I Ride the 38.
Now There's a Car With No One In It.
There is a bus line in San Francisco called the 38 Geary. It runs from the Transbay Terminal out through the Richmond District to the ocean. Some people call it the Dirty 30. Some people call it by other names. It is crowded and slow and frequently late, and I love it.
I love it the way you love something that is genuinely alive — because on that bus I am sitting next to a grandmother with grocery bags and a teenager with headphones turned up so loud I can hear exactly what she's listening to, and a man in a Giants jersey who is arguing, quietly but forcefully, with someone on the phone about something I will never know.
Transportation has always been a social force. The history of who gets to move through a city — how, and at what cost — is the history of that city's power. Highways killed neighborhoods. Subways made skylines. Highways prioritized the car. And now something new is arriving, and I'm watching it arrive, and I'm not sure I've fully understood it yet.
I have lived in San Francisco long enough to watch Waymo go from a curiosity — that strange white Jaguar with the sensor crown — to furniture. They are everywhere now. You walk out of a bar at midnight and there are three of them queued up like a dutiful fleet. You cross the street and one stops for you with an almost uncanny patience, no horn, no sigh, no slight forward lurch of impatience.
And then I think about the guy who used to drive that route. I think about the driver who, three or four years ago, was the one stopping. Who had a name and a story and probably a kid in middle school and an Uber rating he watched obsessively. I think about what happens to him.
I've also been to other cities — Nashville, Atlanta, Los Angeles — and I notice the same look on people's faces when I bring up Waymo. It's not quite fear and it's not quite wonder. It's something between them: the specific unease of knowing that something is coming and you weren't asked whether you wanted it.
I started this site because I believe the question of how we move through cities is not a technology question. It's a political one. It's a question about who decides, who benefits, who is displaced, and whether any of us — in San Francisco or Nashville or Atlanta — actually got a vote.
I don't think autonomous vehicles are evil. I don't think they're salvation. I think they are a social force, and I want to watch what they do to us.