And sure taking a train sure is faster/nicer for long travel, but in practice what matters the most for the economy and people's life/health is the daily commute which mostly happens inside cities.
But you don't quite get how it is in the US (and Canada). In the US it is "if you live *inside* a city" you need a car*, no matter if small, large, or metropolis.
* Except for a few metro areas
Well, some countries are far more centralized than others. The daily commute to/from cities is a huge problem where I live, to the point that cities are flooded mostly with outside commuters. Trains and busses could solve that very elegantly, but nobody’s investing in that.
It's not really an East-West thing. Downtown Sofia for example has much better public transportation than many 'secondary' and rural towns in Germany and France.
It's not like that in all of Europe either, the further you go from Western Europe, the worse the public transit gets. The Balkans are probably the worst, you need a car if you live outside a city as rail and even busses are slow, unreliable, or just not an option in your place.