Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.
Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.
It's a gradual process, and part of the problem is actually embedded on your analogy, it's not like perform a heart and artery transplant, because there's no single action that can solve the problem, but years, and years of multiple, small and large initiatives, to make car dependency goes down.
What is your point even? Population? Sprawl?
Odense has a total area of 30 square miles.
Carson City Nevada has a total area of 150 square miles and has a population of 50k.
Demark has an area of 16k square miles. Nevada has an area of 110k square miles.
So yes. The United States and other large countries do in fact operate off of different rules than small European countries.
Yeah, there are big areas of country Australia and the US where you need a car to get to anything. This is a good reason to have access to a car for some of the population. It's not a reason for the towns themselves to be built with carparks everywhere, no footpaths, massive outlets distributed far apart, bad public transport that doubles as crisis housing for the local homeless population, no pedestrian safety and comfort features like roadside trees, lawns instead of gardens, and everything else that makes up sterile urban sprawl.