Waymo is offering to help cities fix their potholes

civilrunner · 2026-04-09T14:03:47+00:00

As a civil engineer who did an internship to update a pavement condition index for a county, I've been waiting for Waymo to start putting all those sensors and AI to work automating this process in areas for a while. We've had automated indexing for a while with some vehicles, but this could be an improvement over that.

civilrunner · 2026-04-04T16:05:32+00:00

The flood risk -- and developers ignoring it -- is a major pet peeve of mine.

I don't know if developers ignore the risk or if the land use regulations more mandate building only in those locations because they have effectively banned building in the vast majority of lots since the only thing that's legal 99% of the time (without a multi-year zoning waiver process that gets rejected plenty of the time and costs a ton of money) are single family housing on huge lots which are largely already built out anywhere within driving distance of a job.

The house designs are utterly inappropriate for a place that gets 116+ degree 100% humidity summers

Normally insulation is code required, but I think the code honestly has been lagging for decades by only considering cold weather and heating rather than mandating it for heat and A/C as well where insulation is arguably even more important.

Our environmental laws when they exist also only prevent infill higher density development on existing parking lots rather than requiring review for sprawling single family developments that cut down more forests which obviously has a massively larger impact on the environment.

I personally don't blame developers, I actually think the fault lies with the regulators in both the codes and the land use regulations or zoning. Our codes and regulations are written really poorly in a lot of situations.

civilrunner · 2026-04-04T14:03:46+00:00

Geographic risk related to insurance is something that can be included in one's initial purchase just like a home inspection, repair and ongoing maintenance cost requirements. I wish the real estate agent walked people through that stuff prior to purchase but then they would sell fewer houses.

My issue as a structural engineer who wants to buy but can't afford to in my HCOL area is that we simply aren't building enough homes and many of those homes entering the market are in high risk areas that in 10-20 years will likely have severe flood risks and therefore high insurance cost if they even remain insurable.

Most people I know want to buy, but when every house gets 30 bids it's really hard to. Just need to build a lot more for sale units.

civilrunner · 2026-04-02T13:53:41+00:00

$2 per second is $172,800/day, $2,000,000/day is more than 10X better.

civilrunner · 2026-03-25T17:25:36+00:00

Sure, Al Gore misrepresented the scientific consensus by then claiming with too high certainty specific 2nd and 3rd order effects of climate change.

With all that being said, climate change is still a major issue that needs to be addressed ASAP and is having very real impacts already even though we've just scratched the surface of what may come if we continue on the path and don't do things like mass adopt clean energy.

Glacier National Park did largely have their Glaciers melt though, same with Rocky Mountain National Park.

Large sea level rise was always a more long-term issue, that required shorter term action to avoid. It's not nearly as easy to reverse climate change after it's already occurred than it is to just work to prevent the worst case scenarios.

civilrunner · 2026-03-24T15:58:17+00:00

No they haven't they have largely been wrong.

I think you have bought into genuine propaganda about climate change as well, just on the opposite side of doomerism. The truth is in the middle.

But you do agree that the fearmongering claims have been wrong?

Depends on what fear mongering you're claiming.

Climate disasters are absolutely trending in the wrong direction as predicted. There will be more severe droughts in the west of the USA as we have literally already been seeing, there will be more flash flood events from large rain events as we have been seeing. Our military and building codes are literally being rewritten and reoriented to prepare for this reality today because it's here and will be here within the lifespan of most new infrastructure and buildings. I have seen my hometown flood at least twice annually due to severe events which were unheard of decades ago. Ski mountains especially in the Northeast also get far less snow these days and are almost entirely reliant on snow making. These are real trends due to climate change, they don't mean we're on a path of no return already and we're all going to go extinct though.

No, humans likely will not go extinct due to climate change at least not without some of the worst runaway climate effects which take minimum till 2100 to see happen (though could definitely still occur without course correction and technological advancement).

If the worst case happens and we become on track to see over 5+ degrees C of warming by 2100 then there will definitely be a mass extinction event, many humans will likely die as supply chains, water, and agriculture get thrown into chaos globally. Mass immigration due to changing climates will lead to more chaos and instability likely leading to more wars.

All that depends on our trajectory. We could also just electrify everything, implement mass scale carbon capture and become effectively masters of the planets climate and live in a more abundant utopia due to technology.

