Hah, I had a feeling that was a NJB video. It is generally surreal to me that even smaller settlements in Europe have more, shall we say, evolvability than North American ones, and (at least in some cases owing to their antiquity) prioritize the needs of pedestrians.
American cities, almost all were also built before the car. At least the city centers. Both US and European cities grew after WW2.
The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.
In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.
European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.
The problem for America is that moneyed interests (big car manufacturers) would frequently sabotage or otherwise salt the earth for public transportation projects.
One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.
Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.
Interestingly the town in the video is actually quite new- built in the eighties.
Yeah I went to an informal town hall recently at my library about bike commuting in our city. An older gent was pretty adamant that our suburb has pretty much always been car-dependent and couldn't ever be anything else, and didn't care much for my reply that many European cities were on track to be the same until the 70s.