It was not at all a putdown of France, which, after all, does fund many more long distance TGV routes out of geographic necessity; just a favorable comparison of how conveniently widespread the medium-speed train routes are in the average Dutch metropolitan region.

I meant that in terms of convenience. Pretty much half the country uses trains to get to and from work everyday in the Netherlands, with trains running every 15 minutes from pretty much all directions. Maybe 30 minutes for smaller connections. I get trains running every 15 minutes from Utrecht from 7AM to 1AM.

So my point was "as a user taking the train is such a convenience that I take it without even having to sync with the scheduling. I just go to the station, the same way I used to do in France with buses". Except it's for the whole country.

Of course, the country is smaller, flat, . . . there's millions of differences.

I was mostly responding to "Our public transport is tolerable", trying to bring external perspective to the comment.

I'm French, btw. Happy 14th July!