I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected.

By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself).

American transportation infrastructure is terrible.