project manager, at Virginia Avenue Park. The day is crisp and clear, ideal conditions for sensors designed to map and navigate an environment in real time.

Karp summons the car with a tap of her phone, and in no time, an SUV arrives with her initials lighting up on the roof screen. The cylindrical device also contains Key Waymo TechnologiesLidar (short for light detection and ranging) sensor with built-in long-range camera and radar. Collectively, the combination of sensors, computer hardware, and software is called the Waymo Driver; The idea is that the technology will be modular and attachable to other vehicles as well.

We hopped, say hello to independent specialist Lindsay Arlar in the driver’s seat, and our self-driving Jaguar headed down Virginia Avenue. The car moves steadily and confidently, somehow feeling just like it: the exact average of the driving experience as determined by software trained on millions of miles’ worth of data.

The prospect of supplementing this data is one positive aspect of expanding into Los Angeles. “There are 13 million people here, with a diverse user base,” says Nihalani. “We’ve got some people commuting, some going to the beach on the weekends across town, and there’s obviously a vibrant nightlife.”

As we speak, the driver handles traffic stops smoothly, slows down a construction site and maneuvers around the admittedly small obstacles we encounter on Santa Monica’s wide, relatively clean streets. They make human-like judgments, like swinging wide to avoid some debris near the sidewalk when there’s no oncoming traffic.

Nihalani won’t give me any specifics about the obstacles she didn’t handle smoothly. It is noteworthy that in the past year, Report of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration It showed that Waymo was involved in the most traffic accidents of any automated driving system by far; 62 incidents from July 2021 to May 2022.

One of the biggest challenges, Nihalani says, is operating in areas where people tend to ignore the speed limit—Waymo’s cars won’t speed, so a driver will be going at 35mph while traffic is going at 50. Same with Infamous. Left turn on red; It’s technically against the law, so Waymos won’t do it. But the drivers row behind you will give you hell if you don’t take it.

Drivers are more aggressive here, Arlar says—if a Waymo car is going too slowly, they’ll veer in the right direction. “People baptized us, you know,” Nihalani says.

It’s hard to get that “man, I’m being driven by a robot” sense when the car is filled with Waymo employees. In fact, perhaps the most nerve-wracking thing about the experience was the intensity with which the independent specialist in the driver’s seat raised his hands on the steering wheel, giving this racer the impression that things could get stuck at any moment, even though they never do.

Feeling over-supervised in the vehicles when the disembodied voice of a guy named Scott rolls into the cabin to make sure we’re following the rules. “I’m calling to remind everyone that the policy is that only three riders are allowed on Waymo,” he says. It transpires that Scott’s team is doing a “passenger check,” monitoring the interior of Waymo’s cars via video from an Arizona office. Nobody told him my fellow passengers were Waymo employees.

Half an hour later, the excursion was completed, and we disembarked. At no point did the driver system disengage, indicating that the ride went as smoothly as possible.

If anything, it might have gone a little farther also seamlessly, leading me to imagine a world where easy, independent commutes are the norm. In a city that already takes as many car trips as it does, what happens when you make getting around by car less demanding?

“I’m really worried about that,” says David Zipper, a mobility expert and visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. “If it succeeds, and it expands, what impact will that have on a city like Los Angeles?”

Zipper points to a theory called Jevon’s paradox, which says that making something easier or more abundant causes people to consume more of it. “If you apply that to self-driving technology, these things are designed to make driving easier, and as humans we will respond by driving more. That means more miles driven, more stretch as people become more tolerant of long car trips, and more impact on the environment “.

This is to say nothing of the potential impact on taxi and ride-sharing jobs – there are more than 100,000 vehicles registered with Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles, 2,364 taxisAnd the idea that so many workers have to contend with well-funded independent competitors is not a good idea.

Zipper also worries that embracing shiny new tech solutions like self-driving cars—like former mayor Eric Garcetti’s embrace of Waymo, perhaps—undermines efforts to improve less glamorous but affordable and sustainable transportation.

Politicians are looking at ambitious, tech-packed public transit solutions like ride-hailing apps, or Giant underground tunnels Elon Musk is walking around, thinking they’ve found a magic bullet, or at least something exciting they can sell to voters. They end up diverting resources, focus and legislative will away from things like buses and metro lines — things that work, Los Angeles desperately needs himThis will work even better if it is adequately funded and implemented.

Concretely, self-driving cars could make every Angelino’s problem worse. “I mean, gosh, you think you have congestion now,” Zipper says, “think of traffic when everyone else is in the back seat of a self-driving car.”

And me He was Think of the traffic as if another Waymo is making its way through the coffee shop, maybe No. 7 or 8 an hour, in Santa Monica. The scene reminded me of a story about Waymo cars that inexplicably orient themselves at a Residential cul-de-sac in San Francisco; The residents had no idea what was going on, except that it boded poorly for the future of local traffic.

So far, the cars don’t seem to bother the locals, though everyone I’ve spoken to has noted their sudden dominance in the area. “As long as there’s someone behind the wheel in case they get stuck,” says David Choucair, Architectural Designer. “I’ve seen enough videos of that to see this technology as out of reach.” At the time when the independent competitor Tesla just announced Call hundreds of thousands of cars With the so-called full self-driving programme, this seemed to be the prevailing attitude. “It’s scary, still, for me. When I see that car on the street with no one in it, I might freak out,” says Jennifer.

While safety concerns are a real issue, my concerns align more with the Zipper. It’s not that they don’t work as well as they should, but rather what happens if they do. Is this really the future we want? More luxury SUVs on the already congested streets of Los Angeles, struggling to adjust to organic traffic patterns, with a single passenger in the back seat, videotaped by contract workers in Arizona while we click on our phones alone?