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It actually is because building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive. The economy hasn't grown in 50 years in fact much of it has been shifted into bubbles to hide automation and globalization which hurts more developed economies. It's nice to have bike lanes be included when upgrading but it depends on the situation. In many places you can't really build wider roads without tearing down billions of dollars worth of buildings, and if you reduce the amount of road width, you greatly increase the amount of traffic which causes issues in cities. If traffic backs up through intersections, it brings entire chunks of a city to a halt and the problem just snowballs. Trains are cool but if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station it's not really feasible for most people lt takes half a day at least to walk 20 miles and it leaves your body sore. A train station in a modern city might only cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build as you have to lay out track.
One potential solution is to tear down and rebuild entire areas of cities after they become desolate but with a more urban and public transport focused layout. This is still expensive but cities can actually start with a good layout, like wide roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, with tunnels and walking paths and stuff everywhere with better urban zoning more like what they have in aisa and Europe, and then let the city build around that. Another solution is to just build cities from the start to be urban and let the populations migrate over time out of the old car centric cities so they can rebuild, but this is hard because of corporate capitalism which creates a very inefficient economy, so you just don't really have the resources to do these things like people did 100 years ago who lived in much more socialist and worker centric societies with more labor valued economies and less fiat currency protecting every terrible corporation from having to give up their assets to be better managed in an actual free market and small business.
Not that I want to argue with you but when reading this, I thought
Wasn't one of the recent goals to bring labour back to US? Doesn't that seem like a perfect fit?
Replace cars with buses
20 miles?! There should be at least 5 stations on that distance Build the local train in a circle, with a station every few miles. Disperse the "last mile" via buses. Attach one point of the circle to the intercity railroad with a big station servicing inter- and intra- city trams, buses, maybe add a parking lot for now, so people can leave their car and continue with public transport. Later it can be changed to a mall, office space, hotel, w/e. Administration buildings maybe? So those are easily reachable?
Is road maintenance, drivers' policing, car reliance and car-related deaths cheaper?
It costs nearly nothing to put bollards in the middle of roads to make existing paved roads bicycle-only
And it very quickly pays for itself because the roads last wayyy longer.
It does because you have to have the capacity for cars first, and many cities are already under built for the amount of traffic you have there. You can't just take roads used for cars and convert them to bicycle only lanes in many cases because you will gridlock the entire city in traffic if it isn't gridlocked already you cant haul 30k lbs of food on a bicycle. These roads are like the arteries of civilization. Modern cities can have more then a million people living in them and they all need resources to survive as well as they need to be able to commute to survive.
It's also a compounding problem. The more traffic backs up, the longer it takes to merge and turn, the slower people drive and the more stressed people become so they highly the passing lane and stuff. In a city some places can be a bottleneck where a single bad accident can bring 80% of the traffic to a stop within minutes.
There might be ways to do this stuff but it's not necessarily as easy as just converting roads to bike lanes unless you are in areas that don't have a lot of traffic. Some good solutions are things like requiring that new builds keep a minimum distance from the roadway so that you can easily expand in the future. Building new expressways to relieve pressure on other roads so you can utilize them. NonE of these are quick or easy or cheap.
Grid locking cars is the goal. You want people to say "ugh, I don't want to drive because that'll take all day. I'll go by bicycle instead. It'll be soo much faster"
That might work for a day or two until you realize you don't have any food in the supermarket and nobidy is picking up your garbage and the entire economy just stopped.
Grocery stores can do last mile deliveries with bicycles.
They can't, and also they cant haul thousands of pounds of food there without a truck. Even if you lived in a rural area, growing your own food is incredibly labor intensive. Do you know that before the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, it took about 90% of the people on earth to be farmers, in order to have enough food? The global population never really exceeded a billion people until the 20th century.