I have a good friend who's a Lyft driver. According to him, all drivers are rated on cleanliness by passengers; if you're dinged for a weird smell, there are lasting financial consequences (even if it was for reasons outside of your control, e.g. using a Lyft provided rental while repairing from a traffic accident).
We'll see how Waymo handles it! It will definitely be Waymo's problem to solve, though.
> Many of our riders choose Waymo for the clean and consistent vehicle we offer. To ensure every rider gets this experience, we’ll be applying a vehicle cleaning fee for riders who leave a mess behind in the vehicle, such as vomit, excessive trash, and smoking odors.
> For those that self-report their mess during their ride (not including smoking), the fee will be $50. For issues that go unreported, we’ll charge riders $100 for the first violation and increase the fee for subsequent violations. Repeat trash and smoking related violations may also impact your account standing.
That’s an awesome policy. Compare to car share services (in SF.. apples to apples) such as Gig Car and Getaround which allow unsupervised general access (i.e. no driver there to witness car treatment)… those are generally pigsties. Blunt ash all over the dashboard, used kleenexes in the door handles and cupholders, trash on the floor. It always blew my mind that the perpetrators weren’t fined into the dirt. Good for Waymo.
Considering that I’m in a social bubble of considerate people all of whom wouldn’t leave a single bottle cap in a car, this makes me despair at how people must be outside of my bubble.
I'd say the vast majority of people don't litter or trash things, but the few that do ruin things for everyone. It only takes a few bad apples (on in this case trashy people) to ruin something for everyone else.
Its like living with 4 roommates, but one of them leaves their shit everywhere. It could make the whole place look unkept for everyone else.
And because we generally don't want to pick up after other peoples shit/mess things may be left trashy for a long time before anything gets cleaned.
I haven't used Lyft in awhile but as an Uber rider what I can tell you is, if that company has a similar policy, it hasn't worked for me. The quality and cleanliness of the vehicle, and the quality of the driving, has been vastly inferior for me in San Francisco than Waymo has been.
I travel a lot for work so use Lyft a lot and I can say the same. Its not every time, but maybe 1 in 10 times I'll get in a car that smells like absolute shit, smoke odor, unclean, etc.
I think theres a stigma against reporting drivers so most people don't, but then that leaves the people who don't care about these policies to continue giving people bad experiences.
I feel that. With about that same frequency, I encounter a vehicle or a driver or driving that's just dreadful. But, I don't report it or even ding the driver because I feel like that's a hard job that I don't wanna do, and I feel bad. I dunno, maybe I should.
I think the difference is that as an individual driver you have an incentive to keep your car clean, so that Lyft continues to dispatch riders to you. For Waymo the selective pressure is less direct and also spread across their entire fleet. They can accept a level of dirtiness, given some probability that the rider would reject the car x cost of rider requesting a (partial) refund x etc. etc.
More cynically, there are simply too many people that won't take care of "public" property. If every 3rd rider (exaggerated for rhetorical purposes) trashes the car, it's gonna be dirty no matter what.
That doesn't cover all the normal cleaning needed just from people being in the cars, on top of environmental stuff (sand, dirt, mud, leaf debris, pollen...)
Like others said: the second they have run drivers out, the cars will stop getting cleaned obsessively because you won't have a choice.
Same thing that happened when Lyft and Uber when they ran the taxi industry out of business.
Same thing that happened when Zipcar was established. Cars went from being spotless and well maintained to damaged, dirty, and half the dash being lit up.
The metric will be "cost of time spent cleaning" / "cost of sending out a dirty car." If this ratio is > 1 the "recommended cleaning schedule" will be the lowest priority item in the entire fleet.
The cost of cleaning goes way down when you do it in bulk at a service center rather than individual lyft/uber drivers trying to do it. A standardized car also helps.
If you can incorporate the cost of large horizontal demand spikes into the off hours and you can find cheap enough labor to fill it, perhaps.
The time spent travelling out of service, in cleaning, and back into service are all lost opportunities. Hopefully you can clean a very large number of cars in a very short period of time.
The cars may be standard. The messes, obviously, will not be.
The have multiple charging centers strategically placed throughout the city. These seem to currently only have security guards there. The logistics of having cleaning staff there and trying to match their schedule to expected charging times is probably not very difficult but also not very reliable either.
