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