You have to be pretty remote to have no public transport in the UK.

And not very remote at all for it to be practically non existent and unreliable

Every passing year non-city/big town buses get cut and cut and cut because councils are bankrupt

To have none at all, yes, it would have to be very remote.

To have very limited public transport, then lots of places outside big cities.

I just dropped by daughter off at a friend's house. 4 minutes by car, 40 minutes by bus. Busses here are infrequent and unreliable. You need to take a bus to get to a train if you are going a longer distance.

This is in a town with a population of about 20 thousand in Cheshire.

> I just dropped by daughter off at a friend's house. 4 minutes by car

In most urban areas that equates to about 20 minutes on foot. Why bother to even get into a car/bus for that?

Edit: I checked your weather. Definitely wouldn't want to wait at a bus stop.

My daughter almost always walks to school rather than wait for the bus.

This particular trip was 4 min by car because most of the distance was on an A road. It would be a lengthy walk.

Car drivers are always like this, everywhere. Even when I was a little kid, last century, it's a village school, every pupil lives in the same mile or so radius and yet loads of them get picked up in a car.

I now live in a big city but when I walk to the office it's just before school starts, so I see that yeah at first I'm passing kids happily walking with parents but just outside the school it's a jam of idiots who "just quickly" are here to drop the child from a car. The contrast in a few weeks when school is closed will be dramatic, that street is dead, but I bet every one of those parents thinks of it as a "busy road, they ought to do something about that" while not remembering that it's busy because of them.

How many km walking would that be? 4 min total must be a short distance.

That can be 4 or 10 miles. Likely closer to the latter if bus connection takes 40 minutes.

Now be a frail 70 year old in the winter (+2°C and rain).

Breeze.

To be fair in this case the big problem with the bus was probably that to go a small way around the edge of town she would have needed to take a bus into town and another one out again.

> Now be a frail 70 year old in the winter (+2°C and rain).

Yes, and it was raining last night.

Not the OP, but walking may not be feasible. Sometimes the only connection is a road dangerous for pedestrians. Freezing or scorching or rainy weather is another problem.

4 min, rounded down by my navigation app, covering most of the distance on a clear road with a 60mph speed limit. I think half an hour+ walk each way. It was dark and raining when I went to pick her up which is another consideration.

True, though maybe that's covered by OP's "The practical details of implementing this are important...".

Then there's the fine detail of affording to live somewhere with public transport. :(

The good news is that, generally, the places most affordable are the places that have public transportation. Affordability is gained through density (not only in direct housing concerns, but also things like access to jobs), and density is also conducive to public transpiration.

The places where public transportation isn't normally found are the places where the average Joe wouldn't have a hope in hell of being able to afford to live there (affluent suburbs, rural areas, etc.) anyway.

Not my experience at all. The more expensive the better the public transport where I have lived in the UK. London at the top end for both (and central a lot more than suburban). Small town the cheapest, especially the edges that are near rural.

~13% of the UK population, and growing, lives in London. Why would an unaffordable place be home to such a large portion of the population? It wouldn't. These cities become large — and continue to grow — because they are most affordable in the typical case.

Small towns often have a lower sticker price, but the low sticker price is low for reason: Because it is much less affordable. Everyone would be moving there if it were more affordable. Humans love to chase a good deal. After all, even London itself was just a small town, even rural, at one time, but people moved there because it was a better deal and thus the city you know today was born.

Of course, there are always outliers. Perhaps you are one of them. The earlier comment was clear about 'generally'.

The only solution to people driving is viable alternatives to driving.

Under the previous Conservative government, half of UK bus routes ( ~8,000 ) were cancelled[1]. HS2 high speed train route phase 2 the extensions from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds - which would move freight as well as people, freeing up space on local train lines for better passenger transport - was cancelled[2]. Phase 1 of it was due to be opened in 2026-2033 timeframe but was bungled now has no planned opening time, and Reform are calling to scrap that, too. Local council budgets were reduced[3] under the austerity measures, including one consequence of 40% less transport spending. The West Coast mainline was sold from VirginRail to Italy's TrenItalia in 2019[4] (Deutsche Bahn, French SNCF and Dutch Nederlandse Spoorwegen own most of the other UK railways) although this government is bringing Rail them back into public ownership.

And Reform are promising to remove bike lanes, and scrap Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to let cars use residental roads as through-roads again[5][6].

The UK doesn't have it as bad as the USA - but that's not for lack of trying to make car the only way to move.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/map-bus-route...

[2] https://www.railfuture.org.uk/article1904-HS2-Phase-2-cancel...

[3] https://ifs.org.uk/news/core-funding-english-councils-still-...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-a...

[5] https://road.cc/content/news/reform-council-conduct-review-s...

[6] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/lifestyle/reform-councils-...