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Everything is so far apart because America is very large, not because they spaced things out with parking lots. But it does sound funny to make that the reason.

"Yup, this big country was spread out by parking lots."

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We’re not talking about why Seattle is far from Miami. American city sprawl is largely a recent phenomenon (post WWII) and was enabled by the rise of the personal automobile. Even the sprawl-iest of cities (Houston, TX) used to be respectably dense and walkable. The need for a car to achieve basic needs (groceries, school, work) is a phenomenon well less than 100 years old. America has this problem in part because it’s much younger than a lot of European cities, but it’s certainly not purely a function of topography.

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