Light rail and buses? Even the most remote rural towns in Japan have small shuttle buses that serve even the sparsest areas. The great thing about public transit is that it is actually scalable if there’s political will to make it happen. A shuttle bus can connect a rural neighborhood to a big train station within 60 minutes. The cool factor of transit is mix and matching several types of transport to cover the most area with the highest mobility for the widest array of people.
This graphic doesn’t answer OP’s question at all. Madrid and Barcelona are two radically different cities just like New York and Los Angeles are two radically different experiences. And it has nothing to do with how big a country is.