San Francisco opens to everyone
Waymo removed the waiting list in San Francisco: anyone in the city could call a car with no driver. About 300 thousand people had been queuing before that.
Why it matters
A driverless ride stopped being a demonstration and became an ordinary service in a dense old city.
Phoenix, where the service opened four years earlier, is a city of wide straight streets and rare rain. San Francisco is the opposite: steep hills, fog, tram tracks, cyclists, lorries stopped in the second lane. Getting through it meant showing the system handles ordinary urban mess rather than a test track. Rides ran with nobody in the cabin, around the clock. The city government had no power to forbid it, since licences are issued by the state, and that became a dispute between the city and California in its own right.