Cold climates in the USA are all car-centric except the small downtown areas of the super major cities with a Metro (Philly, Boston, NYC, Chicago, etc). You’ll notice right away that Americans that choose to live outside of those metro bubbles are mostly extremely introverted, lack socialization, and want to be “left alone”. There are of course many people living to be near family that make it feel more varied than that super myopic view. Myself, I moved from a rural area to an urban environment as an adult; I can say that people who live out in these areas just don’t want to come together and make community.

If you look into the history of the USA, it was a bunch of religious fanatics that moved here centuries ago, who eventually spread out when they started disagreeing with the main religious leaders. Regular people didn’t generally move “out west” to build “better” community; they moved to get farther away from their neighbors, the law, elites, minorities, etc. A lot of the reason why you see these communities in the middle of the country is because hubs popped up around manufacturing/railroads/shipping ports. Many, many, of these communities are defunct and dying because the underlying reason for those communities to exist has vanished, sometimes generations ago in the past.

Political leaders in the USA are also simply anti-mass transit because the car lobiests incentivized politicians to be that way. If you complained to your political rep in middle-of-nowhere-town-inserted-here, they’d tell you to move to a place that already has transit.

Related to the above, American cities (read: not metroplexes) simply do not fund public works projects anymore. The funding isn’t there, nor the willpower. If you look at architecture around the USA you’ll find a lot of municipal buildings built to last out of marble/stone/brick popping up until the mid 20th century. I cannot recall a time that I saw better than cheap plywood structures going up anywhere near me. You simply do not see third spaces like parks/playgrounds being built and maintained either. The USA in its current form has essentially stopped growing, and is absolutely at an inflection point.

Tl;dr

Americans are anti-collectivist and do not want to live close to other people. The average American response to “let’s improve our city” is: “move away to [insert major city] that has what you want”.

Where is this taken? What's the weird low brownish structure in the bg?

Without having seen the extent of it for myself, I can only say that such places exist in all the countries I lived in.

So let's hope this comm will give me more material to form an opinion.

But I can say with confidence that carbrained infrastructure must be really really bad in the USA. A lack of sidewalks, bicycle paths, public transport...

And I've seen pics where overhead electricity was used in urban areas, which struck me as extremely outdated.