A lot of american cities are being built on literal ponzi-scheme tier shenanigans of using an old federal ordinance to get free money for building roads, the longer the road the bigger the grant. Because of this a lot of welfarestates build long ass roads to nowhere, and then because you have a long road to nowhere they start desperately pandering to businesses like target, walmart, etc who can build massive mall like structures worth going to. These company's always then want the government to build a giant parking lot as part of the deal of them moving in and opening up jobs. Well, it turns out a lot of economists have done that math and the grant pays for the first ten years of the roads life cycle, and then the normal wear and tear starts to cost more than the grant gave them in the first place. Well these were already welfare states and couldn't put any money in, so they don't have the money to maintain the roads... but if you think about it, theres something you could do to get some more money. So these State build, you guessed it, more roads, which means more wallmarts, more parking lots, and more giant scenic trips to nowhere.
All these roads and all these spread out companies mean that people need to buy cars, and cars are expensive, and driving for an hour to get to the wallmart you work out costs 20% of your salary, which keeps you pretty desperate for a job, which Walmart just fucking loves by the way. And, because of decades of masturbatory media telling Americans how fucking COOL you are for owning a CAR. The Americans just fucking love it.
European/asia nations were built primarily with horse and carriage and walking in mind, so for the most part they have none of these problems and almost everything is in walking distance. Because space is such an obscene luxury on the streets, theres like no parking, so everyone has bikes instead. They just fuckin love their bikes, and one day a European or asian national gets on the plane and comes to America, and by the end of the day they're on /r/fuckcars.
Hopefully this has been informative.
www.reddit.com
web.archive.org
