> “There are some days where it can be up to 50,” King says of the WayMo count. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”
One car every 5 minutes => 12 cars/hour => 288 cars/day
If you’re trying to focus and cars keep u-turning in front of you house all day, it doesn’t really matter what the exact number of integer minutes is.
They’re probably only testing during daylight business hours, so let’s say 6 hours a day, since the employees have to show up for work and get back to the office, which is brutally slow in SF rush hour traffic.
12 * 6 = 72 visits maximum at 1 per 5 minutes assuming 1 car, which obviously isn’t true. So assuming 3 cars due to the photo, 12 * 6 / 3 = 20 visits per car per day is all it takes to reach one every 5 minutes during most of the daytime work hours.
Clearly there are more than 3 cars in their fleet, so it takes proportionally fewer visits per day per car to reach 5 minutes. If their fleet is 36 cars, it only takes 2 visits per day.
Sorry, I didn't mean Waymo has 288 cars in their fleet, I was only pointing out that if a car comes by every 5 minutes, seeing 50 cars a day seems like an underestimate.
With regards to operating hours, the article states the cars operate at night:
> “I noticed it while I was sleeping,” says Jennifer King. “I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom window .”
> The visitors Jennifer King is talking about don’t just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there’s nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in.
One car every 5 minutes => 12 cars/hour => 288 cars/day
Something doesn't add up.