I am pretty certain the parent's analogy was that (the non-Paris) French cities typically can fund bus service routes just as widely convenient as (the non-Amsterdam) Dutch cities typically can fund train services.

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.

Sorry, I was not clear in my comment. I did not assume at all that this is a putdown of France (it's our national holiday tomorrow :)) - I was just unclear about the comparison of buses and trains (as they indeed require vastly different infrastructures and costs).

Thanks for clarifying!

My bad, my comment was maybe written too much from my perspective, and with the Dutchies here in mind.

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!

No, it is me who just could not understand the relationship, taken into account the vastly different technical means and population size. Now I got it (also thanks to the daughter comment).

Merci :)