[stevoski]

Prüm is in a seemingly rural yet heavily populated part of Germany. There are villages and towns every few kms, sometimes less. Many people in the region commute to major cities such as Cologne and Aachen daily. Luxembourg, Trier, Cologne, Bonn, and Koblenz are all within manageable distance.

[doczoidberg]

I come from Aachen. I don't think that people commute from here or colognen to Prüm. It's too far away for daily commute. This could change with fully autonomous cars ;)

[dx034]

Even with autonomous cars I wouldn't commute that way. It's not the kind of road where I could read or sleep while being driven there.

[conflagration]

I don't agree. From Cologne you can stay on the Autobahn/Schnellstraße pretty much until you reach the Grohmann front-door. I think that's a much better kind of commute for reading/sleeping than going through urban traffic.

[dx034]

Couldn't read our sleep while being driven on the B51 ( from experience). But not everyone will be as prone to being car sick as I am. Didn't Audi once develop suspensions that cancel the effect of curvy roads?

[adrianN]

The train connections to all nearby major cities suck though. It's nearly 3h even from Luxembourg, which seems to have the fastest connection.

[flurdy]

Initially thought that but Prüm does seem a bit isolated. Google recons it is 1h 23m to Cologne. Liege and Koblenz a little closer.

I was going to say hope it has good train links for a more relaxed commute, but then relevantly the engineers might use Teslas on autopilot to work....

[pluma]

According to Wikipedia there are no longer any passenger trains that stop in Prüm.

The good thing is most Germans living in rural areas are used to commuting by car anyway. I doubt there will be many commuters from Cologne (commuting by car from within Cologne is bad enough without having to drive for over an hour once you've managed to escape the city) but it seems like a nice region to settle down.

[ghaff]

Wait. Based on my reading here I thought it was only in the US that public transportation wasn't ubiquitous and people drove everywhere :-) And that in other countries you didn't even need to own a car.

[pluma]

It's not wrong. You don't need a car in Germany to move between most cities. But you do need a car to get around in rural Germany, especially between small towns.

This was a bit of a culture clash for me when moving from a city of one million to a much smaller city of fifteen thousand. I was used to being able to take public transport to get everywhere and I can actually take the train to move between the two cities, but in the smaller city everybody has or shares a car.