Man vs. Machine

The Wonderful World of Waymo

In May 2024, a street interviewer on TikTok asked eight women if they’d rather be stuck in the forest with a man or a bear. Seven of the eight women answered in favor of the latter without much hesitation. As many viral TikToks do, the video sparked a vibrant discussion online, with many women agreeing that they’d rather encounter a lone bear in the woods than a lone man, and many men making accusations of “misandry,” retorting the women’s responses and weighing the quantitative outcome of a hypothetical experiment that would be impossible to create.

Many woman respondents argued that they’d rather encounter the bear because its behaviors and actions are more predictable. There’s a more prescriptive protocol for encountering a bear. Stay away from its cub. If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back, and so on. With a man, on the other hand, there is no telling whether or not he will be violent towards a woman - especially when alone with her in a forest, away from the power-checking eyes of onlookers and symbolically removed from the consequences of modern society. This perspective may seem cynical, particularly to cisgender men. But cynicism and anxiety are often all that women have in potentially violent situations. Cynicism is what’s kept women safe, or at least made them feel safer. Survival is bred from trust and distrust alike.

I was feeling quite cynical several weeks ago on a Lyft ride home from the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Downtown Brooklyn. After my movie finished around 10 PM, I called a car back to the East Village, which took about ten minutes to arrive. A few minutes into the ride, my Lyft driver told me he needed to use the bathroom real quick, pulling over into a quite vacant gas station just outside the downtown area. Before running to the bathroom attached to the gas station, he stressed to me that he would be right back several times. Alone in this stranger’s car in a neighborhood I was not familiar with, I immediately felt like something was off - what some might call “a woman’s intuition,” and what I would call “a woman’s conditioned cynicism.”

Automatically - without thinking - I stepped outside of the car and called my sister, wanting to have someone on the phone to talk to while I figured out what to do next. I explained the situation to her over the phone and paced in small circles, surveying the gas station and adjacent street. I glanced at the bathroom and realized my driver had emerged and was loitering by the door, fiddling with the handle. He did not appear to be coming “right back” to the car. My stomach flipped. I looked back to the street, which was fairly sparse, except for a single yellow taxi cab - perhaps sent by a higher power. I raised my hand and the cab pulled over. As I climbed into the back seat, still on the phone with my sister, the Lyft driver ran to the car, shouting at me angrily. The taxi driver sped away.

When I arrived back at my apartment safely and locked the door behind me, many thoughts began flooding my mind. The first of which was that I had perhaps been overreacting about the situation - this man was probably driving many people around that night and genuinely needed to relieve himself. But why couldn’t he use the bathroom in between rides? My ride would have been fifteen, twenty minutes tops, couldn’t he have held it? I sent several audio messages to my friends to get their take on the situation, to which I received all-caps “OMG??” responses and claims that I made the right choice to exit the car. I reopened the Lyft app to report the driver and noticed that amid the shuffle of canceling the ride and stepping into the taxi, I had inadvertently given him a three-star rating.

The irony of all of this is that ride-share services are supposed to be refuges to women - especially when traveling alone at night or under the influence. There are settings you can enable on Uber and Lyft that prioritize women or LGBTQ+ drivers, but receiving one is not guaranteed (ride-share drivers are still mostly men). This one particular Lyft experience of mine was undoubtedly a fluke - every day, millions of people worldwide take an Uber, Lyft, or taxi from point A to point B safely. I have taken Ubers and Lyfts since the experience and felt comfortable and safe. But one peculiar ride-share experience is enough to make you think about the whole service a bit more carefully.

Accepting a ride from a stranger - even when that stranger is affiliated with a larger organization and has safety measures at your disposal - involves a lot of trust. You are not only trusting that the person will drive the car safely, but that they will bring you to your desired destination and not veer off or pause along the plotted route. The driver indisputably appears to have the upper hand in this situation, especially when the passenger is a woman. Yet, every day we manage to do it. We put our lives in the hands of strangers - allowing them to operate a piece of heavy machinery and transport us to locales that we may or may not be familiar with. It’s a practice that’s nearly as old as the car itself. Still, some individuals and companies are beginning to ask why there can’t be an alternative - a version of ride-sharing and ride-hailing that eliminates risk, uncertainty, and that cynicism and human trust many have grown so reliant on. Enter Waymo.

Waymo One, an autonomous ride-hailing service

Waymo One is the world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service, available for rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and the metropolitan Phoenix area. A “Waymo” is a driverless taxi that one can order from an app on their phone, similar to how you would order any other ride through Uber, Lyft, or Curb. The “About” page of Waymo’s website features a white woman looking pensively out the window (the website features a lot of women) along with the words “Our mission: Be the world’s most trusted driver.” The company’s goal is to reduce road accidents - according to their website, about 1.4 million lives are lost to traffic crashes worldwide every year and about 94% of accidents are due to human error. Waymo aims to reduce these accidents by removing the human element altogether.

