Getting Waymo for our DART $
Replace all the empty buses with shared rides in robotaxis
A friend on my street bought five Teslas this year. Five! He loves them. The reason? They drive themselves. He can relax on his commute. He’s purchased one for every generation in his family.
Tesla’s self-driving relies on cameras. Even better than that is Google’s self-driving cars, Waymo, as they have a laser and radar on top of the car.
You can’t buy a Waymo though — they are not for sale. Google is turning their tech into a cash cow through the Waymo robotaxi service. They are already doing this in Austin, Atlanta, LA, Phoenix, and San Francisco.
This past summer, Waymo announced that it announced that its robotaxis will soon be introduced in five new cities: Dallas, Miami, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. It just launched to select riders in 60 square miles in Miami.
At some point, Waymo will appear in Irving. There’s already a self-driving car from a Waymo competitor that makes regular appearances at Sunrise Park in Irving Heights, where I live. Robotaxis are coming! (They are actually already all over China. When you land in China, you take a driverless taxi to get to where you’re going.)
Even more interesting is the question, could robotaxis help us with our public transportation pickle?
Consider the following:
There are six Orange Line light rail stations in Irving (Belt Line, Northlake, Hidden Ridge, Convention Center, Urban Center, and University of Dallas), and two TRE stations (West Irving and Downtown Irving).
Nationwide, the average trip for an Uber ride is 5-6 miles.
Just about everyone in Irving is within 6 miles of a DART station, with the worst case being the southwest edge of Irving, e.g. from Stipes Elementary to the Northlake Station is 6.5 miles.
Going from Nimitz to Valley Ranch is 14 miles (why would you ever need to?) and going from west Irving to East Irving is 8 miles.
Assume the cost of a Waymo robotaxi at a base of $10 a ride plus $0.60 per mile (based on what the rate is in Phoenix), then that would be $13 for a 5-mile trip.
A 3-Hour Pass on DART is $3.00. A commute to work and back therefore costs $6. Of course, this involves a lot of walking, waiting, and facing delays, which is so impracticable it explains why…
only 2,566 people regularly use DART at the moment.
Now what about this proposal: discounted 5-mile Waymo rides within Irving, with a pooled discount for shared rides and costs beyond that radius paid for by the rider.
Say I find a neighbor with a similar commute, who wants to go regularly to a certain part of Irving — say a DART station. We each kick in $4 or so a ride, and the City of Irving subsidizes the rest. If Irving got $25 million — less than a quarter of what we spend on DART — to use to subsidized microtransit, we could support nearly three times the people who regularly use DART now, giving over seven thousand people subsidized rides up to 5-mile rides for a weekly commute.
The essential point: a Waymo coming to your door beats the waiting and walking which makes DART so unusable. It would be at a fraction of the cost and would ease the burden of traffic if rides are shared. Subsidizing pooled rides could be the equivalent of carpool lanes.
Such a plan could be rolled out gradually so as not to overwhelm the system, with preferences given to those going to DART stations, living and working in Irving, or under a certain income threshold.
When the robotaxis arrive, getting just a portion of our DART money back could go a long way.
Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.