I live in a relatively small city in northeast France, about 10k pop

I can probably go everywhere if I take multiple forms of transportation. However it's so badly integrated that it's usually not worth the hassle.

I'm taking my mother, sister and her kids for a week at the beach late june. Direct car trip is like 6-7 hours of mostly highway, probably 40€ of gas and tolls.

Taking public transportation, it's 10+ hours, the only train line goes through Paris for some fucking reason, it's 60€ per person, and then I would have no useful means of transportation when we get there. Or maybe we will, idk, it's impossible to find any useful information about buses trams or anything anywhere.

So I'll just take my car instead of gambling on the train conductors not being on strike.

I'd love to take public transit, but if you need to travel further than the immediate neighboring cities, it's just so fucking inconvenient.