Hungary has near-universal coverage that’s thinning out in quality; Australia has good coverage in five city cores and almost nothing outside them.
Hungary — Volánbusz serves 3,144 of the country’s 3,155 settlements, so essentially every village has something. Rail adds ~7,600 km of operational line (about 38% electrified) across a country of 93,000 km². Budapest is genuinely strong: four metro lines, a dense tram network, ~3.4 million boardings on an average workday. The catch is service quality, not reach — public bus passengers fell 35% between 2001 and 2023, passenger-kilometres 23%, and in the hilly northeast, southwest and west the timetables make transit impractical even where the stop exists. Hungary still runs above the EU average for bus use and roughly at it for rail, but its collective-transport share has dropped more than five points since 2005 (EU average sits around 17%).
Australia — 7.7 million km², 27 million people, but ~90% of them urban, so the honest comparison is city-to-city. Even there, only about half the residents of the five largest cities live within 800 m of a service running every 15 minutes between 7am and 7pm; that leaves 7+ million people in the big cities without frequent transit. Mass transit’s share of urban travel is single digits — Brisbane went 6.9% → 7.7% in 2024-25 after fare discounts, Sydney is the highest and the closest to pre-pandemic levels. Outside the capitals, coverage is effectively coach and regional rail running daily or a few times a week; car ownership is not optional.
The comparison in one line: a Hungarian village of 400 people has a bus; an Australian town of 4,000 often doesn’t. But a Melbourne suburb has better frequency than a Hungarian county seat.