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Great question. London is amazing for being able to walk around, and has amazing transit. I honestly love your city, and may move there someday for it. This is mostly because London embraced transit in the early 20th century.
America went the other way, and embraced the car, and that pushed for the "American Dream". Suburbs became the normal, where people wanted an independent house farther away from the city. From there bred new problems, people needed to be able to drive their car there, which meant we needed more parking, which meant that things became further and further away.
You can actually blame parking for most of America's sprawl. Parking eats up a ton of space, and requires large roads to get people where they need to go and then massive parking lots for people to park their cars. Parking lots you can't even understand in your London mind. Then there are new problems - the parking lots are so massive that now you can't even walk to the building next door because it's half a mile just to walk to that place! So people get in their cars to drive across the street to park in the next place. This isn't exaggerated, that's just how it is. Take a look at this shopping center in Des Moines, a city where I grew up.
Americans designed cities for cars, not people. There is no way that areas like that were built for humans to move around in, it was built for people to drive to. Greenspace or walkways are not a thing, you are meant to park, walk for hundreds of meters to the front of the door, shop, and then get back in your car and drive across the big street to go to dinner. (To boot, most places won't let you leave your car either, if you're done shopping you need to move it).
The real problem is that this is all by design. We kill so much space in our cities so that drivers feel more comfortable. Honestly, I really appreciate London and how well they've done. Remember all of this next time your PM wants to "make it easier for drivers". No. Fuck the drivers. They're driving their huge metal car into your city, and wanting to have it take up space all so they don't have to walk or take a train/bus. They should have to pay extra for renting space from the city.
Amazing video on why parking is so freaking stupid in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
I think there is one thing backwards here, the US didnt embrace the car which lead to suburbs, but embraced suburbs which lead to using cars. The decision (which really wasnt a conscious one, more just the way it worked out) is based entirely on the vast geography of the country. We have the extra space, so we used it, and needeing cars followed.
The older cities in the US that were built based on European standards all have fairly excellent public networks (NYC, Boston, Philly, etc)
I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.
Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren't attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.
What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.
Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.