Waymo steps up the propaganda campaign
Coinciding with a presidential campaign with an historic amount of disinformation, Waymo has upped its own campaign to mislead politicians and the public.
On October 17th they came up with Clean rides, clear benefits: Waymo launches new public transit credit program. The idea was for them to get publicity by announcing a campaign where they would subsidize public transit users. Interesting timing given that they object to San Francisco Proposition L which is on the ballot this November. It would slightly increase the tax rate on TNCs, including Waymo, and have the funding go directly to Muni public transportation service.
Misleading
Yes, they are falsely trying to get credit for supporting public transit when actually they are against it.
They managed to get an article in the SF Standard Waymo’s plan to encourage public transit use? Providing credit on its app. The Standard reported that over one-third of Waymo rides are for connecting with transit, something that would be very useful.
Waymo said 36% of its San Francisco riders use the service to connect with BART, Muni, or CalTrain.
But what Google cleverly actually stated was that one-third of Waymo riders at least once took a Waymo to transit, a very different scenario.
In a recent survey, 36% of San Francisco riders said they have used Waymo One to connect to other forms of clean transit, like BART, Muni, or Caltrain.
So Waymo shows that using carefully misleading wording they really can mislead the public.
$3 for Bypassing Transit
The key part of the Waymo announcement is supposed to be how they will provide a $3 discount to people who take Waymo to or from certain transit stations. But the problem is that those transit stations are actually connected to other places by, you guessed it, Waymos! And the future discount just covers the added cost of taking transit.
So why bother taking transit when Waymo riders will do what they have always been doing, which is taking a Waymo the whole way. And now you get a discount if you start or end by a transit stop.
If Waymo wanted to actually promote people taking public transit then they should be paying for the cost of the transit ride directly, by adding money to the passengers Clipper card, instead of reducing the cost of a future Waymo ride.
Waymo vehicles being electric is not helpful!
Waymo continues to tout that their vehicles are electric and are therefore as clean as clean can be.
Waymo’s shared mobility model means all-electric rides are available to everyone in our public service territories at the touch of a button, giving people new options for electrified transportation without needing to own an electric vehicle.
But this neglects several important facts. First, the transit rides that they are displacing are already electric (BART, Caltrain, Muni Metro, and Muni Trolleys), and have actually sources of clean energy – Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric!
Second, the Jaguar vehicles that Waymo use output more CO2 than a Toyota Prius and other hybrids, which are often use for taxicabs, plus they only have a 50% occupancy meaning that the vehicles drive 2 miles for every passenger mile. This means Waymos are much more polluting than other cars out on the road. And they don’t actually use clean electricity since they charge their vehicles at night when clean electricity is simply not available. See all the details at Waymo hiding their use of fossil fuel energy.
And lastly, Waymo at least sometimes uses diesel generators, located within the city of San Francisco, to charge up their “clean” electric vehicles:
If not sustainable, just pretend via a blog post
Along with the Waymo “transit” initiative, they also posted a new page on “sustainability”.
The problem, of course, is that they are being intentionally misleading by using careful wording. For example, they tout how “vehicles produces zero tailpipe emissions.”
But again, the Waymo vehicles are more than twice as polluting as an individually used Toyota hybrid.
