Did You Know?

Austinites really hate cleaning and other odd facts about locals

Zilker Kite Festival with downtown Austin in background

Austinites love self-improvement, home-cooked food, and mending fences, but we hate cleaning.

Austin is home to interesting people with even more interesting needs. The evidence? Thumbtack, an online service that links people with service professionals, combed through tens of thousands of requests from locals to uncover a handful of things truly unique to Austin.

For starters, Austinites aren't afraid to ask for help. Requests for psychotherapy (160 percent), career coaching (120 percent), life coaching (75 percent), and relationship counseling (70 percent) are way higher here than Texas overall.

This foodie city is cooking. Cooking lessons are 750 percent more popular in Austin than Houston. On the flip side, demand for personal chefs is 52 percent higher here than the rest of the Lone Star State.

As much as we love to eat, Austinites hate to clean. A whopping 91 percent more people hired a cleaning service in 2015 than they did the year before.

We're also mending fences. Literally. Last year saw a 122 percent surge in demand for fence repairs and installation — we'll let you decide if that's because of pesky neighbors or not.

Texas as a whole has some unique service requests too. Basketball lessons (126 percent), holiday light installation (111 percent), immigration attorneys (92 percent), pest control (69 percent), embroidery (64 percent), animal and rodent removal (61 percent), golf lessons (61 percent), and dog grooming (47 percent) are more popular in our state than in the U.S. as a whole.

trends texas reports

Self-driving Roller Coaster

More self-driving cars expected to roll out in Austin for 2025

Photo courtesy of Waymo via KVUE

Various brands offering self-driving cars are on-and-off in Austin.

Expect to see more self-driving rideshare vehicles, also known as robotaxis, on Austin roads next year.

Robotaxi company Waymo, which you may have already seen on Austin's roads, is partnering with Uber. At some point next year, customers will be able to use the Uber app to call a self-driving ride.

Austin-based company Avride is in the testing phase and plans to roll out its robotaxis next year.

Currently, Volkswagen ADMT and Amazon's Zoox are in the testing phase in Austin, while Hyundai's Motional is in the mapping phase.

Last year, robotaxi company Cruise paused operations in Austin after the California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the company's permits to operate driverless vehicles in the state. And last week, General Motors said it would no longer fund the company because of the time and resources needed.

This way of getting around has come with its safety concerns and issues. The city is tracking those concerns. According to the Transportation Department, the problems span from blocking the roads and parking in front of people's homes for weeks with lights beaming through their windows, to actual wrecks.

Since July 2023, robotaxis have been involved in 75 incidents. Only 21 of those incidents happened in 2024. It's important to note that Cruise has not been operating in Austin this year.

Since July 2023, driverless rideshare vehicles have been involved in 22 near collisions, eight collisions and seven instances where driverless taxis ignored directions from the Austin Police Department (APD).

According to the data, at least four of those Austin police incidents happened in recent months. The issues varied from driving through police checkpoints, to malfunctioning and getting stuck at an APD road closure near pedestrians, causing safety concerns.

A Waymo spokesperson said their vehicles have gesture recognition capabilities, which they've been training APD officers on using.

As the report shows, sometimes it does not work and Waymo said it is working to improve that. The spokesperson said that as of just last week, Waymo's First Responder Program has been independently verified by TÜV SÜD, making Waymo the first autonomous vehicle (AV) company to receive third-party validation for our emergency response protocols. They also said the data to date indicates the Waymo Driver is already reducing traffic injuries and fatalities in the places where the company currently operates.

Read the full story and watch the video at KVUE.com.

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