It isn't necessarily wrong, it's just two different metrics meant to measure two different concepts.

Switzerland is also on top for person-kilometres.

Model split also has it's downsides. For example:

Not every trip is the same in every country. Denmark commutes 22km on average, the Netherlands does 3km

Not every country travels as far. Someone who does 10km by train out of 100km has a much greater share than 20km out of 10.000.

Germany, would be better in Case you would measure the time that it takes to travel.

Danks ju för traffeling Wiss Deutsche Bahn ...

Interesting! For example, while Switzerland and Turkey appear on opposite sides of the spectrum in OP, they are close to each other in the modal split. And Turkey has even much less car use than Switzerland! 61.6% vs 77.7%. Apparently, taking the bus is very common in Turkey. With 36.6% more than any other country has in train and bus combined.

And while Germany looks literally green in the upper half in OP, modal split shows it's car dependency with 85.4%.

Sweet link! These stats are really cool. Low car and high bus usage seem to be very linked to poorer (relatively) countries. High train usage in general seems to be much wealthier countries, yet those countries also have way more car usage. Also this is very incomplete without looking at bicycle usage, and walking of course. This makes the percentages even more misleading because it's a percentage among sampled transportation modes

Most people have far more km to work every day than the longer trips to visit distant relatives. Thus how often you take the train is a useful metric.

Plus someone who drives to work.already has a car so the marginal cost of the longer trip is insignificant. While someone who normally doesn't drive has to make up the costs of a car for rare trips only and that makes the marginal cost of a car very high. So people who don't drive daily are more likely to figure out how to take those long trips without a car.

At least not in urban areas in Austria

I mean no country could afford to build a trainstation in every village

I travel by train sometimes yet i've never seen a train remotely full here in my life. I've seen fuller trains going to the alpes than than those going to Amsterdam. This may be different during rush hours but outside of the rush hours trains are quite empty.

My thoughts as well. There is a ton of train commuting within the Randstad for example. My girlfriend's company has a surprising number of people who do a daily commute from Rotterdam to Amsterdam as well as places like Den Haag and Haarlem.

If you look at the stats here, The Netherlands ranks 7th nationally for % of trips taken by rail and only Austria and Switzerland are ahead of it out of western European countries.

It also ranks very highly for passenger kilometers which is saying a lot because the country is small as shit, most of the people are packed into an area about 1/3 the size of Belgium, and the overall population is fairly small when compared to places like Spain, France, Italy, and Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage

Nah, that would be inaccurate. The country with the densest train infrastructure in the world (Czechia) is missing altogether from the image. I call bullshit.

The news source has 2019 for comparison because of Covid.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/22/riding-the-rails-which-country-travels-the-most-by-train-in-europe

Yeah in Belgium if I’m not mistaken I didn’t go much to the office in 2021… I think I dropped my abonnement for the train that year.

Had to check which countries don't have trains in Europe. Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Malta and San Marino seem to be the options.

Name checks out

Also, the flag’s a big plus

What does that mean? I'm not sure if I correctly interpret that as somewhat dismissive, as if a good train system was a given or not. It's the result of political will and investment.

in 2017, Germany invested €69 per citizen in its railways, ahead of France's €38 and Spain's €32. It's still far behind other countries, however, with Switzerland and Austria investing €362 and €187 per citizen respectively.

A bit like when you get Zerg rushed in Starcraft and say "Well sure but that's because they built so many units early on". It's a decision, and becoming good in that metric was precisely the intent. Also not to do so is a decision. Unlike in Starcraft, the decision to neglect your public transport is not a similarly viable strategy.

This does not seem to be true. According to Wikipedia the Czech Republic has 9567 km of railways. This leaves them with a density of 0.121299336891 Railway/km².

Switzerland, which was listed as the densest in the Article, has 5317 km of railways. This leaves them with a density of 0.128787695288 Railway/km².

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size

Keep in mind, that the dates of the data collection are 3 years apart (Czechia 2017, Switzerland 2020).

Might be an EU average.