Waymo Will Give You $2.85 Off a Driverless Ride If You Take the Train Too

Waymo will take $2.85 off a future driverless taxi ride if Bay Area riders also take a bus or train close to that trip, under a new deal with Visa described Sept. 22, 2026. The Verge

It works through how you pay. Pay for the Waymo ride with a Visa credit card, pay for transit within two hours, and the credit is added automatically. Think of it like two time-stamped receipts that show the trips happened close together. Visa checks the timing, so riders do not need a special transit app or a claim form.

Waymo is also saving dozens of pickup spots for its cars at Caltrain stations to shorten waits for train riders. Where cars wait and how they reach the curb affects how fast a rider gets picked up at rush hour.

Waymo has tried this kind of transit discount before, in San Francisco in 2024 and in Los Angeles in 2025. It plans to bring the discount and the reserved station spots to more cities over time.

The idea is to link the two kinds of travel. Waymo says over half of its riders in its busiest cities also use public transit. So the driverless taxi is less a replacement for the bus or train and more a short connector to get people to and from stations.

The Bay Area plan comes as Waymo keeps expanding in other places. In Dallas, it ended the waitlist and opened robotaxi rides to all residents and visitors. TechCrunch

For scale, Waymo's latest safety review covers more than 220 million miles with no driver behind the wheel, through the end of March 2026, in five cities including Atlanta for the first time. Waymo

Compared with human drivers in the same places at the same time, Waymo cars were in 94% fewer crashes with serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer crashes where airbags went off, and 82% fewer crashes with any injury reported. For people outside cars, Waymo reported 93% fewer injury crashes with walkers, 84% fewer with bike riders and 84% fewer with motorbike riders.

Atlanta is newer and smaller, with more than 5.4 million driverless miles. There Waymo had 94% fewer airbag crashes and 86% fewer injury crashes than the human average. Humans driving that distance would have been expected to have about 1.2 serious-or-fatal crashes. Waymo had zero. Waymo now drives more than 4 million driverless miles each week. In total, it counts 47 fewer serious-or-fatal crashes, 305 fewer airbag crashes and 707 fewer injury crashes than humans would have had over the same miles.

In my view, the Visa shortcut makes sense because of what it skips. Transit systems use many different ways to collect fares, and joining them into one ticket takes a long time. Checking card payments is simpler, though it is not the same as one joint ticket. It also raises questions about privacy and about riders who do not have a Visa credit card or who pay cash.

Another point to keep in mind is that price alone is not enough. A discount can push people to make the connection, but saved curb space is what puts a car there at 8 a.m. when the platform is busy.

Looking at what this could make possible, there is reason for hope. If driverless cars keep adding miles with this safety record and help people reach trains instead of replacing them, cities could get safer roads and better-used transit at the same time.