With all this focus on cities I'd like to give some perspective for people in the countryside. Simply put: within towns it's similar to cities but even easier (because there's less traffic to worry about), but outside of town the longer distances make it more convenient to go by car, unless you have a lot of time to spare.

That said, it's different if you're a teenager. You can't get a drivers license until you are 18 (16 for scooters though). We don't have school buses here. Regular public transport usually comes by once an hour at inconvenient times (for example, you arrive either 50 minutes early of 10 minutes late for class), take the long way round to pick up as many people as possible because otherwise it wouldn't even be profitable, and still manage to have the closest bus stop a few kilometers out of town. As a result, if you don't have a car and need to go to the city, going by bike is often just as fast if not faster, and of course cheaper. So going to secondary school by bike is extremely common - me and my sisters used to bike 18 km to and from school every day, and while few in my school lived that far away, based on my school I estimate 10 km to be the average distance for countryside kids biking to school.

I still roll my eyes when my friends say I live "far out of town" because it's a ten to fifteen minute bike ride.