Waymo drops its waitlist in San Francisco, letting anyone download its app and hail a robotaxi; in Phoenix, Waymo has been open to the public since October 2020
The VergeAndrew J. Hawkins
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo’s San Francisco rollout follows its earlier expansion from employee-volunteer testing to plans for rides without a human safety driver. Phoenix had already provided its public-service precedent since 2020.
Removing the access gate turns San Francisco from a controlled rollout into a broadly available consumer service. Later coverage of 100,000-plus weekly paid rides across three cities shows why opening eligibility matters: ride volume is becoming a core measure of operational scale.
First-order effects
San Francisco riders can request Waymo rides without first joining a waitlist, expanding the company’s immediately addressable customer base in the city.
Waymo must support a less predictable mix of demand and rider behavior than under a gated rollout, while operating a driverless service in a dense urban market.
Second-order effects
Broader availability makes actual paid-trip usage—not merely test milestones—a clearer competitive benchmark for other robotaxi services.
The move raises the value of Waymo’s Phoenix-to-San Francisco operating experience, including the transition from employee-volunteer testing in San Francisco to public access.
Third-order effects
If similar access expansions continue, robotaxi competition will shift from proving that driverless trips are possible to sustaining reliable coverage, availability, and customer support at consumer scale.
Public access also makes city-by-city deployment decisions more consequential: operators’ expansion pace will increasingly be shaped by whether they can convert approvals and testing into repeatable commercial service.
The trend: Robotaxi providers are moving from limited pilots and waitlists toward open consumer availability, making operational scale the next test of autonomy.
They finally figured out how to San Francisco proof these things, which people don't know is actually the hardest problem in computer science behind cache invalidation and naming things.
However you feel about self-driving vehicles, I encourage you to experience them at least once just to see what it's like. — Love it or hate it, the technology is real and nothing proves it quite like getting a completely driverless ride in downtown San Francisco. [embedded po…
San Francisco is where @Waymo got its start, and today's news is a truly special moment for our company. After years of deliberately growing our operations, millions of rider-only miles, and tens of thousands of weekly trips, we're thrilled to open up Waymo One to everyone in SF!
Waymo is now available to everyone in SF, no invite code needed. The future is here. Now let's make sure SF bureaucrats don't ban it. https://waymo.com/... [image]
After onboarding nearly 300k riders, we're removing the waitlist and making @Waymo One available to everyone in San Francisco! Nearly 2M paid trips and over 20M fully autonomous miles later, we're fully open in two cities. Grateful for all your help getting here together. Let's
I've seen Waymo cars all over San Francisco while visiting there this week and it's so eerie to see them picking people up, driving them around and dropping them off people with no driver. No idea if it can ever scale but it's scary impressive to observe. https://waymo.com/...
Very exciting. I only take @waymo in the city now if I can help it. Just a better, more consistent, smoother, nicer experience (especially in the front passenger seat). The fact it drives itself has become incidental to why I prefer it. 0 series issues after 100+ trips.
Rode my first Waymo today and it was an extraordinary experience — on par with using Google Maps on the iPhone for the first time or dialing up to AOL One of those “the future is so clearly here” moments I'll never forget
We're excited to announce that Waymo One is now open to SF riders — no more waitlist or invite codes! This is a key milestone in our mission to be the world's most trusted driver, & we're thrilled to get more of you where you're going safely. Ride today. https://waymo.com/... [vi…
Trendy conventional wisdom is that Google lost its way and can't innovate anymore etc, but IMO getting a proper full self driving car system working at this scale is one of the most impressive technological achievements of our lifetimes https://www.theverge.com/...