I\'d like to work with pages without trailing slashes. So now I want my URL\'s with an trailing slash to redirect (using .htaccess) to the same URL without the trailing slas
Why do you have several .htaccess files? Where are the one's redirecting to public/$1 stored? You may very well be facing overriding RewriteRule directives that complicate things for you.
Without knowing your setup it's fairly hard to say how you should be using rewrites - can you specify what things are ACTUALLY looking like?