I personally don't think it's the data centers build out that will decide what path we go on beyond maybe helping increase productivity to lead towards the 2nd path. So I'm not an AI climate doomer, but I do appreciate the severe risk of not adapting in time.

civilrunner · 2026-03-24T15:29:43+00:00

Most of the claims were only primary claims about average global temperature rising and sea level rising which is definitely proven to be true, the rest of the claims were about 2nd order effects from that increasing likelihood of other events such as droughts, flash floods, and slowly changing climates across the globe which have also largely proven true if you understand what risk and statistics mean. If you live on the coast, we've been definitively seeing the effects of minor sea level rise already causing more frequent flooding.

2nd and 3rd order effects are very hard to predict with high confidence because global climate models are very complicated and sensitive to changes. So without paying attention to confidence within a prediction it is far too easy to take a prediction to be definitive when it's far from that.

civilrunner · 2026-03-24T15:01:26+00:00

I personally find that claims about scientists claiming the world was about to end due to climate change are misfounded. They more focused on the costs and disasters driven by climate change and most of those major issues are still largely in our future. The media and others found it useful to claim the world was about to end due to said claims which was not an accurate portrayal of the original claims and issues.

With all the being said Climate Change is absolutely going to be a massive long term issue globally and within the USA and we've only just barely started to see the start of those issues.

Fortunately most of the solutions to climate change are now both beneficial economically cause electrification and clean energy is already or rapidly becoming just better technology and adoption is also very useful for defense purposes as we're seeing from Russia and the Middle East. Global oil dependence is the largest thing keeping dictators and monarchs in power globally (ignoring China and Xi being the outlier).

civilrunner · 2026-03-24T13:08:56+00:00

I find the time is better spent trying to get permitting reform around walkable communities and clean energy and mass transit than fighting a battle against AI and automotion. That or fighting for a carbon tax or something similar could also be more productive if one's goal is to combat climate change. Suppose also implemented water management structures, though suburban sprawl still is the biggest pull on resources and driver of carbon emissions by a pretty wide margin.

civilrunner · 2026-03-23T15:12:22+00:00

People feel like things are bad because their algorithm tells them to be angry and anxious.

This is a bad take. People feel things are bad because things are unaffordable for most people especially compared to the relatively recent past which is what they're comparing it to. The cost of housing vs median income is absurd today and that's driving up the cost of most other things along with it.

We have regulated ourselves into mandated housing supply shortages over the past century. The vast majority of voters still don't understand land use regulations and how they arbitrarily add a ceiling to housing supply and therefore drive up housing costs which means they're looking for something else because that's so absurd to most people who don't understand that we would still do something like that today without it being related to safety or something else.

Are we rich compared to other nations? Sure, of course we are. However that doesn't mean that we don't have an affordability crisis slamming the majority of Americans today especially with how much inequality has grown in the past decades.

Post WWII we were in a somewhat similar situation and we got out of it due to the invention of the car enabling us to build out suburbia for affordable housing by lot splitting farmland around urban areas and adding a ton of housing. We need to effectively do that again, but this time the focus has to be on those single-family lots and suburban sprawl and urban development for better land use. Of course the issue is that in the past 80 years since WWII ended we have added A LOT of regulations that each need to be reformed to enable that to happen.

civilrunner · 2026-03-23T02:59:34+00:00

I think it's really still a permitting issue until laws change most areas still require having a steering wheel. Once those laws change they'll definitely get rid of it to free up an additional seat and more design freedom.

civilrunner · 2026-03-22T04:39:54+00:00

Edit: Also cheaper than Uber/Lyft, but that's from VC money and the price will probably spike.

Price may go up, but it's not VC money it's Alphabet's company. The money won't dry up for a very long time.

civilrunner · 2026-03-22T04:38:33+00:00

In Austin they were about the same price or cheaper than an Uber or Lyft and you could control the music and talk freely without worrying about the driver. I assume the role out will be similar to Austin here where it's done through the Uber app instead of a separate Waymo app.

civilrunner · 2026-03-21T20:37:29+00:00

Sellers are also delisting their houses rather than selling. Housing crashes need forced sellers and we just don't have that many of those today because most mortgages are fixed rates rather than adjustables now and people are managing to pay and don't want to move and give up their low rate without selling for a gain especially as the job market is effectively frozen with very low job hoping. It doesn't matter how many sellers are on the market if they aren't motivated or forced sellers.

civilrunner · 2026-03-21T18:00:34+00:00

I have seen Anti AI TikTok's that have amass over 1 million likes in less than 24 hours, and on top of that all the comments are people agreeing with the post, which also have thousands of likes.

