Sure, if you’ve got 10x the population you’ve got maybe ~10x the area and 10x more stuff to build. But you’ve also got ~10x the amount of capital and 10x the amount of labour.

So how is this a valid argument?

Maybe this is an excuse for some areas with extreme high population density… something Norway certainly doesn’t have. But then those cities (say New York) generally have public transportation to take some of the load off.

It’s not an excuse for, say Portland or Seattle, that looks very similar to the Oslo metropolitan area. And you can just repeat that argument for every medium density 1-5 million population metropolitan area in USA.