That is crazy to me that the country with a national identity built around trains also has a powerful car lobby. You really can’t escape it.

Automobiles are extremely seductive. They offer a lot of benefit to an individual. The trouble comes when everyone is using cars, at which point their advantages to the individual are substantially diminished, and their harms to the populace substantially magnified. A thing like this is tough to stop, because by the time you really want to stop it, it's entrenched.