The Waymos of East Riverside

Autonomous vehicles take over our streets

For a month this summer, we lived in a rental house down a long gravel road where prairie dogs popped their heads out of holes as we rumbled by. This was Taos, where the mountain rose impressively beyond the back patio and the nights were loud with whipping wind and coyote howls. Otherwise, it was quiet. It was beautiful. It was a step out of time.

When I would walk that road in the morning or after dinner to catch the sunset, I’d reflect on the many ways that Taos differed from Austin. One of them: there were no driverless cars racing through the streets. Back home, even our tiny road that attaches to a cul-de-sac might see an autonomous vehicle at any hour, sailing past, then making a u-turn to sail past again. The sensors on top like a little hat whir away, turning our roads into data.

**

In 2016 Mayor Steve Adler declared that Austin was the “Kitty Hawk of driverless cars.” Grandiose? Sure. But we also boast about having the tallest residential tower west of the Mississippi, the (former) largest college dorm in North America, the first permanent Formula 1 track in the US, and, of course, being the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Austin has no trouble announcing its superlatives, dubious or no.

One thing about living in a city that is always pressing toward the new and cutting edge is that those new and cutting-edge things can be really annoying. We had scooters littering the sidewalks before many other cities, so that for a while I was moving overturned Limes or Birds out of the way to pass by. We were early adopters of Uber, then voted as a city that rideshare services needed to offer safety measures like fingerprinting their drivers, after which Uber and Lyft left town in a huff. Then the governor overturned the local ordinance, and they were here again.

As if in revenge for our temporary rejection, Uber came back swinging. At the airport now, a giant Uber sign greets you as you come toward the arrivals area. And you can order a driverless car—the ubiquitous Waymo—to ferry you home right from your Uber app.

**

Let me be clear for those who don’t live here: the roads in Central Austin are filled with cars with no humans in them, or cars with humans in the backseat and no one up front. In any cluster of traffic—and Austin traffic deserves its own superlatives—there will be at least one, but often several, autonomous cars. Mostly they are the Waymos, white Jaguars of a nondescript style, noticeable only because of the technology spinning on the roof.

Waymos Waymos everywhere

The Waymos are at the stop sign, in the parking lot, blinking in the turn lane. They are driving slowly down Lamar Boulevard, going the speed limit, or quickly down our street, going the speed limit. As we sat in front of the house of friends greeting trick-or-treaters on Halloween, we saw a Waymo navigate the clusters of kids in costumes, not hitting anyone, but going faster than any decent human would around all those tender and cute children.

One summer morning, driving to Deep Eddy pool, which I feel obliged to mention is the oldest swimming pool in Texas, spring fed and populated by committed locals in their swim caps, I decided to count the number of autonomous vehicles I saw on my way there. Turning left onto East Riverside I counted one Waymo, then a second one. By the time I got to South Congress, one mile away, I stopped counting. I’d already seen seven.

I’ve since been told by my more-in-the-know husband that I likely missed other driverless cars in my count, like the autonomous Teslas that have no visible sensors.

**

Is this weird? Of course it’s weird. But it’s also become so normal, I forget that it’s weird. Then someone visits from somewhere that hasn’t called itself a technological Kitty Hawk.

I get a little thrill when I point out the cars to those visiting friends, friends from Toronto, a city both larger and more sophisticated than ours, and Pittsburgh. “See that car, that white one with the cameras on top? It’s a driverless car. No, really. Look inside, I’m serious.”

And my own travels confirmed it. Of course there were no Waymos in Taos. There aren’t even taxis in Taos. But what about DC? Fort Lauderdale? Charlotte? The cars all appeared to be driven by humans.

**

This essay is not me taking a stance against autonomous vehicles. I know better. The world races forward and we either join in that race, or at least make peace with it, or we get left behind. Besides, I once mocked a friend for getting an iPhone and especially for sitting in his car scrolling on it while waiting for me to arrive for a walk. “I’ll never be bored again,” he joked, and I probably rolled my eyes.

Now I begin my days playing puzzles with my thumb before I even get out of bed.

I wonder, however, what happens when our streets become data. I wonder what happens when we take the humanity out of traffic. Two days in a row I got stuck behind a stopped bus on East Riverside. I turned on my blinker, and watched the rear-view mirror for a gap in traffic to let me change lanes. The first day, a Waymo zipped out from behind me and around, leaving me stuck. The second, a car driven by a person flashed its lights to indicate that they were letting me in.

