It doesn't make sense to emphasize passenger travel over goods transport for rail. Rail's strength is efficient transport of heavy loads at slow speeds.
People are light and often want to go at high speeds.
Europe should reorient its rail network for rail transport, and passengers can travel by bus or plane.
But - Europe's rail network is completely reliant on subsidies, and its easier to get them when you're transporting politicians instead of lumber, steel, milk.
According to a relative who has spent a lifetime being a transport nerd, rail is actually more suited to people transport and roads to goods.
The reason is surprisingly obvious in hindsight. You bring 1000 people into a city centre train station and then they deliver themselves to their final destination. But goods either have to be sent to single purpose custom built lines and depots (eg power stations) or else transferred to road and taken onwards in a multitude of vehicles.
I am personally very good at delivering myself autonomously on foot for several miles, and I will even transfer myself to another train in minutes without external equipment. Coal is generally less cooperative.
Worse, if you decide to keep people in cars, you have to build parking spaces absolutely everywhere they might possibly want to go, whereas most goods just need to be dropped off.
No, just no. You obviously don't have experience with European infrastructure. Rush hour traffic on any German Autobahn will quickly tell you that adding more busses and cars is the worst idea here.
European roads are also impossible to build and maintain without subsidies but somehow nobody or at least very few people talk about that.
A general problem with all these debates is that rail and road have for so long been deeply interlinked with states strategy and subsidies that any real cost comparison is almost impossible.
We are using tunnels all over Switzerland that are built many decades ago. How to you take stuff like that into account?
Sure we could just say 'lets wipe all infrastructure of Europe and start fresh, what the most efficient combination of things?' but that is a pointless exercise.
People very lives have been shaped around existing infrastructure as well.
Everything is interlinked to a crazy degree that makes finding and comparing solution challenging.
The not so long ago completed Alp transit Gotthard Basistunnel was primarily dug for cargo, yes passengers also go through it but the idea is for fast, clean cargo transit all the way from Amsterdam to Italy through the Swiss alps.
Not sure about other countries, but Germany's long distance trains are run for-profit. Only commuter trains are subsidized. Tracks are paid for by taxes - but so are streets.
In most European countries, even if the financing is organized differently than in Germany, the long-distance trains bring in the most money and would be profitable if run entirely commercially.
People are light and often want to go at high speeds.
Europe should reorient its rail network for rail transport, and passengers can travel by bus or plane.
But - Europe's rail network is completely reliant on subsidies, and its easier to get them when you're transporting politicians instead of lumber, steel, milk.