That's because the US is built that way. In turn because every city that's not New York has just expanded horizontally with hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of detached house-driveway-backyard-frontyard suburbia.

In most of the Old World, cities have existed for centuries—if not millennia—and were built for the human foot, not the car tyre. Hence most European and Asian city centres are dense, mostly walkable, and fairly small. From the 1800s onward as transport speeds have increased they've built dense mid-/high-rises in the suburban bits, and developed cheap, efficient, and highly-utilised bus and heavy rail public transport, both within and between cities.

Many such cities additionally have 'green belts' to prevent urban sprawl.

Actually I am misrepresenting the situation in the USA.

The US expanded with the railways, and many American cities were built along and at the end of railways.

But then in the 1950s, Americans collectively decided that public transport was useless and they bulldozed through their city centres, ripped up the trams and railways, and splatted veritable plates of highway spaghetti right through the middle of their cities (often through slums and ghettos mainly housing poorer people of African descent).