**

At some point, we should talk about the way we name things now. What is a Waymo? A Waymo?

Last week I was in my hometown in South Florida to work on clearing my mom’s condos for sale. There, like everywhere else, the old was making way for the new. I felt it in the boxes that I pulled from storage and sorted. I felt it when driving A1A, the road along the coast where condo towers have risen tall for decades.

The old places were named in real words with appropriately beachy themes: Island Club, Silver Thatch, Sea Gardens, Beachside Village. Kind of cheesy, kind of accurate. In the new places, the names got abstract or abbreviated. Oceanview Village Resort became OVR. A W Hotel is going up on Atlantic Boulevard. A new condo was named Aquazul, not an actual word in Spanish, though it seems like one. As does Solemar.

We’re really into words that are not words now, like the torturously named pharmaceuticals advertised during the World Series. (Tremfya, Zeposia, Rinvoq) Or words that are missing a vowel: Sprinkr, Grindr, as if the extra “e” is just too much work.

The next major player in Austin’s autonomous vehicle market seems to be Zoox. Yes, Zoox. Two of the least used letters in the English alphabet, connected by some nice round vowels, sounding like a bodily function.

I don’t know the name of Tesla’s self-driving car, which has been training in our neighborhood the past several months. But I know its tagline:

Always Attentive,
Never Distracted

True, but also never kind, never offering a flash of the headlights that says “You go first” or “Go ahead and jump in,” never pausing to roll down the window and say hi to a neighbor, never offering a little wave of thanks when you let them go next at the stop sign.

**

Another afternoon on East Riverside, driving home after a hard day, I saw ahead of me in the lane to the left something I couldn’t quite identify. Not a whirring camera on top of a car, but a wig on top of a motorcycle. A rag wig, like the hair on my childhood Holly Hobbie doll, a big ole wig of crazy strands of pink, blue, purple, white. From where I was, I couldn’t see the driver, only that massive, glorious, surprise of color.

As I inched forward in traffic, I finally pulled up beside the wig. I found tucked somewhere beneath it a man bent over the handlebars of his motorcycle, intent on wherever he was going. His pants had a giant stars on them, his face was concealed beneath the strands of colorful rope. I wondered if he wore a helmet under the wig, or if he used a kind of magical thinking to believe the colors themselves could protect him.

That wig shifted my day. I’d argued over copays at the front desk of a medical office and discovered that a favorite restaurant had closed right when I craved it most. I’d sat in the headache of traffic merging from two lanes down to one. Then I found this assertive act of human expression sitting amid the cars. I was delighted. I felt a surge of joy.

Austin’s roads used to be peppered with art cars, old cars painted with murals or with mugs and mirrors glued to their sides. In my head, this is akin to the way there would be guys strumming guitars on the front porch when I’d walk the neighborhood on summer evenings. I was neither an art car driver nor a guitar strummer, but I felt like the city invited me to be either or both or whatever it was I wanted.

**

If this is no more, it’s not the fault of the Waymos. They are just a symbol of the many ways the city has changed through the tech boom and the rising cost of housing and the political pressure from both the state and national capitols and just time and progress and the relentless march forward. Austin still wants to be the Live Music Capital of the World, but it also wants to be the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars. It wants to keep it weird, but it also wants to be home to big corporations like Oracle and Tesla with their gobble-it-up leaders taking all that they can. I’m not sure that one city can be all the things this city says it wants to be. I’m not sure that the streets can be human and automated at the same time. I’m not even sure how I feel when I am idling in traffic and a car with no driver sits beside mine, its engine silent, its sensors whirring.

One part of me is awed. Another part winces as the spinning technology catches—and records—the side of my face in its cameras.

---

---

Other things:

I talked about poetry, caregiving, and walking with someone at the end of their life on the Before You Go podcast episode, “The Stories Caregivers Carry: Narrative Medicine with Vive Griffith.” Find it here.

The next Write Together Saturday is November 15, from 10:30-12 CT, and details for my 2026 Artist’s Way workshop will be posted soon. Narrative Medicine workshops for caregivers launch in January. All info is available on my website.