A cross country train here essentially has to be booked in advance. Random example - London to York, ~200mi journey, £110 anytime single ticket one way.
And that's for a single person. Add in a partner, friends or children and watch the fares explode into the stratosphere.
This nonsense doesn't happen on the London Underground, or on a local bus.
Basically, public transport turns life into a game of 'what will I do in x weeks time?'... the only people that really buy tickets for 'now' are business travellers and the elite.
It bothers me that the only reason I really want a car is for the journeys that are actually the most trivial to solve. A train ticket from A to B should never cost more than fuel and depn that a car would use from A to B. Yet it does. eh.
(If you book weeks in advance it's sort of OK. But that's not life. Not a life I want to live, anyway.)
Heh. Just had a look at travelling to my hometown for a weekend. A few days out. Few hundred miles. 160GBP return. To me that's basically a troll fare. It's basically matching the fuel and depreciation on a new van, except one person can make the journey with a suitcase or two. Ace.