Peachfront:Your ugly American narrow point of view is clouding at least part of your reaction to this situation. You need to get over this driving thing (or DRIVING thing as you put it.) If she is deficient in any way because she doesn't drive, so is he.

Europe is so much physically smaller than the US (and Canada) that they can do wonderful things with public transit. In Denmark my inter-city train ticket also became a transit ticket for inner-city buses until the end of the day of travel. So to travel from one city to the next, within the destination city during the day and back within your own city at the end of the day is all done on one ticket.

In Bologna I asked if my business class train ticket would give me access to the lounge if we ended up checking out of our hotel early. The station clerk couldn't understand what I was asking - she kept telling me to take an earlier train to Rome if I arrived at the station early. I could simply use that ticket on another train. For an equivalent trip in Canada (Ottawa to Toronto) there are 3 trains a day. In Italy, there was a train every 45 - 60 minutes so I couldn't get my head around the fact that there were lots of trains to choose from and I wasn't locked into any one of them.

And to encourage people to take the transit, they do two things, 1) make it reasonably priced and 2) tax the heck out of automobiles. Many countries have a 100% tax on a new car as well has petrol prices at time 100% more expensive than North America.