It's the same everywhere, I can vouch for rural Illinois. Check out strongtowns.org, a non-profit that explores this EXACT phenomena and how it happened. Basi

It's the same everywhere, I can vouch for rural Illinois. Check out strongtowns.org, a non-profit that explores this EXACT phenomena and how it happened. Basically, infrastructure == progress to a LOT of poorly informed communities who don't bother factoring in maintenance costs or look at the actual economics of building huge roads through their main street. Throw in a dash of pork-barrel spending and lobbying to secure funding to build more roads for the hell of it and you have the US's current mad-max roads-to-fucking-nowhere infrastructure nightmare. It was all a big experiment where everyone but the guys getting paid to build the roads lost.