Your pronoun antecedents got confused there, but just to be clear, France is 5x larger than the UK in terms of land area.

I don't know that this really points in one direction or another. The UK might have more difficulty doing large projects due to being relatively "crowded" and having less free space, but on the other hand it might also benefit from needing to build less total mileage of road and rail, and for amenities which are mostly bound by the travel distance to them being needed in less quantity.