Waymo is bringing the magic of our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to riders in Nashville, in partnership with Lyft in 2026. Riders will be able to hail via the Waymo app, and as our service…
We’re on our way to Music City! We’re excited to bring the magic of Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hailing service to riders in Nashville, in partnership with Lyft.
Our generalizable Waymo Driver has become even more capable as we’ve scaled to hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides each week across five major U.S. cities. We’ll start fully autonomous operations in Nashville in the coming months, and open to public riders next year. We’ll do so by pairing our world-leading technology and seamless ride-hailing service with Lyft’s proven track record of fleet management through its Flexdrive subsidiary.
We’re also excited to offer riders in Nashville even more ways to ride with Waymo. Riders will hail via the Waymo app, and as our service grows, riders will also be able to use the Lyft app to match with a Waymo vehicle. We’re thrilled for even more people to have access to our ride-hailing service, as we work towards our mission to be the world’s most trusted driver.
“We’re delighted to partner with Lyft and launch in Nashville next year, as we continue to scale our Waymo ride-hailing service to more people in more places,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Lyft’s extensive fleet management capabilities through Flexdrive make them an ideal partner for expanding to Nashville. We can’t wait to introduce Music City’s residents and visitors to the convenient, consistent, safe, and magical Waymo experience.”
"This partnership brings together best-in-class autonomous vehicles with best-in-class customer experience," said Lyft CEO David Risher. "Waymo has proven that its autonomous technology works at scale. When combined with Lyft's customer-obsession and world-class fleet management capabilities, it's two great tastes that go great together."
With more than 100 million fully autonomous miles driven on public roads, the data shows Waymo’s technology is significantly safer than human drivers in the areas where we operate. Nashville joins a growing list of cities that will soon have access to Waymo.
“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee. "By leveraging private sector technologies like Waymo's fully autonomous vehicles, we're exploring possibilities we couldn't achieve on our own, and further accelerating economic growth. I look forward to Waymo's launch in The Volunteer State.”
We’re looking forward to serving the people of Nashville soon. If you’re interested in following our journey or want to help bring Waymo to your city next, sign up at waymo.com/updates.
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By blinding-streak 2025-09-1714:595 reply Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.
That's how competition should work. Every layer should have multiple providers until the companies get all of their profits squeezed away and users get the best possible price.
By lotsofpulp 2025-09-1720:33 A "layer" itself represents costs that can be eliminated which can lead to lower prices for buyers.
That is why vertically integrated businesses can peel away business from existing non vertically integrated businesses with lower prices (legal liability notwithstanding). Sometimes it pays to have the business with more to lose insulated from liability by having a layer without much to lose.
By rangestransform 2025-09-1717:351 reply I sometimes prefer to enjoy the benefits of vertical integration, like Apple being able to codevelop hardware and software unrestricted from having to provide a public API at every layer (e.g. airpods device switching), and being able to unilaterally dictate user experience guidelines to app developers (e.g. ask app not to track).
By groggo 2025-09-1723:14 For sure! It's an interesting point. But from an economic point of view, it's better for consumers if there are clean boundaries and every layer is commoditized.
By ddeck 2025-09-1715:11 And GO in Tokyo.
By adrr 2025-09-1716:20 Curious what these ride sharing companies take for providing the platform. 30%? Having two play off each other they can probably push it down to 15% or lower.
By _fat_santa 2025-09-1717:113 reply Hoping someone in the rideshare space could shed some light on this for me but why would Waymo partner with rideshare providers instead of just going in by themselves? Is it just marketing/exposure (Uber/Lyft both have tons of users, Waymo could instantly tap into that user base instead of trying to grow their own) or is it more of a regulatory thing?
Yup, marketing. And Waymo can launch at a smaller scale in the market knowing that overflow and rides that Waymo can't do can be done by human drivers.
It's a way for Waymo to prepare to turn on the spigot, too, if they dump a bunch more cars into the market.
