I agree and dissagree. I lived in Kirkland(outside of Seattle) and spent time in LA. LA would really benefit from a real tram system. It is not too spread out for it, and it is a great candidate, because so much of it is just shitty strip mall and parking lot, that simply bulldozing half the city and building something decent along with a tram line would be a good idea. Kirkland, not so much. Too much suburb, you are right. But despite the spread of many american cities, there is still a hole lot of urban core, which is desparately lacking any sort of real mass transport infrastructure, and too often I hear eletist sentiments as being the reason not to build real infrastructure.
Ironically, a kind of anticapitalism, unionism, plays a big role in this. Unions in the construction industry have played a big role in making prices in the US higher than they should be, though even this cannot be the entire explanation. Prague has its corruption, I like to think of it as being a %20 tax on all government projects, but still we manage to do things for prices that are reasonable, even within the context of our economy. And the price of concrete aint any cheeper here than it is anywhere else, and the Czech Republic is far less wealthy than America. Somehow, America has learned to oscify itself to the point where it is less capable of building real infrastructure than the average eastern european deap state protodemocracy, it is really strange.