People love to cherry pick a statistic from one European city, and ask why all of the American empire can't be like that.
/s/public transportation/health care/cars/etc.
/s/public transportation/health care/cars/etc.
edit: For some perspective, there are 240,000 water main breaks every year in the US, wasting over 2 trillion gallons of treated drinking water.
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking-w...
A smaller nation can choose a solution that works better at smaller scales, but doesn't scare well - because they don't need it to scale much. A larger empire has fewer options.