It's important for Waymo to do all 3: show they can run the service themselves in a market, and work with both Uber and Lyft, to be able to get fair terms and the option to expand rapidly.
By idiotsecant 2025-09-1717:223 reply What do uber and lyft get out of it, though? If Waymo succeeds they're out of business, right? Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
By mlyle 2025-09-1717:34 Uber and Lyft calculate that their cooperation doesn't affect Waymo's trajectory too much, and they immediately benefit from "more drivers."
> Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
This is one natural way that things may shake out and a natural path to scale. But Waymo needs to have a fallback plan of A) other parties to work with, or B) just doing it themselves to get a good deal with Uber/Lyft in the long term.
Uber/Lyft would like Waymo to not the the sole provider of autonomous technology and to work with them; they can expect to receive rides at just a bit above marginal cost in that case.
By astrange 2025-09-1719:05 Uber and Lyft's business model is that they don't own cars. Waymo owns cars, so is at a disadvantage to them. Cars are still expensive and need maintenance even if they don't have drivers.
By insane_dreamer 2025-09-1721:43 If Uber/Lyft develop their own driverless cars they can terminate the relationship with Waymo and just use their own. If they don't develop their own driverless cars, they can continue to partner with Waymo.
By throwup238 2025-09-1718:381 reply I think it’s more a matter of capital rather than marketing. Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive and that has to show up on someone’s books and financed somebow. They were bound to partner with rideshare sooner or later to derisk their own operation.
By mandeepj 2025-09-1719:51 > Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive
Ha! Lyft doesn't own much of its fleet! There's a small fraction of vehicles that lyft rents through Flexdrive.
Just like Tesla Self self-driving, Waymo can ask people, if they want to offset related capital costs, to buy cars and rent them to Waymo to be reconfigured and run as autonomous vehicles on profit profit-sharing basis.
By pkaye 2025-09-1720:34 I think they will license the technology and get a cut of the profits. They want to focus on the technology, not building parking garages and maintenance lots everywhere. The local ride share companies will do that.
I wonder if Waymo is allowed to charge different prices, or advertise their own direct services, in these partnerships.
"Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
By kunjanshah 2025-09-1717:081 reply In Austin, Waymo app directs you to use uber instead.
By mlyle 2025-09-1717:15 Almost certainly Waymo has given Uber some kind of time-limited exclusivity in that market.
I strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
In a recent interview, Waymo strongly hinted they now have positive unit economics in markets like SF.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...:
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
What is the reason or benefit of them being so secretive about this?
By actinium226 2025-09-1717:00 Usually, though not always, a company will tell you if they're making money on something, and if they're not they beat around the bush like this. Notice how, for example, Gywnne Shotwell never beats around the bush like this when talking about Starlink.
Notice the weird language:
> That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.
He says the "progress" is "very, very positive," but if you're not paying close enough attention you might come away thinking that the unit economics are what's very very positive.
All that said, what he's saying makes sense. They're able to charge more for their rides since they offer the convenience of not having to deal with a driver, and they're not paying the driver, who is the most expensive part, so yea, I'm bullish on them.
By weatherlite 2025-09-1715:561 reply They don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
By PhantomHour 2025-09-1715:581 reply Waymo doesn't gain anything. Google i.e. Alphabet Inc, does.
Especially these days. Every scrap of news that could pump the stock price is publicized aggressively.
And this makes the absence of such actions suspicious.
By orwin 2025-09-1721:35 Not really: this past few years, listed companies tend to be _very_ pessimistic on their quarterly projection, and then reveal that either: it wasn't that bad, and nothing change, or that is was great, and their valuation shoots up. Weirdly the market doesn't react over those pessimistic projections, so it seems it's just a safe play for CEOs. They started doing that in Europe as well.
By boh 2025-09-1716:10 Because no highly indebted company is going to "strongly hint" that they aren't just hemorrhaging cash like everyone assumes--they will absolutely let you know. "Hints" are just best effort accounting aesthetics to seem like the dream is just around the corner.