The win they do have, that I did not consider is, they have cameras _in_ the car. So visible cleanliness is something they can manually check before and after the rid and schedule for service if required; however, it currently seems that this requires the vehicle to go to the larger centralized maintenance facility, which I guessing takes quit a bit more time than the auxiliary charge only lots.
Not trying to be super pessimistic, but mixing distributed autonomous operations with centralized manual service, especially in an urban environment, seems fraught with novel challenges.
The cars will all charge overnight. Clean them there. Getting to and from the charging stations / cleaning depots is roughly free. It’s just the electricity which is like 5 cents a mile roughly. Utilization at night is really low anyways so not much opportunity cost.
The overall point being way more efficient to clean than an Uber.
Once you have a large enough fleet of roughly the same shape, it starts to make sense to build some automated cleaning thing. I'm picturing like, a long tube with vacuum ports in it that can just be shoved in by a robot arm to vacuum each seat. Unless there's a wet mess, that'll basically get it 90% of the way there.
I think we'll see such self-driving taxi interiors optimized for staying clean and then ease of cleaning. At the limit, think like a stainless steel kitchen that can just be sprayed down. Or these sort of self-cleaning public bathrooms: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z81KtV9w5fo?feature=share
Public transit is actually pretty clean. The main problem is that they can't refuse to board disruptive passengers, who just trash everything around them. Waymo has cameras inside, so they can fine/ban you if you litter.
The driverless cars can also, well, drive themselves to a cleaning center during the night-time when it won't affect the income generation.
Another interesting possible feature is to redesign cars to be more easily cleanable. Driverless cars can dispense with the central console, steering wheel and pedals, with simple hard plastic covered in detachable covering. Even the seats can be made detachable.
> Public transit is actually pretty clean. The main problem is that they can't refuse to board disruptive passengers, who just trash everything around them.
They can. My local state operated ferry plays an announcement on every ride that if you harass the staff, they will issue a no trespass order banning you from the service for 60 days. Violating the order is criminal tresspassing.
Of course, enforcement isn't easy, and confronting passengers to issue the orders isn't easy, and both can contribute to confusion and delay. It's a little easier to do on a ferry vs a bus because there's more staff.
If you're looking for easy clean surfaces, you could go for police car backseats. Not very comfortable from the looks of them, but very amenable to cleaning.
> They can. My local state operated ferry plays an announcement on every ride that if you harass the staff, they will issue a no trespass order banning you from the service for 60 days. Violating the order is criminal tresspassing.
I might believe that for ferries, they have personnel for that.
Our local bus drivers were told that fentanyl fumes are not harmful, and that asking the state to do anything about junkies smoking _on_ _the_ _bus_ is systemic racism or something.
Its not the refusal of certain groups of people that causes the cleanliness issue. Its the fact the bus doesn’t see a custodian until its out of service. The difference in cleanliness between poor and dirty areas and rich and clean areas of a city always comes down to investment in routine custodial service vs any behavioral difference. Rich people litter just as much, more sometimes knowing theres someone to clean it up.
> in Philadelphia/New York/LA/SF/Seattle/Portland public transit is pretty disgusting
In New York right now. Subway stations are dinghy. But the cars themselves are fine. Hop on the Metro-North or LIRR and they're on par with European cleanliness standards. (If not behavioural.)
In LA county the newer lrt is fine. The old purple and red car trains though are disgusting even when they are clean. Theres usually a constant unpleasant background smell, halfway between stale cigarette and old puke, the cars are usually hot as hell causing everyone to sweat, and sometimes the already quite poor and noisy ventilation is off entirely in the traincar. It also doesn’t help that the aesthetic is beige and brown 90s style, which makes it even more dirty looking than the newer grey and stainless interiors. Most of the stations are overdue for a power washing. Especially down in the tracking thats full of trash and pee. Its not bad enough to be a deal breaker to me even with the occasional tweaker actively smoking some rock, but still its not pleasant.
That might be a long wait. There's no particular reason a monopoly need appear in this market. If it does, that will be a matter of public policy at it always is. That would be unfortunate, as it always is, but it would also be larger and different problem that goes well beyond this particular market.
