You can go one step further...
Ask yourself how things might have turned out if the government hadn't decided to subsidize roads for cars early in this country's history, while rail transport paid its own capital costs.
It's not cut and dried. Our nation is a LOT bigger than Europe, and it's easy to save gas when your entire nation is the size of a single state in the U.S.
Still, when government leaps in to pay for something that would normally be a commercial endeavor, eight times out of ten its something the private sector won't touch, and often there's good reasons for that.