The thing about the anime is that it’s very, very, very slow. If you cut out all the useless scenes, filler episodes, reaction shots, etc, they would probably only have to adapt around 300-400 episodes, which, while still a lot, is much more feasable.
Public transit is cheaper and more accessable. It would be quite easy to make it profitable. Private transportation is more expensive both on the production side and infrastructure side. The auto industry did a lot of scummy shit in order to make it profitable. In the US, they bought up and shut down just about every public transport corp in order to force the public to buy cars and force the state to build infrastructure.