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