Our system of governance is an expression of our culture. In France, when the government wants to build a railroad, they do the studies, then they pass a law that preempts every other law, and the railroad gets built. In the US, the government does the studies, decides to build the railroad, and spends years tangled up in litigation. We created those legal structures to reflect what we think is important.
Right now, folks in our county are trying to shut down three light rail stops that have already been built and are operating. (Transit is a “conduit for crime.”) If we do that, we have to pay the federal government back a bunch of money we got to build those stops in the first place. Americans hate infrastructure. And they don’t particularly like each other, so they have built a distributed society that doesn’t require as much centralized coordination.
It’s not stupidity or laziness. Americans are too individualistic to build infrastructure. Nobody can put the needs of society over their own needs. That’s why every infrastructure project is a disaster of inefficient self-serving union workers[1] and endless litigation. (I have an acquaintance who is ethnically Japanese, and moved back to Japan after growing up in the US. She remarked to me: “Americans don’t really go around thinking about how what they’re doing affects other people.”)
Once you really internalize all that, it’s pretty fine. I kinda like the suburbs. I like being able to roll right up to a chain restaurant and park, instead of having to shlep a stroller up and down stairs. In my old age, I’ve realized that if you’re living in New York or SF, you’re doing the whole America thing wrong. That just forces you to constantly confront all the things Americans do poorly (transit, zoning, social services). Kansas City! You can drive everywhere, traffic isn’t too bad, cost of living is super low, etc.
[1] In the NYT piece on why the Second Avenue subway costs so much, there were French transit managers pointing out how ridiculously over staffed the project was. The French were pointing out how inefficient we were.