For your critique, you'd want to break out urban+suburban road networks from regional and rural ones. The US was a frontier country that grew on top of continent-spanning trails with pockets of community cropping up everywhere there were agricultural, material, or strategic resources, or the need for a travel rest. It's to be expected that we have many miles of road and mostly a good thing that our communities are so well-connected and traversable.

It's what happens inside those communities, when they could be designed with better concern for local community or sustainability, that warrants the critique. And it's a good and fair critique. Just not one directly spoken to by the quoted statistic.