In the particular case of roads, the issue is actually that America does not have enough people for it's size. The population density in many states is too poor to support, at tax rates that americans are willing to tolerate, the amount of road that is necessary.
See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with New York).
Your comment caught my eye, because I usually hear population density being used to explain why Australia's internet isn't as good as elsewhere.
I'm certainly no expert on the topic, but I haven't heard any news about any major problems with Australia's roads. I'm curious to know how they compare with roads in the US.
USA density: 33.7/km2 87.4/sq mi population: ~ 314 mil
AUS density: 2.8/km2 7.3/sq mi population: ~ 22 mil
I'm an Australian that's lived and worked all over the US for 3 years, and have been in Canada for 7 now.
The roads in America are horrible by Australian standards. When I bring friends to the US they are shocked and say things like "it just doesn't look finished". This is more-or-less true for the majority of social services in America.
Of course, the climate in Australia lends itself to much better roads, but in comparison to Canada's roads, America's still suck, so there is no excuse.
The reasons I have usually heard for poor internet in Australia are usually along the lines of "little/poor fiber to the continent" or "momentum from previously little/poor fiber to the continent". I don't know how much truth there is to either of those.
I guess what I'm saying is that while dodging the real cause of this issue, Americans are going to point to large geography rather than large population as the 'root cause'. In this case that isn't entirely without merit, since for a lot of Americans (those in Maryland for example) the '(tax rate * population) / area' equation works out alright.
It has less to do with population density and more to do with population clusters. The people in Sweden aren't even distributed across the entire country.
Neither is the US population. Let's compare apples to apples for a minute. WA + OR ~= Sweden:
WA+OR population: 10.6 m, size: 170,000 sq mi
Sweden population: 9.5 m, size: 173,860 sq mi
Now, I think that's a pretty fair comparison. The roads can be pretty terrible in Washington and Oregon from my experience. That may be because federal money for roads goes to other less dense states, but these proportions hold up fairly well nationwide too. I think it's just a matter of less public funding, it's that simple.
Ehh, maybe. Philadelphia's roads are legendarily bad though.
One summer when I was living in Philadelphia they removed the surface of the road in front of my apartment. Two months later they put it back. And if it's not that, it's crews filling in holes from road-work with about half as much asphalt as the hole needed, or the random patches of cobblestone street still left in the city, seemingly with little rhyme or reason.
A great example is Canada. 35 million people, but 80% of them live within 200 miles of the US border. The population density stat would be very misleading in that case.
See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with New York).