May 4, 2023
Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix and continues growing in San Francisco
In Metro Phoenix, one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., we’re doubling our Waymo One service area and connecting our downtown and East Valley territories. This expansion will include Scottsdale for the first time, cover nearly all of Tempe and give additional access to Chandler and Mesa. Anyone in the area can hail a ride with the Waymo One app, whether they’re Arizona State University students commuting between campuses or pin-seeking golfers on vacation.
With this expansion, we now serve 180 square miles of The Valley — the largest fully autonomous service area in the world. It’s also nearly four times the size of our initial Waymo One service area when we opened the world’s first true fully autonomous ride-hail service to the public in 2020.
To serve our growing Phoenix ridership and such a large metro area, we have opened a second location to access Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport at the new 24th Street PHX SkyTrain® Station. We now offer a convenient airport pickup and drop off location no matter where you’re headed in the metro area. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport served more than 44 million passengers last year, or more than 120,000 per day, a significant commercial opportunity for Waymo’s growing operations.
In San Francisco, we’ll continue onboarding new Waymo One riders and are giving our Trusted Testers access to more of the city, including Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach. Waymo is the only company to offer fully autonomous rides to members of the public across the vast majority of the city — 24 hours a day. We have welcomed thousands of external San Franciscans to Waymo One since we began offering rider-only trips in late 2022 and have tens of thousands more people on our waitlist as we await our final permit to offer a paid service.
“Waymo One remains the only and largest 24/7 fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the world — serving thousands of rides in multiple key markets — and we’re scaling quickly,” said Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo Chief Product Officer. “These latest expansions in Metro Phoenix and San Francisco will help us provide more trips to more riders in more places, and are a big step forward on the road to growing our business.”
Across Waymo One, we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer. More than 150 million people use ride-hail services in the U.S., and with Phoenix and San Francisco as two of the most lucrative and fastest-growing markets, Waymo One is well positioned for continued growth as we commercialize our technology.
Fueling this growth is the continued refinement of the Waymo Driver and operational efficiencies implemented across our fleet. Today’s impressive performance of the Waymo Driver is enabled by tens of billions of miles in simulation, tens of millions of on-road autonomous miles, state-of-the-art machine learning and invaluable feedback from real riders. With this expansion, we’ve released key software updates to increase the reliability of our service, including improved hand gesture detection, more versatile multi-point maneuvers and enhancements to our driving performance in inclement weather like very heavy fog among other things. We also now allow up to four passengers in our vehicles, delivering more flexibility for our riders and improving the everyday usefulness of our service.
“When it comes to transportation options, convenience, safety and efficiency are key for Scottsdale’s 9.7 million annual visitors," said Stephanie Pressler, director of community and government affairs at Experience Scottsdale. "Experience Scottsdale is excited that our visitors and residents alike will soon have a new option in Waymo as they move throughout Old Town Scottsdale’s shopping, entertainment, historic and arts districts, as well as travel to and from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.”
Over the next few months, we’ll focus our efforts on growing ridership and increasing capacity in San Francisco and Metro Phoenix. We’ll build upon our strong relationships with community groups like Foundation for Senior Living and LightHouse for the Blind, plus exciting partnerships with organizations like the Stern Grove Festival and Arizona Diamondbacks. We’ll also apply our lessons learned in those markets as we grow rider-only testing operations in Los Angeles, our third major ride-hail city.
Join us for a ride when you’re in town by downloading the Waymo One app on the App Store and Google Play.
