America's Kids Deserve Better Than a Waymo Subscription

    8:25PM Jul 14, 2025

    Speakers:

    Keywords:

    Waymo subscription

    teen independence

    car dependency

    self-driving cars

    transportation system

    parental chauffeur burden

    teen safety

    urban mobility

    social change

    isolation

    physical movement

    corporate solutions

    community interaction

    serendipity

    anti-car dependency.

    Kea, Hey guys, it's Kea Wilson, welcome back to the break. So I'm doing something a little bit different today. I just thought the summer would be a good time to experiment. I'm gonna do a solo podcast today. I don't have a guest. I would be curious to hear what you think of this format, but I wrote something on social media the other day that touched off a little bit of, I won't say controversy, but a strong reaction from the folks that read my blue sky account that I wanted to take a minute to just expand on here, because I think it's a really tricky, rich concept that gets at the intersection between what I'm all about, which is the movement and car dependency, and questions about technology and childhood independence And what we want our transportation system to be for the next generation. And this is about an article that I read on wired.com called the teens are taking waymos now. And the subheading, I think I had a pretty emotional reaction to maybe you will too. It is alphabet self driving car company launches what it hopes will be lucrative individual teen accounts and maybe a whole lot of social change in the process. So just to summarize the article briefly, for those who haven't read it, I'll leave a link to it in the show notes as well. But basically the premise of it is that the self driving car company Waymo has launched a product line specifically aimed at drivers between the ages of 14 and about 17, which in most states would mean that you either can't drive on your own without an adult present, or you have a very restricted graduated driver's license, Right? And you know, this is meeting a real need. The article notes that the percentage of us drivers under 19 has fallen by more than a quarter in recent years. The teens are scared to drive in at least one expert's estimation coded in this article. And you know, this is a population that because we built a pretty car dependent world is really struggling to get around and their families are struggling to get them where they need to be. In our last podcast, we talked to Todd Lipman about what he called the parental chauffeur burden, which is basically that we expect so many parents across America to drop everything and take their kids to school, to work, to the soccer practice, to whatever activity isn't within easy walking, biking transit distance of their homes, and as our world grows increasingly car dependent, nothing is Within easy walking, biking, transit, distance of our homes. Right on top of that, teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are already like three times more likely to be killed while they're driving than when they're just 20 years old and older than that. And on top of that, frankly, parents are already doing this. They're already looking at waymos. And you know, we should broaden it out to taxis, maybe as a solution to getting their kids where they need to be in a safe, individual, climate controlled area, even if it violates the terms of service of these companies, which it absolutely does in a lot of cases. And this article, which, by the way, was written by the great journalist Aryan Marshall, who I'm a fan of, takes pains to note that, you know, teens in this day and age are coming of age in a really weird era. A lot of them hit middle school or high school at the peak of the quarantine era. They are isolated, they are stressed. They are trying to rebuild, or in some cases, build a new social networks and social skills that they really didn't have an opportunity to work on when they were locked in their living rooms on Zoom school for several years of their lives, several critical years of their lives, to be clear, but Waymo thinks weirdly that it can help with that. There's a quote in here from Naomi Guthrie, who identifies herself as Waymo product and customer research manager, and she says that Waymo doesn't want to have teens siloed, which is that a Waymo can, quote, be a space to unwind or relax and to have any pent up stress that you might have from your day to day or school day release and just be by yourself. So I can't really make we don't want to have teens siloed, and it's great to be by yourself compute in my mind, but maybe you'll have more luck than me. But again, to Marshall's credit, he questions this line, right? He's. Because in a country where so much of the transportation system depends on access to cars, and where many people, including those too young to have a driver's license, are limited in what they can do and where they can go because of it, the move both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life, putting kids in waymos with a dedicated product line both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life. So it will probably surprise no one that I come down a little bit more heavily on the side of this threatens to reorder young adult life, right? Like not promises to not in a good way. It's a negative thing. It's a bad thing and a bad idea to give teens Waymo accounts in a lot of American life. Obviously, that's not universal. I can think of some use cases where for reasons of ability, or maybe certain kinds of landscapes where, yeah, everybody depends on cars and you have to and that's not going to change anytime soon. Sure, there's no transit network. Let's use this as a stop cop solution. But by and large, this whole thing makes me kind of angry, and I wrote something on blue sky about it that I'm just going to read because I got a little feisty. I wrote, I'm sorry, but this whole thing makes me feel insane. Let's be real. We stole basic independence from generations of kids and teenagers by intentionally making our cities deadly and impossible to travel outside of a car, and now corporations are selling a worse version of it back to them at a price. So as always, when I pop off on a posting platform. This touched a little bit of a nerve. It got liked about 650 times. It was reposted about 150 times, and it got a pretty wide range of feedback, most of which was supportive, people who kind of agreed with me, but some of which touched on some kind of nuanced issues that I thought it would be better to just talk out in an essay or a verbal essay, which is, I guess, what I'm doing right now. So the first one that I think just needs to be just sort of quashed right away was the feedback that, basically, we can walk and chew gum at the same time that Waymo isn't trying to replace the neighborhood roll down the street to your neighborhood school when you're six with a, you know, $50 cab ride in a pod. That what they're really trying to do is provide a stop gap solution while we work really hard to retrofit our communities to reduce car dependence, to quote, one person on there, while making it safer to be in and around these death traps, namely, not robot cars. Robot cars will save 1000s of lives each year, is how the argument goes to that. I say, Where is Waymo operating? Right now, right? You might have noticed earlier in this monolog that Waymo has a lot of cars in San Francisco, a place where you have many transit agencies to choose from, where you are able to safely walk and bike in very large sections of the city. And yet, all of these AV companies are obsessed with optimizing their product line for a dense urban environment and putting it in the tech capital of the country. I don't think that that is incidental. Personally, I don't think it's just because, you know, companies like alphabet and other multinational AV companies happen to have a very big Silicon Valley presence. And they want to make sure their employees and their neighbors can access this technology. I think they want to replace a lot of dense urban mobility with cars, automated cars that they own, that they operate, that they profit off of. And they want to show that if they can do it there, they can do it everywhere, because that is how their product scales, and that is how their product profits.

