In San Francisco, Waymo Has Now Bested Lyft. Uber Is Next

If a data-backed trend plays out, Waymo could become San Francisco’s biggest ride-hailing service before the year ends.

Waymo’s celestial ascent into the cultural zeitgeist — a rise that has been propelled by dystopian memes and sheer, futuristic novelty — has only been matched by how it continues swallowing its competition. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company saw explosive exponential growth in ridership in 2024, with driverless rides increasing from 77,000 to more than 312,000 lifts by August of last year alone, according to the California DMV; as of publishing, Waymo asserts that 30% of their rides are to local small businesses.

Screenshot: Courtesy of YipitData

Independent contractors for Lyft and Uber have been saying they’re “cooked” for a while, citing massive declines in available requests as a result of Waymo’s success. (This, however, is a tandem issue: Waymo’s ride-hailing operations in San Francisco coincided with the increased number of regional rideshare drivers that began working during and after the pandemic.) But now factual data is showing that the aforementioned broiling is, indeed, happening … and at a rate quicker than once thought.

According to YipitData, a data and analytics firm based out of New York City, Waymo’s gross bookings from August of 2023 to April of this year have surpassed Lyft’s in market share. The twenty-month data analysis highlighted Uber’s dominance in San Francisco ridership — well over 50% of all trips booked via a ridesharing application were done on Uber throughout the analysis — but showed, perhaps more surprisingly, how quickly Waymo clambered into the commonplace. Waymo is also currently beating Lyft, a company that has operated rides in San Francisco since 2012, in total gross bookings. 

In a staggeringly short amount of time, Waymo, which is about to celebrate its first anniversary of city-wide ride-hailing operations, has gone from effectively 0% market share of bookings in San Francisco to over 25%. Lyft has continuously gathered fewer bookings than Uber, but still managed to hold onto a roughly 30% market share since 2023.

Waymo has now flipped that stake, surpassing Lyft to become San Francisco’s second most-popular ride-hailing service. If the research published by YipitData is extrapolated outwardly, Waymo could easily beat Uber to become SF’s foremost taxi-like service by early next year. Or sooner.

What does this mean for San Francisco, the city that launched ridesharing services as we know them today? On the roads, not much; self-driving Jaguar iPaces would become even more prominent. But on an economic level, a subset of blue-collar workers (which numbers in the tens of thousands in San Francisco) would find themselves either regionally displaced or outright vocationally exterminated by a branch of artificial intelligence. 

We don’t need a graph to tell you how that window into a looming dystopian landscape plays out. But hey, at least you won’t have to surrender to mind-numbing small talk on your way to SFO.

Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons