European cities have much higher population density, and the lower personal income (often via higher taxes and, ironically, worker protection laws) changes the tradeoff between driving and taking pub trans, so more people take the bus. The tradeoff is that a lot of people live in small boxes.

And european governments have plenty of bs job creation engines like roadwork, too.

Would be nice to have some data. One related observation, that seems less surprising the longer I live here, is that europe has no spacex, google, tesla, nasa, coherent mars rovers, the list goes on... if you give people stuff, they're mostly just afraid someone's going to take it away. But yeah, to echo someone else's comment, I'd rather be poor, or even average, in Europe. I guess being super wealthy here wouldn't be that bad either, since nobody's nipping at your heels.