By maxerickson 2025-09-1717:18 They have to follow SEC rules about disclosing it.
By leetharris 2025-09-1715:014 reply Even with expensive vehicles and hardware? Plus they are revenue sharing with the host Uber/Lyft platforms.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-09-1715:082 reply LIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
They're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works. Waymo's are never remotely driven. They're just told what the operator thinks is the best place for them to go next in a situation where the vehicle can't make that decision. This is critical to controlling opex. Waymos operate 24/7, that means three shifts of operators plus coverage for weekends, vacation, and sick time. This is where the difference between a demo and a product is going to be decided. Alphabet could be reckless about spending on remote operators. But I think they're still processing the trauma of buying Motorola and won't tolerate a big jump in headcount.
> Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works.
Although not, as far as I've been able to find, videos that actually show the control center. Just semi-animated videos of the advising process. The number of customer support people per vehicle is not disclosed.
Employee stats are available.[1] Unclear how accurate they are. According to Unify, Waymo has 2,406 employees. Headcount is up only 6.6% since last year, even though the number of vehicles deployed has reportedly tripled. So they seem to have a big fixed labor cost in engineering, and but a low variable cost per car. Which means this scales well and becomes profitable.
The relatively low headcount growth enables estimating values for the number of remote operators per vehicle. It takes four FTEs to fill one seat in the remote operation center 24/7.
If the ratio of remote operators to vehicles is 1:10, and the fleet size is 2500, that's 1000 FTEs. That's more than 5X the headcount growth.
If all of the headcount growth goes to remote operations, it would be one seat for 50 vehicles. I'd guess it's more like one to 100.
That fits with the relative rarity of seeing Waymos stopped waiting for instructions.
By leoc 2025-09-1723:48 Do we know that the remote operators (all? mostly?) show up in that data as employees, though? Waymo's development has presumably reached the point where it would want to start filling remote-assistance seats with contractors. (There's also offline but relatively labour-intensive work like updating maps, adjusting routes and the like.)
One remote assistant per 50 or 100 vehicles would also seem to put Waymo now far ahead of where Cruise was in 2023, when according to the NYT's sources Cruise's remote assistance staff "intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles", though I suppose it's not especially hard to believe that 2025 Waymo is beating 2023 Cruise handily.
By leoc 2025-09-1722:39 Sure: I didn't say that the remote workers were driving the autonomous vehicles. The NYT article I linked gives a pretty clear account of what they're doing. (The big exception here would of course be Tesla, assuming it ever gets its current "robotaxi" plans to fruition.) In any case, while the "what the humans are doing is not driving" thing always seems to come up early in these discussions, it's a relatively secondary issue when it comes to the cost and profitability question, while (as you say yourself) things like human-assistant-hours per vehicle-hour are central.
By voxic11 2025-09-1717:35 Also (at least in the SF market anyways) their operating license does not allow cars to be remotely controlled.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-09-1721:45 I guess, but my interaction with a real person in a waymo was limited to 15 seconds on my many rides, so I don't know if I'm just an anomaly or not.
> it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy
Yes, this is the main reason to like it. I've had too many experiences with an Uber driver nearly falling asleep while transporting me.
> though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Given how many Uber drivers are immigrants already, this is already happening if Waymo employs call center employees from the Philippines or not.
By Scoundreller 2025-09-1717:37 Also cost savings because you can do things like work the 8AM rush on the east coast and then 3 hours later start picking up the 8AM rush on the west coast with its 3h time zone difference.
> maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
Note that you probably need 2 or 3 drivers per car to get a similar level of usage of the car that Waymo can do.
Just to add another data point, the co-CEO indicated on a podcast 18-months ago that the sensor package cost was <=$100k for the then current generation:
"But saying, you know, picking an upper bound, $100,000 worth of equipment on it, you amortize it over, you know, the lifetime, call it, say, 400,000 (miles), 25 cents per mile. Right. And, you know, it gives you some margin compared to the cost of paying a human driver."
