[dkjaudyeqooe]

Mass transit is great when it's available, which means in places of high density, which is why you list Asia and Europe. It's right there in the name.

I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).

Relative to total area, mass transit is almost nowhere. That's also true for for total road kilometers.

I agree with your last sentence, but for those who live outside of cities or other places of high density, public transport is unusable or unavailable. Governments roundly ignore people who live in these places (due to expense and political irrelevance) so there is always a fairly decent percentage of the population that is "public transport poor".

[johnnyanmac]

>I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).

and how would waymo fix this? Waymo is still a private business and needs to weigh the costs of deploying to a smaller town vs. simply not supporting that range. It's the same issue as government.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Automated vehicles will enable smaller buses that drive themselves and make serving these places profitable to service. Automated taxi services like Waymo also ultimately be cheaper too.

[anotheruser13]

I believe IKEBUS is self-driving.

https://chikatoku.enjoytokyo.jp/en/spot/willer_ikebukuro.htm...

[zorowithenma]

Nah bro, they would instead send those cars where they would get much more profit. You just can't expect too many cab bookings in a small town of 1500. Idk bout EU but here in India we have public transport to even remote places and it is sure profitable and many people do use it everyday, even if the population is less many use public transit instead of own veichles in towns.

[hnaccount_rng]

I don't know. One "problem" is the salary around here. You simply cannot generate enough revenue from anything below 30k people for anything more than school buses (which are both predictable and tax-funded). But you wouldn't need that many rides to justify a taxi. Those _are_ around, even though typically you need to call well in advance. So even if there is like one of those autonomous taxis for a dozen 1.5k villages that will probably be both enough for any reasonable situation and an improvement wrt to the current state