    The next feedback that I want to engage with a little bit is this idea that having teenagers riding around in extremely safe robot cars is still vastly preferable to putting them behind the wheel. I think that's valid. I will be frank, I am not totally sold, from the research that I have read, that we should be granting teens driver's licenses in this country, at least on the basis of how safe they are to themselves and others. And I say this to be clear, as someone who grew up as a teen in a mostly rural area, you know, who depended on having a car to have any kind of social life, to have any kind of part time job, with the exception of when I got my little scholarship to boarding school and my whole world opened up. I think we get into this false dichotomy of teens can drive or teens can rot at home. And what I'm advocating. Skating for is a world where we don't have to make that choice, where you can have an adolescence that is not car dependent, where you have the ability to develop the skills to navigate the world. I think that this is something that, especially with the Waymo conversation, is really important. I might say it's even important for teens to learn how to navigate in all kinds of ways, even if you're driving. I think we're going to have a lot of problems if we start putting teenagers in waymos of what happens when and if they need to be in a not self driving car. How are they cultivating those practice hours behind the wheel? Like yeah, if I agree with the posters and reply guys on this post that we are going to have a car dependent world for a generation or two. All right, shouldn't Shouldn't we be equipping teens to navigate that world on their own, to understand how to change a flat tire and set a Maps app and maybe navigate? Hear me out without a Maps app. Sometimes I just get really tired of these false dichotomies between driving or bust, and that's really the soul of why I write about what I write about. Another piece of feedback that I got that I think is important to engage with is this one, and I'm just going to read another comment. It said, I agree with you, in general, but Waymo doesn't operate in car centric suburbs, yet. It's mostly in transit friendly urban centers. The specific culprit here is insane safety culture that doesn't allow children and increasingly teens outside anywhere on their own. I think there's a lot of truth to this I do. I recognize and I wrestle with constantly the fact that the barriers to active mobility and transit in particular are not just cars. I call myself an anti car dependency journalist because I want to tackle all of those barriers, and especially as they relate to the very deep intersections between racialized violence in this country, gender violence in this country. If you want to talk about not allowing children and increasingly, teens outside anywhere on their own, talk about FEM presenting and queer teens out on their own, or racialized teens out on their own, the dangers that they might encounter. But man, it would bum me out if the only solution we had to violence against young people in the public realm that has nothing to do with cars was to put them in a car. If we had to buy our safety from corporations, if we could afford it. I don't want the only way that a teen girl, a queer, non binary teen, whatever, to be able to walk down the street and know that they won't be harassed by a stranger is if they can afford to pay alphabet to put them in a pod. I don't want the only way that a black teen can stay safe from harassment, from police or from other residents, from vigilante violence, from just a microaggression on the street to be if they can afford a robo taxi, that's about the saddest thing that I can think of. The way that we need to confront those barriers to mobility. And yeah, there are a lot of barriers to mobility that have nothing to do with cars. Is not more car dependency, it's getting to the root causes of racism, sexism, oh, my god, anti immigrant sentiment. That's a huge topic right now that I think we really need to be plugging into it's to recognize the way that car dependency masks those root causes and sells us solutions to problems that are very deep at the root of our society that we can uproot. I think we as urbanists need to get out of the idea that cultural issues are not our issue. Of course they're our issue. Of course they are. They shape the issues that we think we care about most, like whether there's going to be a bike lane in the street or a bus lane, but they also are the invisible blanket that just sort of drapes over everything that we do. We can't absolve ourselves of the fact that parents don't allow their kids to walk down the street just because the car isn't the only reason that they will be afraid to walk down the street. It's all our issue. It's all stuff that we need to plug in and care about. I also want. To bring up a few things that didn't come up as much in the feedback to this post, because I think they're really important to engage with. And one is something that I flagged and got some broad agreement. But I want to deepen into it here, which is this idea that the problem with a Waymo like the problem with any car in part, is how it again, silos you and isolates you from the rest of your community. You can't bump into your friends on the way home from school and from the back of the Waymo, right? It means that you are only going to encounter things that you invite into your pod. You don't even have to look out the window in a Waymo, it is time travel. Basically, you get into it at school, you take a nap in the back, and you arrive at your destination. You don't get any of that interaction with people of other cultures who you might meet on a bus, with people who look different from you, or even with people who look exactly like you and are of your culture who you need to deepen your relationships with. There's a huge social element to the conversation about transportation that I think we really, really have undersold. And there's also a question of serendipity, of making sure that you have the opportunities to encounter the unexpected you can't like, discover a creek or a park or a shop or whatever other neighborhood landmark that will become a core memory from the back of a Waymo you can't stumble on anything we talked earlier about this idea of chauffeur burden for parents who have to drive their kids around everywhere. I also think we should be talking about coordination burden, right? I mean, if I had to coordinate a meetup every single time that I wanted to see one of my friends, versus just walking around the corner to the coffee shop where, I mean, I live in a small town, but frankly, I'm like all but guaranteed to see three to eight people who I know almost every time I go there, that is a real time cost and energy cost on my life. Teenagers should have that, you know, bump ability factor that we talk about in urbanism a lot too. They should be able to just be residents of a community and wander around their neighborhoods and encounter new experiences and make new friends and have new opportunities come to them see the help wanted sign in the window without having every single time to intentionally seek out a destination that they put gas in their car and spend money and drive to. That's really important for development, and it's also just important to us throughout our lives, in a way that I think we don't account for in our traffic models and the way that we plan our cities. Another thing that didn't come up very often in this thread was the fact that waymos, much like their counterpart, the non robot car, you're not getting any physical movement out of that experience, you know. And I'm not just talking like kind of the tired old kind of frankly fat phobic headlines about the obesity epidemic and things like that. I'm talking about physically using your body to move through the world, even if it's just to the bus stop and back, if you're in a power wheelchair, or if you're using your legs and feet, these are important to the human experience and to themselves. And I don't like the idea that

