Another thing related to the effectiveness of the bus system

The suburbs here are completely different from U.S. suburbs. Each suburb is small, has its own name, and has a bunch of houses relatively close to each other with small yards. The suburbs don't sprawl into each other and often have tracts of farmland in between. The building we live in is a 10 minute bikeride from the downtown part of the city and is just a minute outside the big canal that marks the cities boundary, yet there are chicken out the window. At the university outside the window is a sheep pasture.

The fact that even the suburbs are compact is what makes the busses so effective. You only need one or two stops in each suburb and so you can have busses that go everywhere from each of them.