The reasons are systemic. Americans need to live out in the countryside because home ownership is the only viable path to wealth of any amount and wealth is the only viable path to stability. Americans need a car because living in the countryside means buying groceries for the month instead of the next two days, commuting long distances to disparate locations and home ownership requires doing as much shit yourself as possible and that means needing to carry stuff from the lowes and that means having a car, the bigger the better. Americans are secretly all poor and nave no free time, so when driving to or from work, the grocery store (which closes sooner and sooner each year), school or any other place they happen to need to go, a cyclist slowing them down on curvy roads with no safe place to pass is a crisis.

While there has been a set of regulatory factors that influence the physical size of cars, the material reality of the car buying public has to be considered.

And this is to go even further: safe streets is so far down on the list for your average country mouse it’s laughable. Start with food distribution, day care, water and septic, literal anarcho-food not bombs-ist brake light clinics so that we don’t get unaffordable tickets while driving our rattletrap death machines to the jobs we can’t afford to quit, the creation of community activities and the time for people to do them.

So yeah I guess it’s a right answer/wrong formula situation.