"Because of the need for speed, Atlanta has a great big expensive hole the size of Florence that does very little beside getting a small fraction of Atlanta wor

"Because of the need for speed, Atlanta has a great big expensive hole the size of Florence that does very little beside getting a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents." => how can you compare a city in a country like Italy (60M people, 116K sq miles) with an interchange in the US (323M people, 3.8M sq miles) and conclude that? Of course the US have enormous transport infrastructures, simply because it was a need during the 19th century to have a full "colonization" of the land instead of only large cities with high density (just think about agriculture) and it is now a need for a competitive economy to have low costs of transports per km. Sure we have to improve the energetic efficiency of our transports, but that won't be done my taking comparisons that make absolutely no sense