One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.

Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.

Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.

Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.

Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.

Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.

Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.

(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)

You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.