Waymo has quietly started offering rides from San Francisco to SFO, and early adopters are reporting a smooth, drama-free experience. One local who took the trip last week described the process as seamless — get picked up in the city, get dropped off at the Grand Hyatt at SFO, hop the AirTrain to your terminal. Reverse it on the way back. No awkward small talk, no mysterious route detours, no driver who insists on speeding through the Uber lot like it's qualifying day at Laguna Seca.

The catch? It's not cheap. Regular pricing runs north of $50, though promotional fares have been floating around the $30-40 range. That puts it roughly in line with what you'd pay for an Uber or Lyft to the airport — which raises the obvious question: if it costs the same, why wouldn't you take the self-driving car?

This is the kind of innovation that should make San Francisco proud. A private company solving a real transportation problem without a single ballot measure, oversight committee, or $4.7 billion bond issuance. No one had to convene a task force. No one commissioned a study on the equity implications of airport drop-off zones. Waymo just... built the thing and launched it.

Contrast that with BART's perpetual struggles to make its SFO connection feel like anything other than a punishment, or the city's inability to streamline even basic infrastructure projects. The private sector is lapping government transit solutions at every turn, and doing it at competitive prices.

Of course, there are legitimate questions ahead. Will pricing stay competitive once the promotional period ends, or will Waymo jack rates once riders are hooked? Will the Grand Hyatt drop-off remain the only option, or will Waymo eventually get curbside terminal access? And can this scale enough to actually dent airport traffic congestion?

For now, though, the verdict is simple: the robots are taking us to the airport, and they're doing it better than most humans. Welcome to the future — it just costs about forty bucks.