>> It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme.

And a dedication to dense urban living would also seriously impact the development of those regions. Remote mining/lumber towns. Enormous farmsteads. The loan cowboy walking a fence for days. These are romantic concepts but they are also how resources are extracted efficiently. If people only ever stayed near mass transportation hubs North America would not be the powerhouse it is. To this day, huge areas of economic activity rely on that most common of tools: a person with a truck able to go where needed on a moment's notice. Beyond the suburbs, when your power goes out at 3am or your farm catches fire, the first and most likely only people on the scene will be driving their own vehicles.