Before Waymo begins operating in a new area, the company maps the territory with a high level of detail. The vehicle combines these custom maps with real-time sensor data and artificial intelligence to determine its exact road position at all times as well as anticipate the moves of fellow cars, bicycles, and pedestrians.

I recently relocated to San Francisco and can confidently share that Waymo is quite the spectacle - tourists probably take just as many pictures of Waymos on the street as they do the Golden Gate Bridge. The car itself is an all-electric Jaguar I-PACE with cameras outfitted on each of the vehicle’s corners, along with a spinning sensor on top. The spinning sensor is akin to a Big Brother-esque, all-seeing eye - always spinning, always watching, not missing anything in view. Humans - kids especially - tend to personify cars already, identifying the headlights as eyes, the grille as a mouth or mustache, etc. If cars are like humans, a Waymo is like a cyborg, its mechanical attachments (on an already mechanical frame) making it appear like a fixture of science fiction. Once you realize nobody is in the driver’s seat - and perhaps see the steering wheel turn autonomously - it feels as though the creation fell through a portal back in time by accident.

I had my first solo Waymo experience last week when struggling to call an Uber/Lyft on Polk Street in Russian Hill. Fleet Week and the Italian Heritage Festival & Parade were taking place in the city, leading to street closures and egregious traffic. All Ubers and Lyfts were at least ten minutes away and each time I secured a ride on the app, the driver canceled on me. Bus routes were nearly an hour long for what should be a ten-minute drive back to my apartment. So I bit the bullet and downloaded the Waymo app, knowing that a nonhuman driver wouldn’t have the autonomy to cancel on me.

I entered the Waymo as a skeptic. I was already approaching the situation with a large bias, specifically against automated cars taking jobs away from gig workers. Waymo felt like a fitting cherry on top of a decades-long span of Big Tech making it harder for working people to live and work in San Francisco - I’d seen this similarly transpire while growing up near Seattle, Washington.

Unfortunately, the Waymo experience was one of the most comfortable and safe-feeling taxi experiences I’ve had. The car was clean, spacious, and serene, playing ambient music and greeting me (“Hello Madison”) as I stepped in. The Waymo walked me through the safety features, letting me know they have 24/7 support at my disposal if needed. The car drove with the care and precision of a driver’s education instructor, never speeding or braking harshly, carefully maneuvering around cyclists and delivery trucks, and rendering me un-car sick, which is a rarity for me in a taxi.

On another Waymo ride I took with my boyfriend (yes, I’ve taken several other rides), we found ourselves able to talk freely and sing along to music loudly. Upon lightly jerking the steering wheel at a stop sign (there were no other cars around, we just wanted to see what would happen), a clear and competent Waymo customer support agent came through on the loudspeaker, asking if we were safe, and instructing us to not interfere with the “driver” again, as we would be banned from the service.

The service is not without its pain points. There are situations in which driving home alone at night with a weird driver feels unnerving, and there are other situations in which it’s helpful to have the eyes of another person (man) to avoid harassment from those outside the car. Recently, two men stood in front of an active Waymo car in San Francisco to stop it from moving while they catcalled the woman passenger inside, asking her for her number. There have been some rogue cases of Waymos and similar driverless car services disobeying traffic laws. I personally don’t know how comfortable I would feel taking a Waymo on a highway, at higher speeds and with fewer stops than city driving requires.

As with all automation, there’s a balance to be struck between making peoples’ lives easier and making people more alienated from one another. For example, technological innovation in the home space (specifically washing machines, dishwashers, and the like) is, in part, what’s enabled many modern women to work outside the home and earn paid wages, alongside - of course - the shifting of sociocultural values. Technological progress and societal values have a way of informing and reflecting one another, spiraling around one another like a strand of DNA. If driverless cars are to take off in other cities, it’ll be interesting to see how they might affect how we relate to one another. Or to reflect on what their success says about our collective human development.

I grow tired of being a cynic. A distrust of strangers, especially men, has been ingrained in me since I was a little girl by my parents, by media, and by my own learnings, out of self-protection. Will driverless cars make ride-hailing feel safer for women, by simply removing men from the equation? By leaving them on the other side of the glass? Maybe. Maybe for the time being. On the other hand, for every poor Uber driver I’ve had, I’ve had at least ten neutral or good ones. That gives me recommendations about the city I’m arriving in as they taxi me away from the airport. That turns up the music while I silently cry in the backseat. Removing humans removes friction, and it also perhaps removes connection.

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