> 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.