I don't live near one of the big cities with traffic jams. There's generally only a couple cities per state (average) at most that commonly have traffic jams like that.
And yes, in the early 1900's. When a car was "fast" if it did 30 mph, had shit suspension, was good for about 60,000 total miles, had no freeways everywhere, and had like 3 million cars in existence. People didn't take the train because it was faster, so much as because people didn't own cars, and the ones that were available were only cars in the sense of they had 4 wheels and an engine attached. The trips taken back then by train were much slower than what a car can do today.