First of all, take a look at the documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/filesystem#the-public-disk and File URLs paragraph.

This is intentional behavior.

    public function url($path)
    {
        $adapter = $this->driver->getAdapter();

        if ($adapter instanceof AwsS3Adapter) {
            $path = $adapter->getPathPrefix().$path;

            return $adapter->getClient()->getObjectUrl($adapter->getBucket(), $path);
        } elseif ($adapter instanceof LocalAdapter) {
            return '/storage/'.$path;
        } else {
            throw new RuntimeException('This driver does not support retrieving URLs.');
        }
    }

What I want you to notice is elseif block. When you use a local filesystem, it returns '/storage/'.$path.

Notice that it starts with a slash. This suggests it should be used only for URLs, so that if you have a file in public/storage/tables/config.xml saying http://your-app.com/storage/tables/config.xml in your browser will give you that file. If you want to place a link, eg. in <a href=""> you should say <a href="{{ Storage::url('tables/config.xml') }}">.

If you want to access a file in a storage/app directory inside your app you can use Storage::get('tables/config.xml'), Storage::put('tables/config.xml', $newContent) etc. as described in the documentation.

Hope it helps.