He also mentioned that the next generation would see a "drastic reduction in the cost".
By SoftTalker 2025-09-1717:23 Those Jaguars they drive are not going to last 400,000 miles without several significant overhauls. And interiors will wear out and have to be refurbished. Exteriors will get dented and scratched. Is all that part of the $100k they are amortizing?
By Zigurd 2025-09-1717:51 Waymo Driver 5 was introduced in 2020. Driver 6 was introduced August of last year. So if the interview was 18 months ago he would be referring to Driver 5.
Driver 6 hardware is probably built in batches of a few hundred each. Still a low volume CM job, but incrementally cheaper. Probably. If they start building in batches of thousands, that's going to drive costs down significantly.
By jedilord 2025-09-1715:38 [dead]
By Zigurd 2025-09-1715:26 Waymo can hit break even even with the relatively expensive Jaguar SUVs and Driver 6 hardware suite. As someone else pointed out, Google is making more money than most people realize on a per unit basis. My back of the envelope estimate is at least $2000 per vehicle per week. That easily covers financing the capex with thousands left over for opex and overhead.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
By vineyardmike 2025-09-1716:08 Think about it in comparison to a real-life taxi or Uber and the math is surprisingly strong.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
By xnx 2025-09-1715:05 The Zeekr vehicle would've brought costs down, but it is now subject to a huge tariff. No telling how much that has set them back.
I wish they would target mass transit not rideshare cars. A bus with this technology could immediately run a lot more frequent with shorter buses, and because the route is fixed they don't have to verify the entire city, only the roads the bus will travel on. Fix route buses running at high frequency is the key to getting people to ride mass transit, but it isn't affordable because drivers are so expensive if you can even find them to hire.
By MostlyStable 2025-09-1717:082 reply Without major cultural shifts, you still need someone on the bus to prevent them from becoming moving dumpsters. The driving itself would be much easier, as you point out. That's not the only thing that a driver does.
By 999900000999 2025-09-1717:253 reply You could have a guy making minimum wage sit in the back and tell people not to act stupid.
That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k.
Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.
By rangestransform 2025-09-1717:311 reply Very optimistic for you to believe that politically entrenched unions in major US cities will allow this
By triceratops 2025-09-1718:231 reply Buyouts for the affected bus drivers.
By toomuchtodo 2025-09-1718:541 reply For historical reference, this is how longshoremen/dockworkers were compensated when shipping containers increased efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856522 (citations)
By LaffertyDev 2025-09-1719:15 That was a very fun sub thread to read, both for the on-topic and off-topic discussion. Thanks for sharing.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-1717:351 reply In the Bay a police officer staffed on a rapid bus line in 2022 needed ~ $250k benefits included. It won't be that cheap
By 999900000999 2025-09-1718:171 reply In LA you have contracted security guards who often just walk around the metro without the same authority of an actual LEO.
That's typically enough to stop most weird behavior like throwing trash on the ground.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-1720:362 reply Are they a lot cheaper than actual LEOs? I presumed that going rates would be similar. And I guess the "spicier" question is, are they cheaper than a bus operator?
By 999900000999 2025-09-1721:28 https://www.theladders.com/job-listing/-72867907153225138/un...
This isn't exactly a direct source, but it's listing the hourly pay at 25.26$.
You wouldn't even need them to ride every single bus, just enough to deter weird behavior.
Even if hypothetically they cost as much as a real bus driver, this would be much safer. A bus driver doing overtime and possibly texting people isn't too hard to beat.
LA metro has a stage below them called "ambassadors" who walk around with ipads, presumably to help people navigate the system and also call for maintenance or security should there be a need. From what I can gleam they are paid $25/hr.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-1723:501 reply From what I know of LA metro, most people ignore the ambassadors.
