Riding in a Car without a Driver

Do you know you can hire a Waymo car in San Francisco and it will drive you around town while you listen to your favorite music? No need to make polite conversation or figure out how much to tip the driver, though, because the car doesn’t have one!

Waymo is “the world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service.” I had seen these vehicles in previous trips to San Francisco but didn’t really want to try this out because the whole concept scared me. What if the car drove too fast or crashed into another car or ran someone over? Our younger son Andy encouraged my husband Rick and I to try it and offered to pay for us to ride across town from the outer Richmond area to the Salesforce Transit Center, where we would take a bus to Alameda.

After two cups of hot sake each, Rick and I were relaxed enough to try it. Andy had programmed Beatles …