You have to keep in mind that the United States are a very young and rapidly growing country. Not even 50 years ago, places like Texas had one fifth to one quarter of their current population, and were very rural and not particularly wealthy. Population density also plays a huge role. In places like Massachusetts or NYC, infrastructure is better. The amount of required grids and roads per capita is much higher in rural and suburban America than it is in the densely populated middle of Europe.



The Netherlands in particular have been densely populated and among the wealthiest places in the entire world for the past 500 or so years. Building a resilient, solidified infrastructure which is able to withstand natural disasters or decades of neglect is a task that takes generations.

In my news, Texas:

-note the guy was lucky to live near hospital so they still have electricity-



This post was edited by Saucisson6000 on Feb 18 2021 09:40am

ya but roads in urban areas are also super super bad. they're a mix of potholes, cracks, and patched up shitshows.

main highways and interstates are generally decent, but city roads that arent highways are notoriously awful. chicago, san fran, houston, atlanda, new york. doesnt matter where u are the roads are shit. cities continually patch them instead of fixing them.

this is why you need more bikes, stay green

Sure, that's the result of neglect/bad political decisions. But even with more infrastructure spending, the sheer vastness of America would make it impossible for your infrastructure to have the same redundancy as Western Europe. In the Netherlands or Germany, many rural regions would still be considered very densely populated by North American standards. In many of our rurals, you have a small town with 8k inhabitants every 5 or so kilometers, and a mid-sized town with a population of 40k every 20 km. This density facilitates a redundant power grid, which just isnt economically feasible in places like rural Texas.

sure ill ride my bike 25 miles to work, should just have to leave about 2 hours after i get from to get back.

for real tho in american cities bikes are used a lot.

This poor guy had to flee to Mexico to protect his family from weather.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/18/politics/ted-cruz-cancun-texas-disaster-electricity-power-water/index.html

Poor guy

This post was edited by Skinned on Feb 18 2021 10:51am

crazy that you guys have such a dense population after going -6million

Ted Cruz's communications director out with a statement:

https://twitter.com/blaireerskine/status/1362427403440705539

The striking difference is seen in the following map of population density, which uses the same grid and scale for both continents:


Or look at this comparison between Texas and Germany:



Note that 1 square mile = 2.589 square kilometers, so the light orange 250-500 category in the Texas map corresponds to the red 100-200 category in the Germany map.
As you can see, almost half of our entire country reaches a density which even populous American suburbs like Montgomery and Fort Bend county (to the SW and N of Houston) largely dont reach.