If you cant gather political will to build roads, then you can imagine the immense obstacle it would be to bring high speed trains on the table. Consider that there is no country in the world that has good train network without having good road network. Its intertwined.
Solving the collective action problem is a universal issue that is much bigger than the roads issue, and I agree that this is the main issue. But, were it to be solved, that wouldn't necessarily mean going down the same path of every other nation.
Some modern societies, like Denmark, have moved towards a less car-centric model, and it has worked. And just because prior societies that have developed high speed rail have done so after developing cars, that doesn't mean everyone else must do so in that order.
The concept of leapfrog development is that developing nations can save all the expense and trouble of intermediate solutions and skip right to the good solutions.
To use your example: Denmark is not really a huge country, Romania has 5 times the surface area and ~4 times as many people, not to mention the huge economic difference between the two. It's much easier to focus less on cars and build high speed rail when you are a smaller and richer country.
> Cars are a failed god.
This is a hyperbole, people still want to own cars and have the comfort of leaving home whenever they wish and going directly wherever they want to go instead of exchanging buses and trains as well as waiting in between these in order to get from one place to the other.
Specifically for Romania, though I'm sure this is true in other places as well, public transportation inside cities needs to be nailed down before looking at things like high speed rail systems - companies have an interest in their employees getting to work on time, the state would spend less on healthcare if the cities were less polluted, and people would rather wake up a bit later in the morning.
I believe that in the future we'll still see roads being developed alongside rail and high speed rail or other solutions, regardless of how many people think roads are a failing concept.