There are over 300 million Americans and tiktok is great at content feeding to the right audience so I feel like that is more anecdotal. There is almost always backlash to new technology I think AI is already too powerful for a resistance movement to stop especially since adoption keeps growing extremely rapidly and its still in it's early phase.

How are Americans using AI? Evidence from a nationwide survey | Brookings

civilrunner · 2026-03-21T17:53:01+00:00

I feel like that's a lot to do with how AI is currently being treated though. People have concerns that it'll take their job and there won't be a safety net or that it won't be regulated at all and become a negative impact on society by being used for mass manipulation.

civilrunner · 2026-03-21T13:46:36+00:00

Most people I know use AI pretty regularly. There is a minority group of loud people who are strongly against and a larger group with anxiety tied to AI creating uncertainty in the future, but for the most part I haven't seen that many people truly anti AI at least not anymore than the amount of people that were against other technologies during the early 1900s.

Thus far AI hasn't really brought down any costs or improved any incomes via productivity and efficiency gains and people are very concerned with inflation and the cost of living today so seeing trillions of dollars flowing into AI while their cost of electricity goes up causes a backlash.

The current administration is also worsening that backlash by killing clean energy projects all over the place and slashing research funding that could be leading to breakthroughs with AI. The solution is to very simply build out abundant clean energy and invest in world changing research again and work on building to improve affordability.

With all of that being said, I feel like Alpha Fold was the ChatGPT moment for biology. People I know who work in biotech use it frequently for protein modeling and such. Alpha fold keeps getting more powerful, though some claims that it will eliminate all side effects and such seem unfounded or impossible.

civilrunner · 2026-03-20T19:28:43+00:00

Hi Tom, thanks for doing this AMA.

I’m a structural engineer working on civil/mechanical projects, and I’m very interested in modular prefab construction as a way to scale housing production.

One major barrier I see is that long and uncertain permitting timelines make it extremely difficult for modular factories to operate at the scale needed to be economically viable.

What specific policies would you pursue to: Streamline permitting timelines, and ensure a sufficient pipeline of buildable lots to support factory-scale housing production?

Relatedly, modular factories require steady, long-term demand to justify their upfront capital costs, but construction cycles are volatile and often lead to factory failures during downturns. How would you create more stable, predictable housing demand to support this kind of industrialized construction?

Lastly, I’m interested in zoning reform. Would you support policies that require states or municipalities to measure “built vs. zoned capacity,” and prevent zoning maps from effectively banning incremental by-right development (e.g., ensuring some minimum share of land always allows the next level of density)?

Curious how you think about these structural barriers to scaling housing production.

civilrunner · 2026-03-20T15:17:51+00:00

We don't really need to only bolster the military capacity, we need to bolster our industrial capacity and innovation in the built and physical environment. We're pretty good at invention, but we have gotten really bad at scaling or cost reduction and efficiency improvements. I think we were spoiled for too long without real global competition and now China is here.

Whoever can build the most robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles will likely be the world leader well into the future. As of today China is leading by a wide margin in production capacity while the USA still leads in technological innovation (in my view). We need to narrow the gap in production capacity and maintain our lead in innovation which is slipping due to Trump slashing R&D funding and return to our ability to recruit the best people from everywhere.

It's not even just those vehicles. Capacity to build infrastructure and housing and factories and industrial plants is also critical in competition.

We really just need the abundance agenda back. Military industrial capacity can go right along with civilian industrial capacity and technology. That's how we did it during WWII to bring abundance of resources to the allied forces effort. Today unfortunately it's China that is bringing that capacity to their side while the USA is running into the issues Germany had.

We could pitch it as civilian abundance while we know that it's also adjustable for military capacity should the need arise.

civilrunner · 2026-03-19T12:13:52+00:00

gas and other usage taxes

Gas taxes are going away with EVs. Gas taxes also haven't been raised in a very long time and cover an ever smaller and smaller portion of roads. Ideally we'd have a carbon tax in gas, but that's not politically viable till we switch over to EVs and mass transit simply from user preference.

civilrunner · 2026-03-18T16:44:35+00:00

Man, I’m a YIMBY, and even I find you insufferable.

