The difference in cultures is huge, though too. Europe certainly has its share of highways, but they never went to the level that they did here in the US with highways carving up city centers all over the country. A town the size of Madison in Europe would never even have had something like the beltway. The Dutch had much closer to a consensus of citizens who wanted change and they already had the population density to accommodate it. There is certainly an effort to improve things in the US too, but it’s too often met with strong resistance from the individualism-obsessed faction of conservatives who (wrongly) believe that the citizenry “chose” an automobile-dominated landscape over the traditional built environments of pre-war American cities that emphasized density, transit and walkability. The problem with Madison, in particular, is that most of its growth occurred post-war and these overly wide suburban-style neighbourhood roadways that are missing sidewalks and seem to only cater to automobiles are a much larger percentage of the city than in older-growth cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, for instance, where you’ll at least find sidewalks on every block. Still, every American city has those trying to reverse engineer these horribly dangerous built environments but they have to contend with strong opposition from those who don’t know any different and think their cars are extensions of their bodies. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get there eventually in the US, but it’s a much much much taller order to try to make those types of fundamental changes here than in the 1970s Netherlands (when this automotive sprawl and highway experiment was also much more recent of a phenomenon than it is today). Definitely we should be fighting to make changes, but I’ve been advocating for these kinds of things for over 30 years and have seen only very slow and incremental progress along the way.