The amount of useless space and water is staggering to me. Especially since it has little to no functional use for most people, only acting a weak signaller for wealth.
I'm not at all a fan of lawns but one of the things Americans in general forget is that if you water them, they turn brown and go dormant, they don't die. Up in Seattle lawns turn brown from Easter through Halloween. Here in LA they suck the reservoirs dry. If I ran the USDA I'd bring back victory gardens so fast.
The easiest explanation is we're huge. We're so huge we're wasteful so you get giant lawns and zero public transit in some larger cities. That's the Atlanta metro area. I live somewhere in there. To efficiently move from one end to another, or one county to another really, without a personal vehicle is impossible. That area has to be larger than some small countries.
You should see the street map in the part I'm in at standard zoom vs. the suburb I lived in to the east when I moved here. This place is what happens when civic planning is ignored. I think they just paved every dirt road available in the 60s and 70s and said it was good enough. I basically live in the petri dish of things that can happen when local government fails.