By asdff 2025-09-184:52 Well that would be hard to do considering they will call the police on you should it merit it.
By squigz 2025-09-183:01 I feel like a kid making minimum wage sitting at the back of the bus won't command much authority, or be willing to do much more than literally just tell people not to act stupid.
By lisbbb 2025-09-1720:27 The "driver" could become more armed security and janitor.
For a self-driving company, replacing a lot of drivers servicing some passengers is much better financially than replacing a few drivers servicing many passengers. Pencil it out yourself and you'll see that doing robotaxis is much better than doing robobuses. Plus, have any cities suggested that they would contract out their business driving to an automous company? Has anyone asked the unions to see what they might do about it?
Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
By bluGill 2025-09-1717:58 For the company maybe, but for everyone else it is worse. Taxis are worse for the environment than cars because you have to count all the driving around empty picking people up (demand is rarely even in all directions). Rideshare is only of limited use outside fixed routes as people have places to be an detouring to pick up someone else makes them mad.
By quickthrowman 2025-09-1717:161 reply Bus drivers already have to assist handicapped passengers that are getting on and off the bus (at least for my metro area bus service), so someone will need to be in there anyways.
A better bus and stop design eliminates more of that. You can have call ahead for help if you need to. A busy bus route normal people will be glad to help the disabled as well so long as what they need to do isn't hard and doesn't take much time (which it shouldn't - see better design...). For the rest paratransit should take them because despite the higher costs disabled people if they need to much help are taking time from everyone else who wants to get someplace not wait while someone is slowly loaded onto the bus.
By asdff 2025-09-1722:47 The bus driver is often tying down the wheelchair with dedicated straps.
By idiotsecant 2025-09-1717:203 reply People in cities don't like to ride with strangers if they can help it, generally. This isn't absolute - if density gets high enough and people get used to it, they will absolutely do it, but if they have the choice to avoid it they generally will.
No amount of self-driving busses fixes that.
The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus - which is probably not usable for them anyway. Too many people do ride the bus all over the world (even in the US) to think that is really true. Statisticians and Psychologists have long known people lie about their reasons for doing something.
By lotsofpulp 2025-09-1720:432 reply idiotsecant wrote "if they can help it". Which means people take into account things like travel time, congestion, safety risks, general comfort, etc.
>The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus
Is this supposed to be a tautology? Obviously people who justify it are people justifying it. I would bet real money that the vast majority of women will choose a private vehicle over a bus if they were the same price.
By bluGill 2025-09-1813:23 The important part is that there is no way to know if women really will choose a private vehicle over the bus. We have examples all over the world of women who could drive if they wanted to (they could get a license and afford a car), but they don't. Is this a small minority or not we really cannot say.
Given same price is false - a car is always more expensive, but many of the costs of a car are fixed, gas itself is cheap while you still have to make the car payment even if you ride the bus and let the car sit - so it seems like a car could be cheaper.
I believe that given transit is a reasonable option for most trips (not just getting to work) most women will decide over 5 years that transit is safe and will start using it. However there is no real way to know except to try it meaning your bet is not really possible - there are too many variables allowing me to say you didn't do enough.
By GuinansEyebrows 2025-09-1723:091 reply i was curious so i looked this up: LA Metro (combined bus and rail) has a monthly ridership of like 25 million [0]. that's nearly a million people taking shared public transit every day. anecdotally, i chose to ride metro rail over driving when i had a "real" commute. lots of people do.
people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.
for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.
By thegrim33 2025-09-180:28 I think you went too far with the "prefer it" conclusion. Just because lots of people do something doesn't mean it's proof that they prefer it. They may take the bus because that's what they can afford, whereas they'd prefer to walk or drive or something else if they had the means.
Also, the 25 million figure is number of rides per month, not a measure of people who ride transit. Somebody might ride the bus to work 5 days a week, and that counts as 20 rides. The count of "people" that ride those transit methods drops to well below 1MM, factoring that in.
