And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether.

I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.

The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.

Typically the poor are going to end up with subsidized fares even if you raise the standard fare. Your proposed solution seems unlikely to help.

Really horrifying lack of empathy in your thinking. Also, what a stupid, shortsighted plan.

It's possible to want homeless drug addicts to be able to get the help they need while also not wanting them spazzing out on the bus next to me.

I see. You meant that Waymo showed up with a solution for you, specifically, not the city or the neighborhood that you live in.

Specifically for him being probably highly paid IT specialist that can afford daily commute on a taxi.

Which is perfectly fine! It’s just that one individual’s willingness to spend 10x-20x for a similar service doesn’t make that service a “solution” to a community-sized problem.

Would it be cheaper to build and operate a public transit network, or to redistribute wealth by taxing and giving $x cash reimbursements to people for using Waymo?

Public transit is not only cheaper, it is also the only feasible possibility.

Waymo has ~2,500 cars on the road in the US by last count, and combined they are doing between 400,000 and 500,000 rides per week. Total. For the whole country.

TriMet, in just the Portland metro area, did 122,000,000 rides last year, or roughly 2,300,000 rides per week.

Let’s say you moved every single Waymo car in the United States to Portland. Great. You’ve now covered 17% of what TriMet did last year.

Now you simply have to build/buy five more Waymo cars for each one that you brought to Portland, bringing the Portland metro area’s Waymo fleet to ~15,000 cars.

Since we’re abolishing public transit for some godforsaken reason in this thought experiment, that’s fifteen thousand cars that are on the roads constantly. It’s not like adding 20,000 new households where people’s cars are often parked, it’s much, much worse than that.

These 15,000 cars would also likely need additional dedicated infrastructure for fuel/charging, which is expensive and extremely logistically difficult.

It’s not just a terrible idea fiscally (unless you truly believe that Waymo could finance, insure, maintain, and provide infrastructure for a fleet 6x the size of its current nationwide inventory with a budget of $555mm), but it’s logistically just… bad.

It is bad for one simple reason: Waymo, as it exists, does not compete with public transit. It competes with taxis and other ride hailing services. Modes of transportation at scale are not interchangeable. Anyone can buy and legally fly a Composite-FX Mosquito helicopter, but Composite-FX does not compete with airlines or airports.

Waymo’s self driving stuff could eventually be useful on buses, but Waymo-as-a-municipal-transit-vendor would be a completely different business from “Uber without drivers”.