Rail is only faster point-to-point. A regular journey for me takes 55 minutes door-to-door by car, but if I use the train it’s a 20-minute drive to the station, ten minutes parking, faffing-around and waiting, followed by one and a quarter hours travelling because of the need to change trains plus ten minutes by taxi to reach my final destination.
If you live somewhere where it takes 30 minutes to get to the nearest station when using a car (including the parking and walking) then either you're in a rather large town with only one station or you're in a settlement without a station (when I was living with my parents it'd take me that long from leaving the house to getting on the train having cycled 3 miles and locked my bike up).
Either way, you're always going to struggle to get closer to the time taken by car.
In part such issues are likely to be an issue due to the way we build settlements and how many view public transport (i.e. something that their taxes pay for and why should MY taxes pay for it, it doesn't help ME).
The reality is that with better layouts for housing (i.e. most of the things you need day to day, such as schools, local shops, bus stop, community facilities, etc. being within walking distance for a high percentage of people who are likely to use them) and a slightly more rounded view of public transport (i.e. whilst I may not use public transport, the fact that others do means that they're not using the roads that I wish to use as much).
For example,.a lightly loaded bus with just 8 people on board will have removed 5 cars from the roads but only take up the space of two (net benefit -3 fewer cars). However, that's only when they are moving, each car parking space takes up an average of about 23m2 (now whilst multi storey car parks allow you to add more in fur the same land space, they are very costly to build) a car park with 100 cars is 2,300m2 (or about 1/3 of a professional football pitch).
100 cars isn't very many for a car park, and you'd easily find 1,000 car parking spaces within a fairly small area of a town (even if you exclude private driveways - where I live there's a business park which easily achieves.1,000 spaces and the population of the settlement is sub 10,000 people).
As such parked cars need a lot of space, of you could reduce the number which need to park where you wish to drive to then it's going to make it easier for you to find somewhere to park.
If we were to organise a picnic for the whole of the UK, we'd need the same space as a 9 lane (in each direction) motorway from Southampton to Inverness 70m by 1,000km) For everyone to be sit down in a 1m x 1m space, which would be a little crowded, but doable.
To park every car nose to tail you'd need to widen the space needed from 70m to 400m (even though there's only about 1/2 as many cars as people!). That wouldn't even allow you to get any of the cars out other than those at the end as I've allowed 4.8m of space for each car (i.e. the same as a car parking space in a car park).
www.gov.uk