People seem happy to get short-haul flights when driving is an option, so riding with strangers can’t be the issue.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-1717:40 On BART safety concerns and union contracts restrict automation. This fun article from 2017 [1] could have been written today but shows why it's so hard for public infrastructure to be effective. Every actor is incentivized to get something out of public infrastructure. In the current AI mood I suspect opposition to automation by unions would be even stronger.
The Abundance movement has put a good moniker to this concept: Everything Bagel Liberalism.
[1]: https://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/06/lets-talk-seriously-ab...
By majormajor 2025-09-1717:363 reply Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service? Or is it the chicken-and-egg of "ridership isn't high enough to demand more frequent service" + the distraction of shinier rail projects? Bus drivers would be cheaper than rail construction, I think you need to sell "more busses" politically first.
The total cost of a bus is just over $100/hour (I last checked in 2019, so a bit more from inflation), and a driver directly makes around $30/hr plus benefits easially will put you over $50. Now add in all training and management that isn't directly per hour but if you didn't have a driver you wouldn't pay. You do have maintenance and fuel costs per hour, insurance and the cost of a bus. There are are a lot of "it depends" and I've never seen a formal analysis of the true costs, but to round numbers we can say half the costs are the driver and be close enough for discussion.
If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.
Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.
Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.
Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.
Are you factoring the purchase price of the bus? I believe they cost around $1m. Then there is also having to purchase the yard space to store the bus if that isn't already available. Maintenance and cleaning and associated costs. I'm not sure how often a bus is routinely replaced with a new one.
By bluGill 2025-09-181:31 That is what is implied. A bus should be working 10 hours or more per day for 12-15 years so the per hour cost is around $20.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-1717:483 reply > Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?
On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.
However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.
Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.
On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency. For most rail in the US the largest factor in maintenance is weather and so you could run a lot more trains without changing the costs much. You do need to buy more trains, and they will need to be cleaned, but it wouldn't be hard to get enough to people on board to pay those incremental costs. (in the US the bottleneck is often an expensive tunnel that is shared between several not busy lines, each line could itself handle many more trains all day than they have at the peak without changing maintenance costs - but the tunnel is full and it costs too much to build a new one - this is why so many in transit are focusing on construction costs - if we can build a short tunnel we unlock a lot of better transit)
By reaperducer 2025-09-1718:571 reply On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency.
In the cities I've lived, it's not quite that.
Building rail is a lot of dollars, but politicians are often happy to throw money at that problem. It's good for a dozen industries, like construction.
But that money cannot then be used to operate the rail long-term. That burden is on the city entirely.
I've lived in two cities that turned down millions of dollars in federal transit grants because they didn't have the money for maintenance and operation.
Capital costs are paid differently and so we can often safely ignore construction costs as they are a different budget.
Putting maintenance into that capital bucket though is accounting fraud and illegal. If you have a rail line the largest cost is regular maintenance which is based on time not wear until you have a very large number of trains running. So my point stands even if you separate the buckets.
By reaperducer 2025-09-2313:28 While you specifically call out "maintenance," it does happen that capital money is used for non-capital expenditures.
https://www.trains.com/pro/passenger/pennsylvania-governor-a...
Someone should let the governor of Pennsylvania know he's committing "accounting fraud."
By asdff 2025-09-1722:43 The bus driver is making what 60k maybe 90k a year? According to LA metro their new electric fleet is costing about $1.1m per bus. It would take over a decade for labor to exceed just the initial outlay. I'm not sure that busses are even used that long before replacement.
In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.
By jdeibele 2025-09-1721:33 Bus drivers in the US are often behind a plexiglass shield, have a panic button, etc. and with reason.
If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.
By reaperducer 2025-09-1718:54 Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?
It's usually that $transit_company needs $xxx,xxx,xxx to do a good job.
Politicians will only give it $yy,yyy,yyy to do the job.
