Where Were They Going on the Shuttle?

[M'Sharak]

There was a line in the movie between Scotty and Prime Spock where Scotty talks about arguing with a professor about not being able to move a grapefruit more than 100 miles. So until Scotty, with the help of Spock Prime, discovers trans-warp beaming maybe people can't be beamed more than 100 miles away hence still the need for things like cars and shuttles.

This line:

SPOCK PRIME: You are, in fact, the Mister Scott who postulated the theory of transwarp beaming.
SCOTT: That's what I'm talking about. How'd you think I wound up here? I had a little debate with my instructor on the issue of relativistic physics and how it pertains to subspace travel. He seemed to think that the range of transporting something like a, like a grapefruit, was limited to about a hundred miles. I told him that I could not only beam a grapefruit from one planet to the adjacent planet in the same system, which is easy by the way, I could do it with a lifeform.

And we know that later on, point-to-point transport was being done at ranges greater than 100 miles, because we heard Sisko talking in "Explorers" about burning up a month's worth of transporter credits by frequently going home to New Orleans while he was at the Academy.

 

[pookha]

I always had the feeling that transporters were more common on starships than they were at the Academy or in the general populace. Hence the shuttlecraft for the recruits & the returning cadets.

i suspect a transporter takes an awful lot of energy.
a ship with an anti matter/ matter energy source it isnt a big deal.
to me it seems that transporters were used more for when people were in a hurry when they were on earth/