Wired Does Waymo in Arizona: A Future With More Sprawl, Less Traffic and Less Pollution?

To be honest, your MesaZona blogger is none-too-thrilled over Waymo - in Chandler, Tempe or here in downtown Mesa. Robots are risky. Last year in November after the last on-the-ground stop in the Downtown Mesa Bus Tour at The Sliver Lot, yours truly was walking home when he almost got mauled-over by an over-aggressive Waymo Chrysler Pacific minivan barreling south through the Main Street/Robson intersection - was totally oblivious of pedestrians. A fast-reflex to step back fast  prevented what could have been a personal catastrophe!  3 cops on homeless bike patrol had headed-off in another direction.

Wednesday of this week was the BIG MEDIA HYPE day for Waymo to announce a trial-run of its limited taxi service. (That subject was covered in an earlier post on this blog.)
Here's another report from another reporter - Aarian Marshall writing in Wired ::
" . . . So I’m here to see what happens to a place when robot cars show up, as automakers and tech companies have promised they will in the next few years. I’m looking for the first steps in a takeover likely to unroll over decades.

But mostly I’m bored, and I’m not the only one . . . That’s about it.

“At first, the Waymos were a novelty,” says Micah Miranda, the city’s head of economic development, sitting in front of a picture window inside a City Hall conference room. Chandler—flat, sprawling, in shades of sepia—extends out behind him. “Now they’re just white noise." 

Waymo chose this corner of the country for a few reasons:

1. “In many ways, Phoenix is the perfect place for us to get started: It’s got wide but complex roads, and it’s a large city with sprawling suburbs that give us a lot of room for growth,” says Dan Chu, who oversees product at the self-driving car company.

2. The streets here are well marked, and the sidewalks rarely traversed by pedestrians.

3. It doesn’t rain or snow.

4. Arizona virtually has no rules governing who tests robocars in the state, or how.

(Its governor did suspend Uber's testing last spring, after a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe.)

Although Waymo didn’t need Chandler’s permission to start testing in the city, Miranda says the company’s execs were solicitous and engaged when they first approached the it about their plans. Aarian Marshall 12.08.18 07:00 am

32 Hours in Chandler, Arizona, the Self-Driving Capital of the World

This is how the future rolls in: with conference calls, public meetings, office huddles.

Daniel Slim/Getty Images

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"Self-driving cars promise to make roads safer and more efficient, but Chandler’s leaders seem more interested in having Waymo around than its cars. The Google sister company has added to a burgeoning high tech cluster, which already included outposts for Intel, the semiconductor company NXP, and General Motors’ IT innovation division. The locals believe Waymo’s presence has created jobs, though they can’t say how many.

. . . Back in the city’s central offices, the local planning department pondered its own role in preparing for self-driving cars. When section chief David De La Torre asked other big city administrations for help—including New York and San Francisco—he got nothing. No one was really thinking seriously about updating their roads for the arrival of the robots.

This is just how Waymo likes it. . . In May, Chandler became the first American city to pass what was widely hailed as an AV-friendly zoning code. In reality, the rules are more about ride-hailing than robots. The changes allow developers to reduce their parking provisions by as much as 40 percent if they can prove that their residents or clients will use Uber and Lyft to get around, and build enough enough pickup and drop-off zones to accommodate them. That space can then be used for other things:

more housing, more offices, more parks, more density, more places to walk.

. . . Which is the main takeaway from Chandler, really. Waymo and everyone else building self-driving cars promise a future with less traffic and pollution, and more space for people, not vehicles. . .

I realized this place might as well be patient zero

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