Would have been cheaper to just buy her a car

Cars are inefficient, they can carry much fewer people and are also a lot more polluting.

Also, they are dirty and you need to watch traffic. In train you can study, read, actually develop instead of being miserable.

So you’re telling me that running, staffing and maintaining a train is more environmentally friendly than 1 electric vehicle?
The train is already being ran, staffed, and maintained. The only difference is the cost of applying brakes as this stop and then restarting the engine. So you should be comparing having all passengers buy a vehicle instead of just this one student, or only the cost of stopping the train at this station.