Doordash and Waymo Launch Autonomous Delivery Service in Phoenix

I guess we were thinking of different numbers. That's including depreciation, interest and sales tax, which I would consider purchase cost, not part of the cost to own. But

Yes it is.

> the median distance to the nearest food store for the overall U.S. population was 0.9 miles, with 40 percent of the U.S. population living more than 1 mile from a food store. The median distance to the third-nearest food store for the overall population was 1.7 miles. When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/u-s-shoppers-...

In older areas, some. But practically anything after WW2, not nearly as much.

It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.

The great majority of development in American cities over the last 75 years has been single-use, with neighborhoods of exclusively single-family houses separated from nearby commercial strips with big parking lots along wide roads.

The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.

This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.

Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.

Go to Google Maps, drop the StreeView person anywhere in the US 10 times and count how many times you find yourself in a place where you would be happy to be walking right now. Try and look for sidewalks and pedestrian crossings. It's hard to understand the layout of American cities for the European and Asian mind.

I've been to the US many times and I'm still shocked when I need to drive from this parking lot to that parking lot across the street because it would be dangerous and possibly illegal to just walk there.

Walkable cities are actually illegal in much of the US due to zoning laws right now. The reason you don't see shops in residential suburban developments is not because there is no demand, it's because it's literally illegal.

Having walkable and bikeable destinations is compatible with back yards. It just needs to be legal to build it.

You don't need to get everyone to coordinate. You need politicians to not listen to the lobby of home owners and real estate companies worried about their investments (in other words, ignore the NIMBYs). Change the zoning laws, incentivize developing mixed use, prioritize pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and stop prioritizing cars and parking.

I live in Japan, so I know how it works.

You have to get pretty damn rural before you need anything more than a bike to access a convenience store.

Obviously the absolute overwhelming majority of Japanese live in cities anyway, so it's not really comparable to the US.

> you don't understand snow and how it effects vehicles

Tell me more about how the 92” of snow my town got last winter leaves me ignorant.

> Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem

Snow used to be a problem! It isn’t anymore because it’s solved. My Subaru can keep lane using radar alone, following the car in front of me, in a blizzard.

> Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt

They’re also noticeably absent from Chula Vista [1].

Also, I know I don’t understand snow, but maybe the folks in Denver do [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[2] https://denverite.com/2025/09/02/denver-waymo-pilot-project-...

It may just be that robo-taxis don't operate in snowy conditions for a while and those regions have to wait for year-round service.

When there are no lane markers, the two scenarios are there's a car to follow, or there isn't. If there a car or cars to follow, that's easy enough, just follow behind at a safe following distance * it's snowing factor. The other case that people seem to think is impossibly hard, is for the computer to invent lanes because now there are no lines for it to look at. It's harder than if there are lines to follow, sure. And it depends on the type of road you're on. A busy city street isn't the freeway, isn't a suburban stroad, isn't a windy rural road. But fundamentally they're the same. It needs to "know" the dimensions of whats drivable (including if traffic is one or two way), figure out how many car widths will fit, including an error margin so other drivers get a bit of extra room, and then do basic math to divide that into lanes, and then just pick one.

A pre-AI regular computer vision algorithm could do that. Combined with the fact that Waymo maps out locations in high detail before offering rides in an area (which means the edges of what's drivable is already known to the AI, and, I mean, they don't drive there currently, so me pointing out it's basic math isn't, like, proof or anything, but it just doesn't seem insurmountable, given the other things computers can do these days. Computers can look at photos, tell you what it's a photo of, and then you can search for "car" and show you all of your pictures of cars! OCR works well enough that I can take a photo with text in it, and then just copy and paste the words, without having to wait for the computer to run a slow analyze process that I have to wait on first.

Computers are fallible, but the other part of that is, having driven in snowed out streets, sometimes you get stuck behind someone who's snow covered lane math you don't agree with, and you either pass them or get stuck behind them. Which is annoying, sure, but it's one of those things you just kind of live with during winter? Complain about to your friends and family maybe?

The other thing is that we all know that in dry sunny conditions, city streets aren't always well marked. So there's already capacity to put the vehicle somewhere that's not rigorously defined by painted lines on the street. Now, we don't know how much Waymo has their army of contractors manually add lines to the street data that the cars have, or if the computer calulates that, which would make it harder to drive when there are no visible lines because it's been snowed over.

Anyway, the other challenge about winter driving is the difference in traction. There's snow, ice, black ice, wet asphalt, salty asphalt, and sometimes even dry asphalt. 4wd is popular on cars in those areas to help deal with varying conditions. With 4wd, moreso AWD, and also ABS braking, we're already relying on a computer to sense how much the wheels are slipping, and then to transfer power to the wheels that have traction. I'd imagine a more advanced computer could help out those systems and preemptively tell them what's going on. (Black ice btw is why I don't believe in camera-only systems. It's not that cameras aren't capable in regular conditions, its that I think self-driving should be better at things, and if it's got data on where there's black ice because its advanced sensors just simply pick it up, we'll all be safer.)

Only time will tell. I'm just a random on the Internet who took some computer vision classes while I was getting my. degree back in the OpenCV days. Maybe it is that hard and self-driving cars never make it to snow prone areas. I just don't think it's as big a challenge as some people make it out to be. A system with LIDAR should be able to gauge distances in the dark better than I can with my human eyes that need headlights in order to make out anything after the sun goes down. Which in the dead of winter, the sun goes down at 3pm, which really messes with the human psyche.

> Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door

Fair enough. Not really an issue in Phoenix. Plenty of buildings (in San Francisco and Atlanta, to memory) require delivery to be dropped off at a centralized location. And there aren’t many high rises, or months of monsoon, in Phoenix.