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.