> Assuming everyone is going the same place at the same time.
If railways were in place, people would have built around the railway destinations, just like cities throughout history were typically built on waterways for easy transport of goods.
The flexibility of the car encourages sprawl which gets you into a situation exactly like what you're describing, where it just seems obvious that trains aren't good enough. The same sort of sprawl just wouldn't exist in a train-dominated transport system.
If railways were in place, people would have built around the railway destinations, just like cities throughout history were typically built on waterways for easy transport of goods.
The flexibility of the car encourages sprawl which gets you into a situation exactly like what you're describing, where it just seems obvious that trains aren't good enough. The same sort of sprawl just wouldn't exist in a train-dominated transport system.