> they end up doing the whole travel by car anyway.

I'm not sure this is true, but I haven't seen any official numbers to support this or what you're saying.

Anecdotally, consider the Maresme line ending in Barcelona. Plenty of people take their car to Mataro or the smaller stations before/after, and take the train in to Barcelona leaving their car at the stations, as entering Barcelona in the morning is a big hassle with a car.

As someone with roots in Iberian penisula, across both countries, where I lived half of my life and routinely come back to, approaching 50y, anecdotallyis what I see when people are forced to drive from small towns.

Entering big cities is big hassle with the car, yet plenty of people put up with it, due to the convinence that public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed, or carriages are taking more passengers than they should.

> public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed

This is 100% not the case in Barcelona.

> or carriages are taking more passengers than they should

Perhaps at the absolute peak of rush hour, but the roads are just as bad at that time as well.

Barcelona is one city, one of the richests in the Penisula, and the capital of the Catalonia region.

Think outside of the box, of the rest of the other people outside Barcelona, specially the regions that aren't that full of money on their ayuntamiento.

This is true.

Also, high-speed trains are a lot (2x, 3x or more) more expensive than the traditional trains were, for a very small time savings (15-20%) in many cases, which means a lot of people cannot afford to travel by train anymore. So yes, high-speed trains transformed people's lives but not always in a positive manner.

[delayed]

They are; in France they are referred to as Intercités and Ouigo Classique.

In Spain, especially after the closures in the 80s [1], the traditional rail network, which was already chronically under-maintained, also became, with some exceptions, hopelessly disjointed. Many of the remaining operating routes can't meaningfully connect the territories they pass through with each other, only to Madrid.

As more and more of the main cities are brought into the high speed network, the traditional network is given less funding and less service, to the detriment of the smaller towns served by it. However, it is important to note that this trend was already underway before the high speed network was in place.

The remaining regional train between Barcelona and Madrid, for example, takes eight hours by the schedule (nine or ten in real life) while the high speed trains take three hours or less.

Occasionally, some services survive that use the high speed network for most of the trip, then switch to the traditional network for the last leg of the trip.

[1]: https://nitter.net/pablomarinas_/status/1361406780757200898

Most of the non-high speed routes are gone indeed. There's 1 non-high speed per day, while there are 8-10 high-speed (which are a lot more expensive).