[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.