>>1489158Am american. In my area (northeast) trains are considered to be slow and annoying here, doubly so for freight trains (which take a loooong time to cross roadways) with busses just commonplace all over, but ridden mostly by poor people, including students. Trains are basically just used for people commuting into/out of the nearest metro area and they don't really run at convenient times for anything besides commuting.
Nobody really cares about "permanement routes" that I've seen. The road network here is pretty interconnected so driving isn't that much of a slog. Walking places and biking sucks for most since it's hilly as hell and nobody wants to spend 30 minutes walking to and from a place when the car will take them in 5.
Freedom of "where to go" is more important since everyone has their own ideas of what the best place to shop at is, residential areas sometimes are broken up with plots of offices and other unobtrusive flat buildings hidden by the hills and trees, and commercial zones are a mishmash of everything from restaurants to automotive shops to bodegas - typically different areas are separated by price, not what they sell or offer. There are also lots of stores on the highways (motorways) which busses do sometimes stop at, but non-car users most likely have to get to these areas from either the back or a highway entrance/exit. The highways also have frequent pedestrian overpasses, especially where you might need to cross the whole highway to get to a different shopping center.
Thus "where do I want to go" is based on "how much do I want to spend today"?
Other areas of the US are different - where I am there's almost no traffic lights on the highways since we use cloverleafs and half-clovers to U-turn, but other states I have been to do have them for U-turning in the middle of the roadways.
