SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – Waymo wants Bay Area riders to pair a driverless car ride with a bus or train trip. Its new reward: $2.85 toward a future Waymo ride when a customer pays for both trips with a Visa card within two hours of each other.
The company announced the transit rewards program Tuesday, September 22. It is starting with Waymo employees and plans to open it gradually to the public in the coming weeks. So the offer is coming, but most riders cannot claim it yet.
There is another distinction: Waymo is giving away Waymo Cash, a credit for its own rides. It is not paying riders in cash or depositing $2.85 back onto their Visa cards. Riders still pay for their transit fare and their initial Waymo trip.
The idea is to make a combined trip more appealing: take a Waymo to a station, ride a train across the region, then perhaps connect with another vehicle at the other end. A $2.85 credit will not cover most robotaxi trips, but it can reduce the price of using one for the first or last part of a journey.
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How the reward will work
Waymo says the offer applies to Bay Area transit agencies that accept contactless Visa tap-to-pay, a network the company counts as 27 agencies. That puts the program beyond San Francisco’s Muni system and makes connections with regional rail and other transit services possible. The $2.85 amount matches the current adult Muni fare paid by card or Clipper, although a longer rail trip can cost more.
The Clipper system accepts contactless bank cards at its readers, but a separate plastic or mobile Clipper card is a different way of paying. Waymo’s announcement specifies a linked Visa card used for both purchases. Riders who normally use a Clipper card, another card network, or a transit pass should not assume those payments will qualify. Waymo has not published a public start date in its announcement, so riders should check the app for availability before changing how they pay.
There is also a tradeoff for people with discounted transit fares. Clipper says tapping a contactless bank card charges the full adult fare; youth, senior, disability and Clipper START discounts require the relevant discount card. For those riders, switching to Visa just to earn a Waymo credit could cost more in transit fares than it saves.
Why Waymo is courting transit riders
This is an expansion of a previous experiment, not Waymo’s first transit promotion. In October 2024, the company offered a $3 credit for Waymo rides to or from eight selected transit stations in San Francisco and on the Peninsula.
The new program ties the reward to an actual paid transit trip, rather than simply to a Waymo pickup or drop-off near a station, and reaches agencies across the Bay Area that accept the specified payment method.
Waymo also announced a Caltrain arrangement: it says it will lease 40 parking spaces at Caltrain stations to stage vehicles for riders making train connections. The announcement did not specify which stations will get those spaces or when they will be in use.
The larger question is whether robotaxis will bring new passengers to transit or draw some away from buses and trains. Waymo presents its service as a way to bridge the gap between someone’s home or destination and a transit stop.
The company says surveys in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix found that more than half of its riders also use public transit. That figure shows overlap between the customer groups, but does not establish whether Waymo rides increase transit use overall.
Henriette Cornet, a University of San Francisco researcher who studies autonomous vehicles and transit, told the Los Angeles Times that getting to the first transit stop remains difficult in some Bay Area neighborhoods. The reward gives riders one more reason to try combining modes, though its real effect will depend on the price and convenience of that combined trip.
