Western european countries and cities industrialized even before US states and cities. They just had very different development priorities, that were formed partly around their historical pre-automobile population density.
But it turns out that the US model (low density sprawl) has a much higher per capita long-term maintenance and replacement cost. In many cases, that cost outstrips the infrastructure's productivity in the long term.
For more background on this:
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
Of course the US has plenty of neglected infrastructure in high density areas, too. That's a complex subject, having to do with decades of urban disinvestment.
I'll give you that European countries are smaller, though in this case I don't see the relevance (talking about trains, sure, talking about major AIRPORTS - doesn't hold), but I don't see "more recently developed". Europe covers a range, sure, but a good chunk of it has been developed at the same general pace as North American countries.
> It’s not that we don’t have things that need fixed and maintained, but the hyperventilating about it is overdone at this point.
Until I actually see anything changing, I can't agree. I don't particular advocate "hyperventilating", but I just watched the country (within the past decade or so) twice pass major tax cuts and move through a period of extremely cheap borrowing and not invest in known infrastructure maintenance needs. We're not even breaking even on the issue.
Most of the east coast is now so densely populated you can almost go north to south without ever leaving what one might call “a city/suburbs”, tens if not hundreds of millions of residents in a pretty damn small area when you think about it. Public transit still sucks from what I hear.
Granted, everyone always says their public transit sucks and that seems interesting too.
Like China?
Leave Chinese cities and go into the countryside and there are primarily dirt roads.
If we consider "megacities", they are at 15 vs the US's two (NYC and LA) [2].
In fact this is interesting, because although its population is huge in terms of the rest of nations-- about "a full Brazil" bigger than all of North America, and Europe (including Russia) combined [4]-- to put things in another perspective, we're talking about a country that's just 4.3 times the size of the US [3], yet it has 10x more cities and 7x more megacities.
This makes me think it's less rural than the US, which probably yields more focus on cities and less investment in rural areas.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+china+%2...
[4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+china+-+...
Yes, like China.