Alexis Madrigal got a chance to visit the fascinating town of Castle, a roads-only city constructed by Waymo for the sole purpose of developing self-driving cars.
Built at the site of the decommissioned Castle Air Force Base, it's mostly just roads of various kinds, with almost no habitable buildings. Writing in The Atlantic:
They needed a base, a secret base. And that's what Castle provided. They signed a lease and started to build out their dream fake city. "We made conscious decisions in designing to make residential streets, expressway-style streets, cul-de-sacs, parking lots, things like that," she says, "so we'd have a representative concentration of features that we could drive around."
We walk from the main trailer office to her car. She hands me a map as we pull away to travel the site. "Like at Disneyland, so you can follow along," she says. The map has been meticulously constructed. In one corner, there is a Vegas-style sign that says, "Welcome to Fabulous Castle, California." The different sections of the campus even have their own naming conventions. In the piece we're traveling through, each road is named after a famous car (DeLorean, Bullitt) or after a car (e.g., Barbaro) from the original Prius fleet in the early days of the program.
We pass by a cluster of pinkish buildings, the old military dormitories, one of which has been renovated: That's where the Waymo people sleep when they can't make it back to the Bay. Other than that, there are no buildings in the testing area. It is truly a city for robotic cars: All that matters is what's on and directly abutting the asphalt.
It's a really interesting deep dive into the process of developing the future of ground transportation.
• Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars (The Atlantic)