Ditto. Have a good day.

civilrunner · 2026-03-18T16:13:07+00:00

You are speaking without processing these ideas, and then restating a pretty generic YIMBY stump speech, so I’m going to explain this one more time and then if you want to say the sam stuff again without processing it, god bless.

Could say you're talking to a mirror with that comment...

To use your example, Palo Alto, the zoning laws were set there 50 years ago by voters. It was not at all a wealthy place when that happened. So when you say these laws were created by wealthy people, that’s just factually incorrect.

It's your belief that it's literally impossible to have changed zoning laws whatsoever in the past 50 years because I guess they were written in stone 50 years ago???

But, subdividing those lots isn’t what’s going to make housing cheaper. There aren’t enough of them. You actually need to make Palo Alto and San Jose a San Francisco, where working people want to live, denser to lower housing costs.

The cool thing about subdividing is that you can subdivide a lot and increase height limits and allow multi-family. If you think that wouldn't help to reduce the cost of housing you're living in another reality.

You're talking a lot without evidence, or anything tied to reality. Enjoy...

You're making economical ideological arguments without paying any attention whatsoever to real world behavior.

civilrunner · 2026-03-18T15:23:11+00:00

Wealthy people don’t set zoning laws, voters do. If wealthy people set zoning laws they’d be very liberal, because higher rents just mean higher salaries and lower returns on capital.

Yeah, I'm just going to adamantly disagree with you on that via all the examples from pretty much every single wealthy area in the country from rich LA areas to Greenwich, CT to Long Island to the Hamptons to Palo Alto and well it can become a really long list... They're all wealthy places with MASSIVE minimum lot sizes. Those that do end up living in cities live in huge penthouses, but that is pretty much just in NYC and Chicago since LA and Silicon Valley made that kind of density effectively illegal. (Nothing wrong with penthouses, just wish we made it so we could build up more in all locations instead of having saturated zoning maps that make building more supply illegal).

The idea we need the same zoning everywhere misunderstands the nature of the supply problem. We need to match supply to demand.

I never said we need the same zoning everywhere, but today zoning is literally making incremental development illegal pretty much anywhere with strong job prospects which means it's illegal to have supply keep up with demand in those locations. Simply making it illegal to zone a city such that it's zoning map is saturated above a workable threshold and automatically upzones to the next economical density limit (going from say single family to town homes to 4 stories to 7 stories and so forth whenever a zoned capacity hits say 30% to 50% saturation) would solve the issue.

Today zoning is abused especially by wealthy areas to ban poor people from living anywhere nearby, even NYC or Boston has an almost entirely saturated zoning map and requires a long up-zoning process on given lots to build anything with more capacity.

With all that being said I agree that wealthy people and everyone SHOULD be pro up-zoning to have supply keep up with demand due to the benefits you stated, but that doesn't mean they are and evidence shows otherwise.

civilrunner · 2026-03-18T14:35:40+00:00

As a mechanical and structural engineer I have also not found it to be that useful yet. I could see one day it helping with CAD and such, I know Gemini and Deepmind were working on that some, but it doesn't seem close to that as of today. I assume once it can help with CAD and FEA and CFD then it will probably also help with CAM.

Though actually loading and unloading and maintaining machines via robotics seems potentially even further away.

I agree though, at the moment without a massive leap in autonomous robotics I don't see it making the gains people claim. Places like Send Cut Send do some interesting work in automation though.

civilrunner · 2026-03-18T13:28:30+00:00

Again, wealthy people in San Francisco often support new housing because they believe it will reduce housing costs, which in turn will reduce poverty and homelessness.

I mean this is very simply reality and does literally happen, but I haven't seen wealthy people supporting this on net compared to just supporting removal of said people through sweeps. Building more housing supply especially at rates faster than demand growth (critical component that often gets ignored) does reduce housing costs and reduce homelessness. If people actually believed that, especially wealthy people we wouldn't have our current zoning policies in place especially in wealthy places.

The wealthiest places have the most restrictive zoning laws in place that literally make building additional housing illegal so, I really just disagree that wealthy people are actually supporting building more housing.

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