Fair enough, I'm all for trains! And I agree, they really do have the most potential out of pretty much everything else (to be fair, they each excel at different things) in terms of people over distance.

And I get what you mean about the structures, starting to see the same tendencies over here as well. Add to that the fact that our average is about 0.6 cars per person and growing (mostly concentrated in cities, of course), or something like that, plus an outdated infrastructure which is basically frozen due to being surrounded by historical buildings (and god forbid we do anything with those, ours is to wait and watch them slowly crumble!), and you have traffic jams in even the smaller cities and towns. It's fucking horrid, is what it is...

Plus every new neighborhood which is added around the city is either a new residential area filled with tumor-like arrangements of apartment buildings with, of course, insufficient infrastructure to support said 0.6 cars per capita, so the possibility of extending a public transport line of any sort to that area is basically nulliffied from the start, or a useless shrine to Corporate Capitalism in the shape of a business center with a couple of gaudy office buildings and a whole swath of land tarped over with concrete and "modernised." While maintaining the old two-lane streets. The main bus line for the residential area in which I lived in my old city used to run along the industrial traffic lanes - you'd frequently see lines of fully loaded semi trucks waiting for the bus to finish transfering passengers. Because they had nowhere else to put it, they just sold the area to developers without a second thought given to how they'd actually connect the area to the rest of the city.

And to get back to the trains, we actually have a decently extensive railway network, but all it's seen for the past few decades has been basic maintenance, and our trains are the same. I mean, most of our engines are from the Communist era and most of our train cars are hand-me-downs from Germany - and they're really nice train cars, honestly, the sleeping cars have wood paneling, in-cabin grooming sink, and actual mattresses, they're a splendid bit of engineering - and they start looking like hammered shit maybe half a year after being introduced. I had to make 12 900km trips by train throughout the country last year and I'd say I ended up with an immune response after at least eight or nine of them, felt flu-y for a couple of days. And, yeah, this is also a major problem with the education and level of wealth around here, but they really don't bother actually trying to maintain a semblance of cleanliness.

So of course everyone buys one and a half cars and lugs that hunk of metal all around the place.

But the US of A chose to move housing out of the cities into suburbs dozens of miles away. As long as you don’t change that you’ll stay car-dependent. It’s just too far.

Agreed, that right there is the problem. But it wasn't just a one-time choice it's an ongoing decision: (A) inexpensive large house in the suburbs/rural area or (B) more expensive small apartment in the city. Personally I choose B but I have relatives who live in rural areas (large houses, huge yards, 1 car per person) who think I'm crazy.