    corporations are selling a product line that allows us to avoid that, that the way that we have to experience physical movement is by paying to go to a gym. There's a problem with that. At the core of this, for me, is just honestly the reliance on corporations for what should be our basic needs, our basic services, our basic humanity, getting somewhere, running into people moving our bodies, being able to get to school, get to work, experience, serendipity and joy. None of those are things that we should have to pay for. And I get that we are living in a world right now where the alternative is pretty bleak. It is a dangerous walk or bike ride, it is an unreliable bus or train ride. It is being in your home on your own, but I think that we need to dream a lot bigger. And I think we need to pause and ask ourselves, anytime we are offered a corporate alternative to a human need, why do we have to pay for this? Who made it this way? Did we do it on purpose, and can we undo it? Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much again for indulging me as I experimented with a little bit of a new format. If you like to shoot me a line. Kea at street. Streetsblog.org, that's Kea. If you're like, oh, Kea, just got back to interviewing authors. Don't worry, I have lots of great guests on deck for you this summer. But thank you for listening. Thank you for caring about the nuances of this issue. Gotta do my little close out Spiel here. The break is a production of streets vlog USA. Our theme music is eggshells by Christina Johnson, I am your host and editor. Kea Wilson, if you like this show, you can leave a five star review on Spotify Apple podcast or anywhere else you listen. And before I let you go, same question as always, what is one thing you have done today to help end car dependency? Let me know. Kea,