Waymo offers $2.85 credit to riders who pair robotaxi trips with public transit

Waymo is now offering a $2.85 credit to any rider who pairs their ride with public transit, expanding a pilot program it previously ran in two cities – but it’s only available for Visa users, for now.

One of the great things about living in a city is that you can get around without a car. Higher housing density makes public transit possible, which then serves as a cheap way to move lots of people quickly.

But, every once in a while, you’ll still need some other solution to get where you’re going – especially in American cities where public transit isn’t nearly as expansive as it ought to be. Maybe you take a train into town because it’s cheaper and you can skip traffic, but the only stop is a couple miles from your destination.

For these situations, there are taxis. Instead of owning a car and finding a place to park it, you can just borrow a ride for a fee.

Of course in the modern age, we have robotaxis, driven by computers rather than humans, and Waymo is the leading provider of this service in the US.

So to assist with this symbiotic relationship between transit and taxis, Waymo is now offering a deal: anyone who takes a transit ride and a Waymo ride back to back gets a $2.85 reward back from Waymo.

The program is only available on Visa cards for the time being. Waymo would like to expand it to other payment processors, but has not yet done so. To use it, you link your Visa card to your Waymo app, and when you use the same card for both a Waymo and public transit ride within 2 hours of each other, you get $2.85 in “Waymo Cash,” which can be used for future Waymo rides.

Waymo initially had a similar trial program in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and designed the program to mirror a $2.85 discount given to riders who use both BART and SF Muni, two regional transit systems, in the SF Bay Area.

The company says that in its most mature markets (SF/LA/Phoenix), over half of its riders also use public transit, so it expects to see high use of the new program. But the new program will be available for all of the 14 cities it operates in… although some of them have more public transit than others.

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