You're absolutely right once you're there. I'm talking about actually getting there as someone who lives 100+ miles away. The UK needs better options for switching from the required car to some high speed option for the final 30 minutes of the journey. Even LA offers this with its Metro stops..
There are plenty of train stations 30 minutes out from London. You can go as far north as Letchworth Garden City, west as Reading, south west as Woking and so on.
There's a shortage of convenient parking at these outlier stations, because most were built in the center of towns long ago without parking in mind. Woking station was built in 1838.
There are options like Bristol/Didcot/Oxford parkway that do exactly that. Some of the lines are very slow though and need a lot of modernisation to give quick access. I wonder if some of this could be solved one day using small electric regional airlines that could land within the M25 and fly from small town airfields with parking.
I believe such a thing happened a fair bit with Newquay until COVID caused services to cease. I live quite near a small airport that flies to Amsterdam. I can actually be in central Amsterdam quicker than London door to door and it's an appealing approach, but the CO2 situation is not so nice.
There are absolutely great rail links to London. From nearly every direction. Drive your car to one of those places, buy a travelcard and you're all set.
